Now, Discover Your Strengths
30.06.2017
“A great organization must not only accommodate the fact that each employee is different, it must capitalist on this difference”. So decrees Markus Buckingham co-author of “First, Break all the Rules”.
Book Review:
Now, Discover Your Strengths
by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D.
Together with his co-author Donald O Clifton, he claims that rather than focus on addressing the weaknesses of our teams, we need to exploit their talents and turn them into strengths that we can exploit. Here’s their reasons behind this conviction.
Lesson #1: The Structure of Strength
Only 20% of employees working in large organizations feel their strengths are being utilized every day. Even more concerning is that, the longer they stay with a company the more entrenched this feeling becomes. This goes back to what Buckingham stated in his earlier book. Organizations are built on two false premises:
We can all become competent in anything, and our growth potential is our biggest weakness.
Strengths = Talent + knowledge + skill
Although it’s possible to develop strength without full knowledge or skill,its never possible to fully possess a strength without talent.
Lesson #2: Knowledge in Two Parts
There are two kinds of knowledge:
Factual knowledge – data, statistics, facts, truths.
The second type of knowledge is experiential. It’s knowing – as a child – not to touch a hot stove after having burned fingers. It’s knowing that a good relationship with a VP’s secretary can increase access.
To discover our strengths we need to acquire both types of knowledge, complementing each with the other. Skills bring structure to experiential knowledge. Eventually, having exploited the experience and its benefits, we are likely to formalize this into a repeatable series of steps and actions – a skill.
Skills enable us to avoid trial and error and to embed the best actions into our normal behaviour. If you learn a skill it will help you get a little better… but it will never turn into a strength without the third ingredient: talent.
Lesson #3: Signposts to Strengths
As we’ve identified, talent is a key component of strength. So to find our strengths we must first find our talents. Buckingham suggests we should monitor our spontaneity. How we react to the situations and challenges around us reveals the source of what we do “naturally” and how we handle things.
Lesson #4: Snags to Succeeding With Strengths
No matter where you live in the world there is one common thing that gets in the way of success: our weaknesses and the underlying belief that we should focus on their elimination. For many of us, the fear of our weaknesses significantly overshadows our confidence in our strengths. Many of us may put this down to ego control: we don’t want to appear egoistic by “begging” up our strengths. We may also be reluctant to promote our strengths because we think they are not much to write about.
What is your Strength?
When you know your Strength- you get better results.
Tim is a Consultant to Business, Government and Not-for-Profits Organizations specializing in innovative and challenging ways for organizations to survive, to thrive and to build their teams.
