The Challenge of Exploiting Strengths

It seems so obvious that organizations would perform better if people could exploit their strengths rather than attempting to mitigate their weaknesses. However, implementing this as a management strategy is not without its challenges. Consider an analogous situation in the realm of politics and economics.

In democratic societies, people pursue their self interests rather than the interests dictated by a monarch. The benefit of this is that people are far more productive doing what they want than they are doing what they are told. The down side is that you have to deal with all their opinions and a concerted focused effort on any one specific thing is virtually impossible. The upside, of course, is that you have higher levels of productivity, advances in knowledge, creative ideas, cultural advances, advances in technology and so on. However, if you were to, some how, take a picture of today's democracies back to a medieval despot, it is unlikely that they would want to have any part of it. It all looks very chaotic and the benefits, to someone who has not experienced them, are unclear. In fact, if the first vote of a new democratic society was to decide on whether or not to be democratic, it is certainly not a foregone conclusion that it would become one.

New social systems require two things: visionaries and huge successes. And the same thing is true with new management systems. I doubt that rank and file organizations will all start cutting over to strengths based management. What is more likely is that organizations will toy with strength based ideas. By doing things this way we will begin to see the benefits and will learn how to deal with the problems that it creates. Over time we will learn more about how to manage this way. Then, at some point, a visionary will coalesce our experiences in a cohesive treatise on managing strength. Some one will try the new vision, hit a home run out of the park, and others will follow.

This is one of the most promising ideas I have seen in a long time. But, don't expect a revolution. A slow and cautious punctuated evolution is probably the best approach and that is, indeed, how I see it happening.

My Strengths: Strategic, Futuristic, Learning, Analytic, and Intellection

My top five strengths, according to the StrengthsFinders test are: strategic, futuristic, learning, analytic, and intellection. Briefly, here is what they mean.

Strategic means that I can see patterns in things and the implications of those patterns. This is not only true, it is one of my defining characteristics. I see patterns and implications everywhere. When I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind where the guy saw patterns everywhere due to schizophrenia I actually began to worry that I might be schizophrenic because I see patterns everywhere as well.

My second strength, futuristic, is also a defining characteristic. I read the future just like most people read the morning paper. I don't always get it right just as most people do not fully understand what they read in the paper. But, I am far more likely to see the future implications of a situation than the present ones.

Third, I am a learner. I love learning about new things. I am always taking on new things just so I have something new to learn about. I cannot drink a beer without learning how beer is made, who makes it, what the different kinds are and so on. I cannot watch a movie without know what other movies the director has made, what other movies the actors have been in, what other things the screenplay author has written, and what other movies may be similar or remakes.

Fourth, I am analytic. I like to see things as they are, how they work, why they work the way they do, and how they relate to other things and the way those other things work, why and so on.

Finally, my fifth strength is intellection. I enjoy intellectual activity. I have always been drawn to philosophy and pursuit of intellectual questions.

I suspect that anyone who knows me will be simply nodding as they read these. They are my defining characteristics. And they didn't come as much of a surprise to me. What did come as a surprise was that these were not things that others are necessarily good at. I thought other people were just being lazy when they did not keep up with me in these areas. I did not realize that they may have different strengths.

Now, Discover Your Strengths

Last week I carried on a bit about a motivational management book I had listened too which suggested that the best way to manage people was to develop their strengths rather than to have them work on their weaknesses. As I listened to this book, I was stunned that something so obvious would take so long for us to figure out. Upon reflection it occured to me that this emphasis on shoring up weaknesses is probably an anomaly. In fact, the values of conformity and measuring up are both industrial age values. And now that we are moving beyond the industrial age, we are also coming to our senses about a few things as well. I don't mean to bash the industrial age. A lot of good came out of it. But, as with any good thing it is easy to get carried away. And in many ways we did.

But, back to the topic at hand. I listened to their second book entitled Now, Discover Your Strenths. This second book reported on a vast amount of research conducted by Gallup to identify categories of strengths. They came up with 34 areas which people seem to have some sort of 'natural' ability. That means that you do things in your area of strength with little effort. You might be good at connecting with people, or working a crowd, or seeing implications, or figuring out how things work. There are things that you are better at than other things. There are things that your are better at than other people. There are things that other people are better at than you. And it only makes sense that you do the things that you are good at and spend your time getting better at them.

Unfortunately, in today's world, we tend to down play our strengths. If we are good at something we tend to dismiss it as unimportant. It is easy for us so we don't value it. And other people resent our strengths. In a world that values conformity, standing out implies that others fall short some how. This all reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut short story where anyone with a talent was penalized somehow in order to insure that nobody made anyone else feel inadequate. This is funny in a short story, but sad in real life.

If this idea has any appeal to you, I would encourage you to visit the Strengths Finder website. They list the 34 categories and, if you are so motivated they, provide a test that will tell you your strengths. Next time I will discuss my strengths and their implications.

First, Break all the Rules

I listen to a lot of recorded books and lectures. Most of the time it is fairly serious stuff, but occasionally I like to lighten up with a motivational talk. While the quality of motivational talks can vary greatly, I find that the good ones usually give me something worthwhile to think about. And that is exactly what just happened. I went to the library and checked out four or five motivational talks, one of which was a management talk called First, Break All the Rules. This talk caught my attention with the claim that if you want a high performance organization you should focus on your employee's strengths rather than their weaknesses. This was exactly what I was looking for - something to think about.

According to the authors, the most common employee development process in use today will review the employee on an annual basis, identify their areas of weakness and have them work on those weaknesses over the next year. This, again according to the authors, produces mediocre employees who are frustrated and struggling to be good at things they are not naturally good at. Instead it make more sense to have them identify their strengths and work at being better at things that they are naturally good at. This is so obvious, I thought, why did it take so long for someone to figure this out?

I am going to insert my own analogy in here to crystallize the clarity and importance of this idea. Imagine a professional football team where the players spent their time working on their weaknesses. The quarterback would practice blocking. The running back would practice tackles. The tackles would run reception patterns. The kicker would develop his social skills, and so on. How well would this team perform in competition? Probably not very well. In fact, their only hope would be that other teams also practiced using a similarly dysfunctional development strategy. And that is exactly what happens in business, industry and government today.

But, you may ask, how do you know what your strengths are? How do you discover them? How do you develop them? How do you employ them to get better at doing you job? Well, stay tuned, there is more to come.

No Safety in Numbers

In the last post, I discussed how going along with the crowd in your research may be risky in that you may not get as much credit (or even any) for the work you have done. People who have developed recognizable names in research have usually done so by going off on their own and discovering something new and novel. People who plod along shoulder to shoulder with other researchers may gain recognition from the other plodders, but it is rare that they gain recognition beyond that. However, plodding along is not the only risk associated with being part of the crowd.

I used the analogy last week of a beach full of beachcombers with metal detectors. The other risk of being part of the crowd is that the crowd may simply be on the wrong beach. The frequency of this occurrence probably varies quite a bit from one field to the next. However, no field of research is exempt. A promising new vein of research is discovered. Researchers flock to it. And, for a while, it is easy to get papers published in this new area. There may be special issues of journals dedicated to it. There may even be whole new journals dedicated to the emerging area. But then, time passes without much progress. A new and different area excites everyone. Before you know it, you cannot get an editor to even consider a paper in the old new vein. And then, one day, you find the beach deserted except for a few diehards who refuse to give up.

There are probably people who have invested heavily in this area. Many have probably gotten tenure based on their publications. And now they have so much invested in this area that they are unwilling to look for a new beach. So, the chances are that they give up doing research and along with that any dreams of being recognized for their contributions. The beach that no one cares about can be a lonely and disappointing place.