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.