Building a strengths-based organization if you are not the CEO

When I read many of today’s management books, including some of the Gallup and Buckingham books, I often get the impression that they were written for someone with CEO-like powers to initiate a major (strengths-based) initiative in her organization.

But what do you do if you are a manager of a smaller business unit within a larger corporation? What if neither your superior nor your HR manager knows what a strengths-based organization is all about, but you nevertheless wish to build one in the area of your responsibility?

Depending on the context, this can be quite a tricky task, requiring careful thought and political intelligence.

For one, creating a strengths-based organization can take several years, depending on the size and complexity of your organization. However, if your career is on a relatively fast rise, it is safe to assume that you will change jobs every four to five years, sometimes even faster than that. Depending on your circumstances then, there is a risk that you may not have enough time to complete the task.

And most likely, you won’t handpick your successor, so there is a high risk that she may not buy into your strengths-based ideas and revert to a more conventional management style. That would not only be a waste of your organizational change efforts, even worse, it could be quite an unpleasant shock to your employees, creating cynicism at best, and outright frustration and employee turnover at worst. As a consequence, you may have to consider adopting a lighter or "stealth" version of a strengths-based organization.

Furthermore, you need to ask yourself how much freedom you have to implement a major organizational change initiative. Or in other words: how rigid are corporate HR policies, organizational values, or the opinions and supervision of your superiors? Remember: it is not without a reason that Gallup titled its first major book about strengths-based management and related issues with “First Break All The Rules”. Many of the findings of Gallup’s multi-year studies fly into the face of the kind of conventional wisdom found in most companies.

The following ideas are an adaptation of Guy Kawasaki’s recommendations for internal entrepreneurs in his book “The Art of the Start” (p. 20 f.), mixed with my own experience as a manager:

1. Put the company first: building a strengths-based organization is not about your personal glory, but about the betterment of the company and the engagement of its employees. Always keep that in mind!

2. Stay under the radar: managers in conventional (=most) companies are mainly concerned about maintaining the status quo and protecting their interests, and that certainly includes also the HR managers. A strengths-based organizational change initiative may worry many managers, including the HR manager, no matter how great it would be for employee engagement. Don’t expect them to applaud you. On the contrary, expect them to sabotage you, silently or openly, and all the more so if you are successful.

One idea to stay under the radar is to downplay the scope of your initiative, for instance by pretending to do only a"strengths-based selling" training, instead of declaring a major "cultural revolution".

3. Give hope to the hopeful: “inside every corporate cynic who thinks that “this company is too big to innovate” is an idealist who would like to see it happen”. And that may be especially true for innovation targeting employee engagement. Find these people and enlist them.

4. Anticipate, then jump on tectonic shifts: a new CEO or General Manager, a new HR manager, a rapid deterioration in sales, profits, customer satisfaction or employee engagement may create an opportunity and/or pretext for your efforts.

5. Build on what exists: many conventional companies have adopted a competency-based selection and development approach. Well developed competencies are pretty much the same as strengths, and you may take advantage of some tools and concepts which have been developed here.

Remember that strengths are not the same as talents, and it is not recommendable to use the 34 talent themes of the Clifton StrengthsFinder for recruiting purposes, for instance. Building a strengths-based organization requires you to think through the strengths needed in your organization, which is not an easy task, and the definitions of competencies in your company may come close to some of the strengths you are looking for.

It is probably also wise to use the competency-based jargon in your company, instead of introducing a new strengths-based one, thereby confusing employees and creating conflict with the HR people and superiors.

6. Collect and share data: prepare for the day when your strengths-based initiative will be “uncovered” and questioned: there is hardly any better proof than having statistics that show how customer satisfaction, employee engagement, sick days, workplace accidents, or any other HR-related productivity measure have improved since you launched your initiative!