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"A great organization must not only accommodate the fact that each employee is different, but it must also capitalize on this difference," co-author Marcus Buckingham puts it in his book "First, Break All the Rules."
Instead of focusing on our teams' flaws, he and his co-author Donald O Clifton argue that we should focus on their skills and convert them into assets that we can leverage.
Join us for the next 12 minutes to learn why this conviction was made.
Lesson #1: The Structure of Strength
Only 20% of employees at big companies believe their abilities are used daily. Even more troubling is that the longer people work for a company, the more ingrained this attitude develops.
This is consistent with Buckingham's previous book, First Break All The Rules. Organizations are based on two erroneous assumptions:
We can all become skilled in anything, and our biggest flaw is our ability to develop. We spend little or no effort on what we can do better because we fix what we can't accomplish.
Great managers, according to Buckingham, realize that each person's abilities are unique and regard this as a crucial area for development. So, what does it mean to have strength?
Buckingham defines it as "consistent, near-perfect performance in a task."
Think about it. What do you do that is consistently near-perfect? Buckingham believes that to uncover our strengths, we must first grasp how to distinguish between our innate skills and what we can acquire.
Talent is a mental, emotional, or behavioral tendency to begin with. It's the way we see things.
Second, what we may learn—knowledge—is via the eyes of others. To build strength, we must first distinguish the two views before combining them into one: the associated skill.
Talent + knowledge + skill = Strengths
Although it is possible to gain strength without having complete knowledge or skill (sometimes referred to as being a "natural"), it is impossible to possess strength without talent fully. Let's take a closer look at each component.
Lesson #2: Knowledge in Two Parts
There are two types of knowledge: factual and experiential.
Data, statistics, facts, and truths are examples of factual knowledge.
Meanwhile, experiential knowledge is the second form of knowledge.
It's knowing not to touch a hot stove after burning your fingertips as a youngster. It's realizing that having a strong connection with a vice president's secretary may help you get more access.
To uncover our strengths, we must learn both types of knowledge, each of which complements the other.
Experiential knowledge is given structure through skills. We are likely to formalize the experience and its advantages into a repeatable set of procedures and actions— a skill—when we have fully exploited the event and its rewards.
We may minimize trial and error by using skills to integrate the optimal activities into our daily routine. Learning a skill will help you improve a little... but without the third ingredient: talent, it will never transform into a strength.
A talent, according to Buckingham, is a recurring set of ideas or sensations that may be exploited to produce a good result. It's a talent if you're competitive. It is a talent if you are persistent. It's a talent if you're determined.
Yes, even bad attributes may be talents if they are relevant to the profession.
Every day at work, we must make judgments, and our abilities play a significant role in these decisions. We can't externalize every decision we make during the day. Our abilities are the inherent connections in our brains—what we do without thinking.
That is why teaching a skill to someone who does not have the talent can never be as successful. Our abilities are masked by our natural reflexes, making them difficult to identify and describe.
As a result, to identify abilities, we must take a fresh look at ourselves.
Lesson #3: Signposts to Strengths
As we've seen, talent is an important component of strength. So, to discover our strengths, we must first find our talents.
Buckingham advises that we keep an eye on our spontaneity. The root of what we do "naturally" and how we manage things is shown by how we react to events and difficulties around us.
Buckingham also advises that we think about our desires. What would we do if we had the option? Yearnings reveal our fundamental motivation: no matter how far we are separated, we return to our inclinations.
Consider your learning outcomes as another approach to spot talent. What have we studied, done, or been taught that has allowed us to take things up quickly? When it comes to rapid learning, there must have been something behind it: most likely talent.
Finally, Buckingham advises that we consider our levels of contentment. What is it that we perform at work that brings us the most joy? What is the reward's underpinning practice? What does it take to make us happy at work?
A dormant skill will lie behind these pleasures, laying the groundwork for future fulfillment.
Here's a basic rule of thumb to remember. This is not dependent on talent if you are doing something and wondering how much longer it will take. If, on the other hand, you're wondering how you'll be able to do it again, you have a talent.
Lesson #4: Snags to Succeeding With Strengths
There is one thing that stands in the way of success no matter where you live in the world: our shortcomings and the underlying notion that we should work on eliminating them.
Many of us are terrified of our flaws, and our confidence in our talents suffers as a result. Many of us could attribute this to ego control: we don't want to look egoistic by "begging" for our advantages.
We may also be hesitant to advertise our strengths because we believe they are uninteresting to others.
Instead, we emphasize what we believe the audience wants to hear, much like a résumé for a job. We need to take ourselves out of this internalized prism and perceive our talents through the eyes of others.
If one of our flaws is relevant to our work, we must determine whether it is a skill, knowledge, or talent flaw and then devise a corrective strategy. Buckingham's resolution techniques are as follows:
- Improve your skills in this area. If we can go one or two steps closer to competency each time we encounter a weakness, the weakness will ultimately vanish.
- Create a system to support you. Find a method that allows you to stop thinking about your flaws and instead focus on practicing and maximizing your talents.
- Make use of strength to counteract a flaw. Are you more productive first thing in the morning? Do you find it tough to make decisions? Both a strength and a fault. Combine them and make judgments in the morning—strength triumphs over weakness. Whatever our liability, we are likely to have the strength to overcome it and erase it from our day.
- Look for a companion. Are you strong at analyzing data but not so good at presenting it? Find a partner that is the polar opposite of you: strong at presenting but bad at analyzing. The partner might be someone you work with or someone you meet outside of work. Becoming the Yin to the Yang of the other is a win-win situation for both parties.
- Stop. Stop involving yourself in the imperfection. "Do I need to be doing this?" you might wonder. Someone else should take on the duty. This may appear defeatist, but the entire activity is freeing in many situations and encourages you to concentrate more on your abilities.
Lesson #5: Building a Strength-Based Organization
Building our strengths has a lot of advantages. Imagine if everyone in our company could play to their strengths as well. Buckingham feels that this is what sets businesses apart.
Because each person's abilities are endless, we should devote a significant amount of time and attention to identifying strength bearers in the first place, rather than hiring people who lack them and hope that training would suffice.
Buckingham proposes that we create a strengths-based hiring system. Here's how to do it:
- We need to design our selection process around a tool for detecting talent. This may be a psychometric exam or Buckingham's own "Strengths Finder" method (you'll have to read the book in its entirety to learn about it). It is a constant baseline for assessment and comparison when used appropriately.
- We need to fine-tune our system by looking at our top performers. Here, we're customizing the basic model and personality to fit the demands of our company. There may be certain personalities that we require and others that we do not. This is a one-of-a-kind feature of our businesses.
- Throughout our company, we need to teach the language of talent. When discussing personnel requirements, everyone should speak in a system-aware language.
- For our whole organization, we need to create a theme profile. What does a businessperson appear to be like? The qualities of a Southwest Airlines employee are well-known. Is it possible for us to do the same for our own company?
We must guarantee that all of this work is maintained by connecting our performance measures with talent. We need to figure out how to quantify the intended results accurately.
As a useful standard, Buckingham advises using the twelve outcomes outlined in "First, Break All the Rules." These were addressed in a previous overview, and it's worth re-reading.
Second, every employee should be given a performance scorecard. Why? Even though each person's strengths are unique, we nevertheless require similar controls and assessments to maintain efficiency.
We can ensure that we address each of the areas with the greatest impact by using a balanced scorecard for each employee.
Finally, we must make sure that strengths are at the forefront of every employee/supervisor conversation.
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