New Book, Renewed Focus on Your Strengths
Posted on | November 9, 2007 | No Comments
Generally, I’m not a big champion of career assessments and career interest inventories. In my experience, they’ve never managed to deliver any new insight, or to fully capture my interests and strengths. I’ve also found that many of them attempted to direct me to a very small slice of very traditional career opportunities–doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers and teachers–most of which I’ve already checked into and passed on.
But, that said, I am not saying that you should not use assessments or any other tools that may help you to narrow your focus on what you do well and the career opportunities that might allow you to capitalize on what you do best. Typical, off-the-shelf assessments simply don’t work for me. I’m not a big proponent of “What Color is Your Parachute” and books of that ilk either. But, again, if you find value in these tools, if they help you to organize your thoughts or narrow your possibilities in any way, please use them.
Today, I want to tell you about a career assessment that I do like. First, a little history. When I was an human resources executive with a large national retailer, we embarked on a company-wide performance improvement initiative, the goal of which was to increase revenue by increasing employee productivity. To increase employee productivity, we needed to figure out what was holding them back from delivering high-productivity performances. We contracted with Gallup, a leading research and polling organization that focuses on workplace surveys (and does those political polls during presidential elections). We hired Gallup to help us identify the obstacles to peak employee performance.
Gallup used a tool called the Q12, an employee survey that included 12 questions designed to determine the level of “employee engagement” (the degree to which our employees were engaged, or committed to, our company’s goals and mission). Survey questions included “At work, I have an opportunity to do what I do best every day” and “The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important”.
We used the results of the survey to address the identified obstacles to engagement and thereby address performance obstacles. In addressing the obstacles, we discovered a need to reorganize our management staffing structure within the retail locations, a need to move managers into positions that allowed them to “do what they do best every day”.
We used assessments to determine which managers should be placed into which positions within our new structure. The assessments were based on the competencies required to be successful in each new position and the managers’ scores on questions designed to discover their level of competency or proficiency. Managers earned percentile scores. Those earning the highest percentile scores were placed in the highest level positions, and were eligible for training programs required for promotion. Those in the next-highest percentile were placed in the next highest positions, and so on with the lower percentiles.
The performance improvement was pretty disruptive to the organization, but it was a valuable learning experience for all of us. What I learned was that most people are not used to focusing on their strengths; we are used to focusing on our weaknesses. Even though we explained the assessment–what it was designed to do and how we used their strengths to determine the roles into which they’d be placed. No matter how thoroughly we explained it, all the managers focused on was the fact that their weaknesses, the things on which they scored lowest, had landed them in job positions that they either did not want or did not believe they could succeed at.
We tried explaining that the scores were merely a way of creating an objective way of easily determining who should go into each role, and that the new roles were starting points, not career-ending. None of it worked. We lost 20% of the managers that participated and spent the next year and half putting out fires related to frustration and resentment of the assessments and reorganization.
I believe a great portion of that failure was due to the fact that the leadership team, me and the other executives, did not wholeheartedly believe what we were saying. We didn’t believe that it was strengths that we were focused on, we didn’t believe that strengths were more important than weaknesses. We didn’t believe that we could improve performance more by focusing on our managers’ strengths than on their weaknesses. We said all of this. But, privately, we discussed our doubts that we could actually turn our focus to leveraging strengths rather than continuing to focus on identifying weaknesses and attempting to improve them through performance reviews and individual development plans.
All of this leads me to today. Today, I am even more convinced that there is greater value in leveraging strengths than in countering weaknesses. And so is Gallup. Gallup has researched the impact of finding and leveraging strengths by studying thousands of companies and their employees–the improved productivity and increased revenue generated by a culture that’s focused on building on people’s strengths, not fixing their weaknesses. Gallup interprets strengths as talents and recommends that organizations try to leverage employees’ talents to improve their performance. The results of Gallup’s research can be found in the book Now, Discover Your Strengths.
I have arrived at the same conclusion as Gallup, but a bit more practically: I’ve tried it. Over the last year or more, I’ve focused my job search and career development on my strengths. I’ve committed to only taking jobs and consulting work that allows me to do what I do best. I’ve steered away from assignments and work that causes me to spend a lot of time trying to shore up my weak points.
The result: My clients and I are much happier with my work. I’m making more money. I’m working longer hours, but I don’t mind it. In fact, I love nothing more than doing work that I love, work that leverages my strengths.
Gallup researcher Tom Rath has produced a follow-up to Now, Discover Your Strengths. Rath’s book, StrengthsFinder 2.0 features a new and updated version of the strength-finding assessment tool (StrengthsFinder 1.0) used in Now, Discover Your Strengths. StrengthsFinder 2.0 is a deliciously brief explanation of the types, or themes, of talents we all have. The book does a good job of creating a language that we can use to talk about our talents, labels we can use to explain to them to ourselves and to others.
When you purchase the StrengthsFinder 2.0 book, you receive an access code that grants you access to the StrengthsFinder 2.0 online assessment. You can answer the 177 paired questions (you’ve got 20 seconds per question) and then receive a report Strengths Discovery and Action-Planning Guide. The guide details your top 5 talent themes (mine are Achiever, Relator, Strategic, Competition and Ideation), theme descriptions, insights into your personalized strengths, examples of what your strengths “sound like”, 10 ideas for acting on your strengths, and a Strengths-Based Action Plan worksheet.
The access code also gives you access to useful resources including a worksheet for mapping the strengths of others in your department, team or work group, and for approaching strengths-based discussions at home. There is also a fledgling community forming on the site (not much there though).
During my last presentation, one of the participants asked me to recommend books that might help her further explore her career options. Here’s my recommendation:
StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
I recommend Now, Discover Your Strengths if you want to know more about Gallup’s research.
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