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.