Back in 1966, Peter Drucker in his seminal book, “The Effective Executive” wrote:
“The effective executive builds on strengths – their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates; and on the strengths of the situation”
This has been hailed as one of the sources of the Strengths Movement; the core of which is that excellence is not the opposite of failure and you won’t learn about excellence by studying failure. Instead to learn about success we must study success and apply the results. By encouraging people to play to their strengths, we will increase motivation, increase engagement and deliver greater results.
In the current economic environment, organisations are seeking operational effectiveness and efficiency and increasingly looking to identify innovative ways to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great” said that “good is the enemy of great” and related this to the “Curse of Mediocracy” which arises from the belief that everyone should be good at everything and when they are not, we should focus on developing the weak areas.
“A strength is a pre-existing capacity for a particular way of behaving, thinking or feeling that is authentic and energising to the user, and enables optimal functioning, development and performance”
In summary we might say that;“Strengths are things that we are good at AND that energise us”
There has been more focus on understanding the categorisation and application of strengths in recent years with the purpose of creating a language that people can easily understand and apply.
The Strengths Approach suggests that understanding our core strengths and using them more, will positively impact on our performance and engagement in the workplace. The disconnect often comes when people are not able to use their strengths every day at work and are “forced” into traditional competency based measurement systems. Unless these competencies directly mirror some or all of your strengths then for the majority of people in organisations; their energy is not applied in the most optimal way to deliver greatest value.
If similar thinking is then applied to teams; it can be argued that, the greater an individual’s awareness of their personal strengths; the greater the opportunities for creating effective teams to harness potential synergies.
Previous research in this area suggests:
“Bringing together two or more people with complementary strengths not only compensates for the shortcomings of each but also results in a team in which the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts” Stephen Miles and Michael Watkins, HBR
“A good team member deliberately volunteers his strengths to the team most of the time” Marcus Buckingham
Teams provide the lens for the strengths approach because they possess all the ingredients that are needed for strengths based working.
There are 5 fundamentals of the Strengths Approach:
Research suggests that organisations who are advocates of the Strengths Approach report greater people engagement; greater effective team working and better organisational performance.
Organisations that match employees’ strengths with the demands they make on them are more likely to achieve synergy through strategic alignment of people and performance targets:
By first understanding your strengths and applying these regularly; individuals are likely to perform better; use their energy more optimally and be more engaged in the workplace resulting in greater opportunity for individuals, teams and organisations to deliver greater results.
If you are interested in finding out more or exploring the use of Strengths within your organisation, we would be delighted to discuss this with you.
For further information about article or Lean please contact marina@leadershipfactory.co.uk