Playing to Your Strengths

Marcus Buckingham (with some co-authors) has made some impressive contributions to positive psychology with a series of books First Break all the Rules , Now, Discover Your Strengths , and Go Put Your Strengths to Work as well as other books and other media. I refer to this as the StrengthsFinder movement as a convenient shorthand because StrengthsFinder is the name of a book, a test, and a website derived from the research. I would encourage people to read these books as my very brief synopsis will not do justice to the richness nor importance of the ideas coming out of this movement.

Nonetheless, Buckingham asserts that the dominate model of performance review used in most organizations today is flawed. Typically, a employee will talk to his or her manager who will identify the employee's weaknesses and encourage said employee to work on those weaknesses over the course of the next year. This, according to Buckingham, will, at best, lead to adequate organizations but not high performance organizations. Each person has strengths which need to be identified, developed, and used to the advantage of both the employee and the organization. And, rather than work on one's weaknesses, one should work on one's strengths.

There is more justification for this than I have room to go into here. But, a simple example can provide a plausibility argument. On a typical football team, the quarterback excels at passing, runs adequately, and it likely to be rather poor at blocking or tackling. If the football team were run like a typical organization, the quarterback would be called into his annual review and the weaknesses in blocking would be pointed out. The quarterback would then spend the next year trying to raise the quality of his blocking. This is silly on the face of it. But, it is how modern organizations run. In order for an organization to be high performance, individuals must figure out what they are good at (we call these strengths) and find out ways to employ their strengths in the pursuit of organizational goals.

I have taken the test and my first strength is Futuristic. I am good at seeing the future. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that it is all about predicting the future. There are, as one might expect, also things that I am not good at. For example, I am not particularly good at schmoozing other people and making them feel comfortable. Nor do I particularly care. One of my other blogs DrArtz-RantingAndReflecting provides ample evidence of these weaknesses.  But, when I am thinking about the future it is effortless and sublime.

Unfortunately, we tend to hide our strengths to avoid the criticisms of other. This is a carryover of industrial age thinking where conformity is valued more than uniqueness. If I am good at predicting the future and others are not then there must be something wrong with them or wrong with me. Usually, people see this as something wrong with me. They get tired and annoyed when I talk about the future. But this isn't about me. It is about our inability to accept strengths and uniqueness in others. We don't like people who can effortlessly talk to strangers at parties. We don't like people who can remember names. People who strive to keep things on an even keel are just annoying. And those who care deeply about others, well, there just aren't words to describe the contempt that feel for them. So, when people are good at things, others, who are not good at those things like to downplay their importance.

But, we can't avoid the fact that when people are using their strengths they are more productive and more satisfied. So, while this reorientation that Buckingham is talking about may take some time, it will definitely happen. And, all of the pieces I have been bringing together about the nature of work will help that happen.