Talent SpeedReading II: How to do it

In my previous post, I made the case for (and against) talent speedreading, the art of quickly identifying other people's talents and strengths, as well as weaknesses. Now, let's proceed to the practical part: how to do it.

First of all, you need to define a vocabulary, a taxonomy or some sort of theory about talents. The Clifton StrengthsFinder is an obvious choice for talent speadreading, but it is not the only one.

For example, Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger wrote a book with the title "The Art of SpeedReading People" which also inspired me to write this post. Their system is based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an inventory of personality type which has its roots in the theories of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

As I outlined elsewhere in this blog, the study of personality (both the theories about it and your own personality) is most helpful in understanding your strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the MBTI and the Tiegers' book provide many helpful insights into identifying talents.

In this post, I propose to work with the 34 talent themes of the Clifton StrengthsFinder.

Next, you should develop a thorough understanding of these 34 talent themes. You should know them inside out. Books like "Strengths-Based Leadership" or "Discovering Your Sales Strengths" provide important insights and examples.

But even if you have a very good but theoretical understanding of these 34 themes, it may be difficult to properly identify them in the "heat of the battle" of a typical working day. Some talents can be confusingly similar, like Strategic and Deliberative, Intellection and Connectedness, Woo and Positivity, Relator and Individualization, Command and Self-Assurance, Adaptability and Arranger.

Therefore, I would like to propose a "shortcut" based on the four leadership domains presented in Gallup's new book "Strengths-Based Leadership":

Executing:

ACHIEVER, ARRANGER, BELIEF, CONSISTENCY, DELIBERATIVE, DISCIPLINE, FOCUS, RESPONSIBILITY, RESTORATIVE.

Influencing:

ACTIVATOR, COMMAND, COMMUNICATION, COMPETITION, MAXIMIZER, SELF-ASSURANCE, SIGNIFICANCE, WOO

Relationship Building

ADAPTABILITY, DEVELOPER, CONNECTEDNESS, EMPATHY, HARMONY, INCLUDER, INDIVIDUALIZATION, POSITIVITY, RELATOR.

Strategic Thinking:

ANALYTICAL, CONTEXT, FUTURISTIC, IDEATION, INPUT, INTELLECTION, LEARNER, STRATEGIC.

I have found these four domains very useful not only for quickly assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a team but also those of individuals. And it helps to avoid to fall into some common pitfalls, such as confusing the strength of "Relationship Building" with the strength of "Influencing", or confusing the strengths of "Strategic Thinking" (and "Talking") with "Execution".

I confess that I myself often confused these domains which led me to be surprised when meeting very friendly salespeople (Relationship Building) who had difficulties in closing sales (Influencing), or when meeting rather tough if not arrogant people (Influencing) who were then presented to me as very successful sales people.

And people who excel in Strategic Thinking can leave a great impression but do not necessarily get a lot done later on (Execution). On the other side, execution strength is of questionable value if the wrong things get executed in terms of strategy or ethics (the current economic crisis provides ample evidence of this). Also, I have seen effective employees (but weak in Strategic Thinking) going through some embarassment when being exposed to a senior management meeting deliberating strategies. The business literature is full of examples and discussions about this phenomenon. Read Ram Charan's book "Execution" or Jack Welch's "Winning" for example.

There are other ways of clustering the 34 talent themes which can also provide important clues to speedreading talents. Gallup itself used a slightly different version of the four domains in the past. Have a look a this interesting page on the Clifton StrengthsFinder Blog.

On that same blog, by the way, you can find an interesting list of short paragraphs for each talent, like "Significance-loves to make a difference" or "Command-loves to make their own decisions". Memorize these 34 paragraphs and they will come to your mind when you see them in the behaviour of the people you try to speedread. Yes, you have to memorize these things, in the same way people used to learn by heart Shakespeare quotes or Bible verses in the past. TalentSpeedreading requires quite an effort, it is not just a quick fix.

So enough about theory, let's move on! Let's say you conclude that a person has many talents in Relationship Building and Execution, but not in Influencing and Strategic Thinking. So what's next?

Well first of all, let's appreciate that with this information alone, we know quite a lot already, at least for the workplace environment.

But you can drill down deeper from here and try to figure out which talents might be behind this person's strength in Relationship Building: Empathy, Includer, Relator?

Thinking in terms of the four domains also makes it easier to distinguish between "similar" talents like Positivity (Relationship Building) and Woo (Influencing). If you are not sure whether someone has Positivity or Woo, but feel that he is much better at Relationship Building than at Influencing, then you want to bet on Positivity. The same logic applies to:

• Deliberative (Executing) and Strategic (Strategic Thinking),
  
• Connetctedness (Relationship Building) and Intellection (Strategic Thinking),
  
• Adaptability (Relationship Building) and Arranger (Executing), and again:
  
• Positivity (Relationship Building) and Woo (Influencing)

So you observe people. You talk with the peers of the people you observe. And of course, you speak with the people whose talents you want to identify. However, you want to focus more on actual behavior than words.

A simple approach of doing this is to ask simple questions like "Tell me about what you really enjoy doing at work" or "Tell me what you do best" or "Tell me about your biggest success story" and so on. Again, there might be a risk that the answers to these questions are "manipulated" to be socially desirable, especially if you are a manager talking to an employee, and even more so if either one of you is new on the job. In order to get a feeling whether these answers are real or "faked", you should ask for specific details, like "tell me about a time when...". You may want to read my post about Behaviour-Interviewing for Strengths for more on this.

At last, let me say that I realize that all these suggestions are just shortcuts based on enormeous simplifcations. This is always dangerous when dealing with something as complex as human nature and talents. But I believe that this does not mean that we should not try. Dr. Jerome Groopman, author of the excellent book "How Doctors Think" writes something very interesting about the importance of shortcuts in another very complex field: medicine (p. 35 f.):

"Reasearch shows that most doctors come up with two or three diagnoses from the outset of meeting a patient - a few talented ones can juggle four or five in their minds. All develop their hypotheses from a very incomplete body of information. To do this, doctors use shortcuts. These are called heuristics.

... Shortcuts are the doctor's response to uncertainty and demands of the situation. They are the essential working tools of clinical medicine, where a doctor must combine thought and action.

... The problem is that medical schools do not teach shortcuts. In fact, you are discouraged from using them...

... Of course, a doctor must know physiology and pathology and pharmacology. But he should also be schooled in heuristics - in the power and necessity of using shortcuts, and in their pitfalls and dangers."

When reading this, I feel tempted to exchange "doctors" with "managers", "medicine" with "management", "patients" with "employees" or "colleagues", "medical school" with "business school" or "textbooks".

Thus, I hope that this post may help some fellow managers to develop some vital "shortcuts" in the area of strengths-based leadership!

Talent SpeedReading I: Benefits and Risks

Click here if you would like to skip this first part about Talent SpeedReading and go directly to the second part: "How to Do it"

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to identify the talents of people in a quick and easy way ("speedread"), without hiring consultants or without even doing the Clifton StrengthsFinder with all of them? I believe that seasoned leaders, executive coaches and recruiters develop this strength over time. But how about the rest of us? How about a manager who has just discovered the Clifton StrengthsFinder and wonders how he can speedread the talents of his employees?

Before exploring how this could be done, we might want to ask what speedreading talents may be good for, or whether it might not be dangerous in some way.

Gallup's research shows that employees are much more engaged when they can do what they do best everyday. Furthermore, more engaged employees lead to several positive outcomes, from higher customer satisfaction to higher shareholder value creation.

My own experience as a manager shows that focusing on your people's talents has a big and fast impact on results. However, I also learned that it is an illusion to believe that you can engage all of your employees or get them enthusiastic about a strengths-based approach, especially in the short run. But even if your strengths-based management efforts are effective with only 33% of your people, that will make a difference!

You can invite a consulting company like Gallup to help you identifying the talents of your people in a systematic way. That may require a considerable financial investment, though. You could also buy a couple of books that give you the StrengthsFinder access code and invite your employees to the Clifton StrengthsFinder online assessment which would (or could) reveal their Top 5 talents.

The problem with both of these approaches, but especially the second one is that your employees may be skeptical about all of this. Conciously or often even unconciously, they may not answer all the questions in the StrengthsFinder survey in the most honest way. They may have a certain "self-image" that they hold dear but that is distorted from their real self. Or they may tend to give "socially desirable" answers. This is a common problem with all personality assessments where people have to answer questions about themselves.

This is where Talent SpeedReading comes in: not only could it save money and time but it can also avoid the "social desirability" problem, if (and this is a big if!) you listen to the judgment of the peers of your talent speedreading "target", and do not form your opinion entirely on your own observations (and biases). Some researchers (click here for source) point out that two raters are consistently more accurate in rating a subject than the subject is him/herself.

So far, I have highlighted the benefits of Talent SpeedReading for employee engagement and in order to avoid the "social desirability" problem common in most self-reported personality or talent assessments. But there are other benefits:

In most organizations, both business and non-business, you need to have quite some political skills to get anything done. An important pillar of such skills is the ability to identify your political allies and adversaries and to "read their minds". You have to know their motives, their strengths and their weaknesses. The ability to speedread their talents (and weaknesses) is certainly most helpful here. The simple concept proposed in part II of this post can provide you with some important insights: is someone strong in Strategic Thinking but poor in Execution, for example? Or is he strong in Relationship Building but not necessarily as strong in Influencing?

And then, Talent SpeedReading is certainly also very helpful when talking with friends and family, and especially when talking about career-related advise.

At last, a word of caution though: I am not sure whether Talent SpeedReading is a good idea for recruiting purposes. It may be better than nothing, but then again, any structured interview is probably better than asking some random questions.

In another post in this blog, I discussed the perils of using the 34 talent themes of the StrengthsFinder for recruiting. In short words: when you recruit, you should look for strengths, not talents. Remember: talents are "raw material" and they may not yet be productive strengths. As a manager, you may not have the time to develop the talents of a new employee into the strengths you need.

So you have to think through the strengths that you really need in the position that you are recruiting for. And this is not an easy task. It is like thinking through the real objectives you have in business or in your own life. They may seem obvious at first, but the more you think about them, the more you may discover how complex they actually can be.

For instance, objectives can be in conflict with each other which may require you to make some tough choices: the personal objectives "financial gain" and "work/life" balance are often at odds, for example. The same is true for strengths: don't get into the trap of looking for superman, full of strengths and with no weaknesses (see the Peter Drucker quote on the column on the right side)!

Talent-based interviewing

You may be interested to read (and contribute to?) this interesting discussion in the Employee Engagement Network.

One of the central tenets of Gallup's Consulting practice is that focusing on employee's strengths (rather than weaknesses) is key to achieve high employee engagement which in turn drives ultimately shareholder value. The Employee Engagement Network discusses strengths-based as well as other means to achieve this important objective.

Norwich Union changes focus from competencies to strengths

Have a look at this interesting article of Karen Stefanyszyn, head of organizational development at Norwich Union, the largest insurer in the UK. It touches issues like strengths-based interviewing and selecting for strengths which I would like to discuss in this blog.

This article is on the website of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology. There is also a section about "Strengths at Work" where you can find some other interesting articles.

One of the best strengths-based selections of the 20th century

Our talents are "recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings and behavior". As such, they describe very much our preferred work-style. Once you are promoted to into a management function, it is very likely that your work-style strongly influences your leadership style. For example, if you have always preferred to work independently, you may tend to give more independency to your employees as well.

In the book “First Break All The Rules”, the authors even suggest to select employees based on how their talents match with your leadership style (p. 101):

“Think about who you are as a manager and who will mesh with your style. Do you prefer short-term goals and expect to check in regularly with each person to monitor incremental progress? If so, you need to surround yourself with direct reports who yearn for structure and detail and regular updates, the thinking talent discipline. Or are you the kind of manager who likes to hand off as much responsibility as possible, who sets long-term goals and then expects employees to orient themselves toward those goals without much help from you? If so, your direct reports will need the thinking talent focus, which we described previously.”

This sounds like good advise, but in real life it may not be so practical. In your career, unless you build up your own company, you are likely to move from one department to another department, from one company to the another, or even from one country to another and you will always encounter new employees with different talents which may not be to your liking. So what do you do? Fire them all, just because they don’t match with your leadership style? Or adapt to them, thereby compromising on how you work and lead best?

This is a really tricky question. For one, it is obviously an ethical one. Can it be right to dismiss someone just because he needs more structure while your working and leadership style craves for independence, delegation and empowerment? It seems to be very unfair, and yet I believe it happens all the time. Only that people won’t talk about a mismatch between talents and leadership style; more likely, you will hear things like "he just does not seem to fit any longer into the team", "she just doesn't seem to get it", "he seems to be unable to deal with the inevitable changes", and so on. I have no scientific evidence, but I would not be surprised if the number one root cause for dismissals was a mismatch between a manager’s leadership style and the employee’s working preferences, and both have a lot to do with talent.

Apart from the ethical concerns, there are also practical concerns. These days, as a manager you are expected to deliver quick results. Thus, there is little time to overhaul your team to make sure that it matches with your leadership style! But if you don’t change them, you will have to adapt. If you are blessed with Individualization or Maximizer, you have a chance to do this well. But otherwise, you will probably soon feel quite uncomfortable. For soon, this kind of mismatch will manifest itself in many unpleasant ways, from misunderstandings, frustrations, to disengaged employees and key people leaving the company.

The conclusion that I draw from this is that the wisest thing to do is to think twice before accepting a new job; and to choose a new assignment based on how well your leadership style matches with your possible new employee’s working preferences and the company’s overall culture and strategy. That may sound a bit like wishful thinking given the competitive rivalry that often exists about getting the next promotion. However, consider this: Emmett Murphy and his associates studied 18’000 managers and 562 large and small organizations in the United States and around the world. In his book “Leadership IQ” he comments on a very important activity of successful leaders, selection (p. 30) along with this most interesting anecdote of when Marshall selected Eisenhower to be the General for the European campaign:

“Hearing that [=Eisenhower’s answer to a probing question of Marshall], Marshall knew he had the right man. Eisenhower, on the other hand, wasn't quite as confident. He did accept the position, but only after more thought and discussion. He carefully and objectively analyzed the leadership needs of the European campaign and finally agreed to consider his own candidacy. With reservations that reflected his strategic humility, he came to agree that Marshall was right:

In spite of his limitations, he could do the job. And, of course, he did the job brilliantly and later went on to serve two terms as President of the United States.

For Marshall and Eisenhower, a well-executed selection process led to one of the best selection decisions of the twentieth century. Each played an active role in the process: Marshall decided that Eisenhower was the right person for the job, and so did Eisenhower.

…

Marshall and Eisenhower demonstrated the central goal of the selection process: Put the right person in the right place doing the right job at the right time. Selection is a pragmatic and collaborative process. Both the prospective employer and the prospective employee share the responsibility for making a wise decision. It is as unwise to take a job for which you are unsuited as it is to hire someone you know cannot succeed. Too often, people feel that the selection process is one-sided, and that the "more powerful" person is making all the decisions. Our research revealed that people with high Leadership IQ believe exactly the opposite: They see themselves as decision makers in all situations. Like Eisenhower, they are more concerned about making a choice themselves than whether someone else will offer them that choice. When asked to chronicle their growth and development, the exceptional leaders we studied consistently focused on the process of making an active selection as the pivotal event at every stage of their life histories. Even though they acknowledged the occasional relevance of luck, they invariably attributed their successes to their readiness to make choices. Being in the right place at the right time is important, but only for those ready to act on opportunities.

I find this story "beautiful" from a strengths- and Maximizer point of view! And note that Emmett Murphy’s book is not part of the “Gallup/Buckingham strengths canon”.

So how do you choose a new job or assignment based on your talents and strengths? In one of my next posts, I will offer some ideas. But at this point, I would already like to recommend a good book, which -although it does not declare itself to be a "strengths-based" book- uses a lot of strengths-based concepts, such as its "Business Career Interest Inventory" test to discover nothing less than your career related strengths!

Book: "Discovering Your Career in Business", by Timothy Butler and James Waldroop

I found also this article/blog of Rajababu Nivraaj quite interesting.

Selecting for Strengths: Sales Rep in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Last week, I asked the question: What strengths should we recruit for in sales representative in the pharmaceutical industry? Allow me to suggest some answers today. This fits nicely into the posts further down.

As I mentioned, Novartis did some interesting research on this subject and part of its findings are publicly available in an interesting presentation that can be found in the following link:

http://www.sloansalesconference.com/media/2008/keynote_-_Greg_Schofield_-_Novartis.ppt

According to this presentation, highly successful sales reps in Novartis have the following strengths:

· They purposefully probe and listen.

· They adapt their message to each Doctor

· They are not shy to using rather direct closing techniques with doctors

· They create call continuity, for example by taking good notes, by reviewing them before the next visit, and by defining goals and key messages for each visit.

· They are relationship focused. As such, they make sure that they deliver what they have promised and they never answer a doctor's question if they are not sure about the answer.

· They coordinate with teammates who visit the same doctor to make sure that they don't miss important information and adapt their messages and approach to what their colleagues have said.

· They have a strong will to win.

What talents themes of the Clifton StrengthsFinder (R) can you identify behind these strengths? In short, I would say:

1. Individualization or Connectedness or Empathy

2. Responsibilty and/or Relator

3. Discipline or Input

4. Command or Belief

5. Competition or Significance

The ability to probe and listen can come from various talents, but the ability to adapt the message to each Doctor suggests Individualization. Yet, I have also seen great sales people with Connectedness who are also able to “connect” their message to all they have learned about the doctor. And Empathy is certainly also very useful: if you feel that the doctor is nervous or angry, you may want to ask to come back in a week to make your presentation.

Behind “relationship focused”, I see the talents Relator and Responsibility. Relator may be obvious, but Responsibility is very important for med reps because doctors hate it when the rep promises something (like bringing a study or sample on his next visit) and then does not keep it. That is unlikely to happen for someone with strong Responsibility.

For “creating call continuity”, I see Discipline or Input. Discipline can be a thinking and striving talent; people with Discipline like structure and routine. They don’t mind taking notes and reading them before the next visit. People with Input often like collecting information and can create the habit (=strength) of taking notes of everything important or interesting. I myself have Input very strong and I can testify how strong the urge to take notes can be: if it was not so unethical (and inefficient), I would almost like to record every important conversation!

Input can also create the desire to coordinate with teammates to make sure that they don’t miss important information.

People with Command or Belief are “not shy to use direct closing techniques with doctors”, such as asking “Doctor, would you mind trying this new therapy with only five patients until my next visit?”, or “Doctor, can I leave this important study here for your reading and we talk about it in my next visit?”. Command may be obvious, but Belief may be less so. Yet, I have heard and read again and again that people with strong belief in what they are selling (or teaching) are powerfully persuasive. And I get the impression that a lot of the better performing med reps have high Belief. If the talent Connectedness manifests itself also in strong convictions, it can have a similar persuasive effect like Belief.

The obvious answer for “strong will to win” is Competition. To a lesser extent, Significance may also serve here.

Now that we know this, what are we going to do with it? If I understand Gallup and Marcus Buckingham correctly, we should not try to select for these talents. For one, as we have seen, different talents can result in similar strengths.

So instead, we should select directly for these strengths. Behavioral based interviewing can be helpful here. Asking questions like…

“Tell me about a time when you turned a doctor’s no into a yes!” or

“How important is it for you to win? To be the number one?” or

“Do you believe that one can persuade all doctors in the same way?” and if no, “Tell me why not?”, “How do you adapt your persuasion to different doctors?”

In the last question, you do not want to hear obvious generalities like age, gender, medical specialty, but deeper things like the emotions perceived in the doctor, the doctor’s presumed deeper interests or fears, and so on.

I would like to invite YOU to propose more behavioral-based questions in a comment to this blog. What would be your favorite questions and what answers would you want to hear?

Can we use the Clifton StrengthsFinder for recruiting? If not, how should we select new employees for strengths?

My business is in Diabetes Care (products more than services). Last year, we started exploring innovative ways of providing a much better diabetes education as a way to differentiate ourselves from the competition. One of the key questions was: what profile should our diabetes educators have?

It was around that time when I did the StrengthsFinder myself for the first time and soon also invited my managers to do it. We were all so fascinated with the outcome that we could not help thinking in terms of (the StrengthsFinder) talents when we tried to define the ideal profile of our diabetes educators.

However, Gallup does not recommend using the StrengthsFinder (or its 34 talent themes) as a selection tool, as it is supposed to be a tool for self-understanding and coaching. I confess that I could not quite understand this in the beginning as I was (and still am) so convinced of the connection between talents and performance.

But over time, I understood why it would not be a good idea indeed to select for talent: because talents (according to the definition of the Gallup books) are more of a "raw material", not necessarily of great use for a business yet. Talents often need to be developed into productive strengths through targeted practice, repetition, experience. And that takes time, sometimes a lot of time; time which you usually don't have as a manager trying to hit the road running with a new strategy.

Let me give you an example: let's say you you are in a business that sells mostly to mid-sized business, often run by the owner himself. You come to the conclusion that your sales force is too conventional, too much product- and relationship oriented. You believe that you sales force needs to become more service- and solution-oriented; a true business partner with a profound knowledge of the customer's industry trends and needs.

That may require quite some strategic and entrepreneurial thinking. If you would limit your new profile to the StrengthsFinder talent themes, you may come up with talents like Strategic, Ideation, Futuristic. But recruiting for these talents only is no guarantee that a sales rep will have the desired level of entrepreneurial thinking, as this kind of strength may require many other elements, such as industry experience, some management training, product knowledge.

So you are much better off recruiting directly for the strengths you need, in this case entrepreneurial thinking or business acumen good enough to be a real business partner of your customers.

The other important disadvantage of recruiting for (the StrengthsFinder) talents is that different talents can result in a similar strength: for instance, for a Diabetes educator, the strength to adapt a recommendation to a customer's unique personality and situation is of tantamount importance. The obvious StrengthsFinder talent for this is Individualization, but I have also found some people with Connectedness and Empathy very good in this. If I selected only for Individualization, I would miss interesting candidates with Connectedness and Empathy.

So eventually, I got convinced of selecting for strengths, not for talents. But which strengths? The beautiful thing of the StrengthsFinder is that it offers you a nice taxonomy of 34 talents along with the vocabulary so that you can speak the same language with your managers. But when we started to talk about strengths, we found ourself lost in a similar way as we did with talents before learning about the StrengthsFinder. My team and I had a hard time spelling out what strengths we were really looking for and inevitably resorted again and again to using the talent themes vocabulary.

Soon, I decided to ask Gallup for help. They use a system called SRI. I forgot what the abbreviation stands for. The SRI makes use of what is probably Gallup's biggest strength: asking intelligent questions to lots of people and drawing important conclusions from the answers. So what they usually would do is to interview 100 or more of your employees who do the job for which you want to create the strengths profile. And with your help, they identify the high performers in this group of 100 (or more). Then they would compare the answers of the high performers with the rest of the group to find out whether there are certain questions that the high performers consistently answer differently than the rest of the group. A nice example is written in the book "Discover Your Sales Strengths": if you ask sales people the question how they feel when clients doubt what they say, the high performers feel bothered, while the mediocre or underperforming sales people would say that they don't bother.

I am a layman with such interviewing, or quantitative or qualitative research, but I find this approach most interesting. However, I also see some problems:

• First of all, Gallup is everything else than cheap and so usually only large companies can afford this SRI.
• But apart from the cost, the fact that you need a larger number of people to interview also makes it difficult for smaller companies to do an SRI. If you have your own small business or are a manager of a smaller business unit in a large company, you may not have 100 employees and at least 20 high performers.
• And even if you are a large company or have 100 employees, you still may have a problem when you realize that things are not going well and that the root cause of this is a mismatch between the strengths of your employees and what the company really needs. In such a situation, you want to define the strengths required for the company’s new strategy or vision, but how do you do this if few of your existing employees seem to have these strengths? The SRI won’t help you here.
• A similar problem can occur if you want to develop an innovative new service, something that has not been done before in your company. That was my case with the Diabetes educators. But I didn’t have any Diabetes educators with whom we could do an SRI! So what do you then?

Gallup was very forthcoming in finding a solution to my needs, also because they were intrigued by the idea of improving diabetes education; but they pointed out that they had to adapt and improvise in order to come up with a solution.

Ever since, I have been thinking about ways how small companies (or small business units in big companies) can define the strengths that they need for their jobs, their strategy and their culture; especially so if they are in a turn-around situation or want to venture into innovative new fields. This is not an easy job because defining the right strengths does not depend only on the job description, but also on the company's overall strategy and vision, as well as your leadership style. I will explore these issues in more detail in the next post.

I have been searching the literature for something like a taxonomy of strengths. I haven't found a lot so far. When I came across the book “FYI – For Your Improvement” by Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger, I read with great interest their list of 166 competencies such as “action oriented”, “command skills”, “listening”, “patience” and “humor”. If I understand the strengths literature correctly, the term “competency” is a bit muddled in that it can be talent, strength, knowledge, skill or a blend of them. Still, this list is the closest thing of a strengths taxonomy that I have found so far. I wonder whether anyone of you has experience with this? Do you know of any other "strengths taxonomy" or similar?

Have a look also at these talent-based interview questions of Jay Forte.

What are the right strengths for your company's strategy and culture?

In the previous post, I have raised the question about how companies, especially smaller ones, should define the critical strengths they need for their unique strategy and culture.

This is not a simple question, as there is no universal talent profile for sales people, customer service people, accounting people and son on. The book “First Break All The Rules” makes it very clear that the strengths required for the same job can be very different depending on the organizational culture and strategy (p. 100):

“In the early nineties Gallup began work with two of the largest retail brokerage firms in the United States. Both companies wanted help in selecting brokers. And both of them defined the role in exactly the same way – the broker was not paid to be a money manager, doing financial analysis, picking stocks. Instead he was paid to be a money gatherer, identifying high-potential prospects and the persuading them to invest their money in this firm. He was a salesperson.

Although the definition of both roles was the same, each company organized itself differently. One was extremely structured. Each broker spent months learning how to represent the same suite of meticulously packaged products, and regular refresher courses helped keep him from straying too far from the company’s mandate.

By comparison, the other company was wildly entrepreneurial. Licensed brokers were told, “Here’s a phone, here’s a phone book. I want to see 500,000$ in assents under management by this time next year. Best of luck.

Both strategies had their strengths. And as it turns out, both strategies have proven very successful. However, both could not be executed by the same kind of person. Although the job title was the same – “broker” and the job description was the same – “gather money” – the talent profiles were significantly different.”

For the structured company, the critical striving company was Achiever and the critical thinking talent was Discipline. For the entrepreneurial company, the critical thinking (and striving) talent was Focus, ideally in combination with the thinking talent Strategic.

The quotation above is one of my favorite parts in the book "First Break All The Rules". I find the connection between business strategy and employee's strengths most fascinating. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that a mismatch here is worse than a mismatch between a job's required strengths and the employee's strength. I have been researching the internet and literature for more insights into how to match strengths with your company's strategy and culture, but I haven't found a lot so far. Therefore, I would like to ask you whether you know any valuable sources of information or have made your own experience?

Behavior-event interviewing for strengths?

A friend of mine brought the concepts of “Behavioral Event Interviewing (BEI)” or “Behavioral-based Interviewing” to my attention. I confess I have never heard these terms before, although the concept itself was not new to me. The concept is well explained by Tamara E. Holmes in an article that you can find for free on the NFIB (“The Voice of Small Business”!!) website: http://www.nfib.com/object/IO_16988.html

“Under the technique's premise, it is not enough to know that a prospective employee is fluent in Spanish. Instead, you would want to find out how the person has used his or her bilingual capabilities in the past.

The premise behind behavioral-event interviewing is that past behavior predicts future performance. Just as a credit report is used to predict how a loan applicant will handle money in the future, examples of past accomplishments and behaviors can help hiring managers get an idea of how a potential employee will perform in the future.

Unlike interviewing techniques that focus on hypothetical situations and ask applicants what they would do in a given situation, behavioral event interviewing focuses on what applicants have done. The danger of using hypothetical situations to gauge an applicant's ability to handle the job is that the applicant is better able to give the answers he or she thinks you want to hear. Also, applicants might want to believe that they would act in a certain manner when, in reality, they would not.

When coming up with questions for the interview, consider the way each is phrased. You'll want to use open-ended questions that require more than a "yes" or "no" answer.

For example, starting a question off with the phrase "Tell me about a time when…" prompts the applicant not only to describe a situation that fits your criteria, but also to walk you through the resolution of the situation. Such a discourse not only allows you to hear about the situation, but it forces the applicant to talk more. As a result, you're better able to gauge his or her communication skills, which can also help you make your hiring decision."

Indeed, these recommendations are very similar to the interviewing tips in “First Break All The Rules “ on page 215 ff. (“The Art of Interviewing for Talent”).

I find it interesting that the concepts of a behavioral-based interviews can be applied to a strengths-based interview. I am not a psychologist, but I understand that personality and behavior are two different concepts: while personality does not change a lot once we are adults, our behavior can change. Of course, our behavior is very much influenced by our personality, but I always got the feeling the “behaviorists” tend to be those who say that “managers are made, not born”, while the personality folks rather tend to say “managers are born, not made.” And it is my understanding that talents are an aspect of our personality. How good can it be then to use behavioral-based interviewing to find strengths?

My friend who is an experienced "Talent Manager" working for a large company in the US says:

"Strengths are personality based, and the issue is they have not found a correlation between personality and sales ability or high performance outcomes in teams in competitive environments. But yes, behaviors do make a difference to performance. So the Strengths people have turned the strengths into behaviors that relate to your industry for you (I think). So it is a bit muddled, but might work! I just come from a business and academic background and prefer not to have my work based on a foundation of strengths or personality. However, there is a school of thought that believes personality predicts performance. The most well known person is Hogan, and Hogan Assessment Systems."

This seems to be a very interesting but also controversial field. If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you google "behavioral-based interviewing", because there is a lot of interesting information out there. There are also a few good books in Amazon. Check out also the following document:

http://www.asisvcs.com/bellsouth/pdf/710057.pdf

Dear Bloggers, if you know more about this, have experience or know interesting website, please put them in a comment to this post!

What are the Ideal Strengths for a Medical Visitor?

What strengths should we recruit for in sales representative in the pharmaceutical industry? Are the strengths needed for this job any different from typical sales strengths? Do we have any solid evidence for this?

Novartis has done some interesting research on this subject and part of its findings are publicly available in an interesting presentation that can be found in the following link:

http://www.sloansalesconference.com/media/2008/keynote_-_Greg_Schofield_-_Novartis.ppt

According to this presentation, highly successful sales reps in Novartis have the following strengths:

• They purposefully probe and listen.
• They adapt their message to each Doctor
• They are not shy to using rather direct closing techniques with doctors
• They create call continuity, for example by taking good notes, by reviewing them before the next visit, and by defining goals and key messages for each visit.
• They are relationship focused. As such, they make sure that they deliver what they have promised and they never a doctor's question if they are not sure about the answer.
• They coordinate with teammates who visit the same doctor to make sure that they don't miss important information and adapt their messages and approach to what their colleagues have said.
• They have a strong will to win.

What talents can you identify behind these strengths? Do you agree with these strengths, or do you believe that some of them are misleading while other more important strengths are missing? What interview questions would you ask and what answers would you want to hear in order to find these strengths?