Harvard Business Review Article about Strengths

I found this article about strengths-based (career) management in HBR. I must say though that for people who are familiar with the Gallup and Buckingham books, there are no major new insights to be found here. But it is a good introductory summary for people who are not familiar with the issue.

http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2005/01/how-to-play-to-your-strengths/ar/1

Coaching em base de talentos no Brasil

O termo coaching para executivos já não é mais nenhuma novidade. Já faz algum tempo, que isso se tornou “moda” entre os executivos do Brasil e do mundo. Porém, o coaching em geral ainda tem uma tendência de enfocar demais nas debilidades. Dos talentos, se fala pouco, pois, se presume, erradamente, que eles se tornam em pontos fortes sem muito esforço.

Você já parou para pensar se os pais do Ronaldo, o Fenômeno, tivessem insistido que ele trabalhasse mais nas debilidades, por exemplo estudando mais, ao invés de desenvolver seus talentos no futebol? Ele seria, talvez, hoje, um empregado, frustrado, ao invés de um atleta realizado e rico.

Isso é um exemplo, do perigo em focar demais nos pontos fracos, tentando ser uma pessoa que você nao é, alguém que não acredita ter verdadeiros talentos a serem desenvolvidos.

Depois de ter estudado muito este assunto e ter me certificado em coaching em base de personalidade (Big Five Workplace Profile da CentACS nos EUA) e coaching em base de talentos/pontos fortes (com a Gallup University nos EUA), ofereço coaching profissional em Campinas e Sao Paulo para um numero limitado de clientes.

Nosso coaching será assim: você descobrirá seus talentos e os converteremos em um plano de ação. Isso mesmo, os desenvolveremos em verdadeiras pontos fortes! Prepare-se, pois isso exigirá muito disciplina e prática!

Se interessou pelo assunto? Leia mais neste link. Ou leia o famoso livro da Gallup "Agora Descubra Seus Pontos Fortes", já disponível em português!

5 REASONS TO FOCUS ON STRENGTH AT WORK

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of best universities. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com

All of us have our strengths and weaknesses. Most of us give a lot of importance to our weaknesses and try to overcome them so that we may become more competitive at our work place. But have you ever tried focusing on your strengths and those of your colleagues at your work place? Did you know that this strength-based management had its benefits too? Here are some reasons to focus on strengths at work.

1. You feel more connected with your team and colleagues when you place more focus on their strengths than on their weaknesses. Once you know the strengths of a person, you know how to interact well with that person and how to build on those strengths. Usually, the only topic that keeps you connected to your colleagues would be ‘the boss’ as most of you may find it difficult to relate to stuff outside work. But knowing each others strengths and focusing on them allows you to see your colleagues in a positive light and build a better bond with them.
2. You feel motivated by your strengths. We achieve so much more when we focus on our strengths. They give us a sense of self-worth that we feel happy. When you focus on employee strengths, they feel motivated too. Their self-esteem goes up and they feel happy to be a part of a team in which their strengths are recognized and emphasized.
3. You can use colleagues’ strengths to complement and supplement your own thus building a very good team. For example, you maybe good at developing long-term strategy. You can complement this strength with the researching skills of a colleague to come up with the best strategies. A colleague may be good at public relations. You may support her in building relationships within your team. This will go a long way in motivating her. So focusing on strengths will build a strong team that can handle almost any challenge that arises.
4. You will save the time and energy that has to be put into improving your weak areas, by focusing on your strengths. Trying to improve in an area where you are weak may promote you from poor to mediocre. But is it worth it? Why not focus on a skill at which you are excellent and try moving to masterful. This can be more enjoyable and save you the boredom at work. You can better your strong points and leave it to the others to help out in areas where you are weak. This saves everybody a lot of time.
5. Your work will become more fulfilling and it will reflect in all aspects of your life. A high level of confidence within you and a friendly atmosphere at your work place make life that much more pleasant and stress-free. Focusing on weaknesses gives rise to fears and insecurities. These fears are non-existent when we focus on our strengths. Try focusing not only on your strengths but also on your colleagues’ and watch the positive change come into play at your work place.

It is not possible to be an all-rounder but it is possible to be the best at certain things the way that only you can be. The same holds for your staff and colleagues. Give strengths a new focus and see if it doesn’t work.

The link between your StrengthsFinder talent themes and your career in business

"Almost every person who takes the Gallup StrengthsFinder profile asks the same questions: what's the right career for me? What should I consider doing now? What is my best fit". 

Such is the promising beginning of an article in the Gallup Management Journal (GMJ)  "Building a Career on Your Strengths" (click on this link, but you need to have a subscription to the journal). I definitely am one of the persons asking these questions. And one year after my "strengths Epiphany" and lots of studying, I still feel somewhat in search of the deeper career-related implications of my talents. 

The problem I find with many of the strengths books as well as that GMJ article is that they usually give you only very generic advise, such as "move from strength", "consider the possibilities", "define the expectations", "candidly consider your "fit"", "define an action plan", "build a constituency", "measure your performance". 

All right, very nice and well. But somehow quite theoretical. The best help I have found so far to discover and define my business related strengths is the book that I recommended in one of my previous posts: "Discovering Your Career in Business" by Anthony Butler and James Waldroop. 

But what I have discovered only these days is their website, where you can do one "business career interest" assessment for free, which will basically tell you how well you score on their "Entrepreneurial Attributes Scale Score (EAS)", or in other words, how similar your self-description is to that of entrepreneurs. 

If you are willing to invest 95 USD, go directly to their main website and purchase their CareerLeader. I am not associated with these guys and have no financial interest in doing so, but I highly recommend doing this assessment, which will take you about 45-60 minutes (if you are fast). This assessment will inform you about your two or three top business interests (which I find an interesting proxy for business-related talents) out of the following selection:

• Application of Technology
• Quantitative Analysis
• Theory Development and Conceptual Thinking
• Creative Production
• Counseling and Mentoring
• Managing People
• Enterprise Control
• Influence through Language and Ideas

The final report will explain to you what these interests mean, it will inform you about your business related strengths (!) and weaknesses, what jobs and career paths you should consider, what kind of organizational culture would be a better fit for you and your strengths, and last but not least what motivates you in your career. 

For example in my case, it turns out that I am "extremely interested in Influence through Language and Ideas" (has anyone seen my Blog lately?) and that I "also have a notable interest in Theory Development and Conceptual Thinking". That is quite accurate! And for your comparison: my strongest talent themes are Maximizer, Significance, Strategic, Intellection, Ideation, Input, Command, Activator. The only thing that one might expect here would be Communication, which is not in my Top 10. 

Admittedly, I could have guessed these two interests without taking the test for 95 USD and could have read the general comments about them in the book for 18 USD. But I find the online test and report still worth the money for the highly individualized report you get, the cautions about dangers to your career, the many interesting "how to" links it includes, and finally  it is kind of cool to get a written confirmation of your own"strengths-based career musings". 

Like all these tests, you have to enjoy them with certain caution and the authors of the report repeatedly emphasize that they can of course not guarantee you career success even if you follow their advise, as success depends on so many different factors. Yet, I find that this online tool has provided me the most "crispy", specific and actionable insights into my business related strengths so far. And if you don't like reading books, this report is quite comprehensive!

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.

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?

How to Develop Individualization?

"People who are especially talented in the Individualization theme are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. They have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively." Definition from the Clifton Strengths Finder Report

In my experience in sales and marketing, I have observed that some of the best sales people have strong individualization. This helps them to listen very carefully to their clients, observe seemingly minor yet important details and adapt their messages to their clients deeper needs. 

One colleague and one of the best sales persons I have ever met once explained to me that sometimes he walks into a client's office and just perceives that the client is stressed about something. Although he would have carefully prepared this sales call, he would immediately "abort mission", talk about trivialities and ask the client whether he could return next week. 

I have seen similar talents with some people strong in Connectedness who seem to have developed this talent into a strength that seems similar to Individualization: they somehow figure out what makes each person tick and connect their message to what they have observed in the client. 

Dear Bloggers, have you observed this as well? What advise would you give someone who hast just discovered that he has Individualization and now wants to develop this talent into a real strength in sales?