Developing strengths rather than weaknesses not only better motivates employees, but also maximizes performance to help achieve business targets faster.  Martyn Sakol reports

“One cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all available strengths… these strengths are the true opportunities.’’¹ Management guru Peter Drucker wrote these words almost 40 years ago.  However, how many of you reading this article have conducted or experienced a performance review recently, where the objectives you set or agreed, were to work on areas of weakness? What are the issues that come up each year at an employee’s annual review? Are they the same issues that were supposed to have been addressed last year, or even the year before that? In our experience the majority of organisations still focus on developing weaknesses.  This is like a developmental treadmill – running faster and faster, but going nowhere because weaknesses can’t be built upon. Why might this be?

Weaknesses result in risk
In my view, the prevailing cultural ethos within organisations across all sectors in recent times has been that strengths will take care of themselves, but weaknesses result in risk and associated costs. So the belief is that we need to ‘manage’ weaknesses and work on them. As a consequence, strengths have been neglected for a long time.

However, the significant and growing interest that we have observed in the benefits of applying positive psychology to organisational capability suggests hat business leaders are starting to realise that if you harness, facilitate and leverage the things that people are good at, then business results follow.  This is most apparent in the current interest in coaching for performance, emotional intelligence, talent management and succession planning. For example, consulting engineers WS Atkins, report that they have significantly improved retention amongst their high potentials. Turnover was down to 2%.  This was achieved by identifying and leveraging their strengths through the design and implementation of development centres. The business imperative to do this was because the demand for talented staff is high and the supply is low and highly competitive.  The key message here is to do lots of what you’re good at, and development is focused on finding the right roles for managers and employees that match their strengths.

Why? Because competitive advantage in our ever-increasing climb up the value chain, requires the identification, development, retention and sustained performance to make sure the right people do the right things at the right time. Successful organizations in the emerging knowledge economy innovate continually to maintain their place in such a dynamic market place, and it is the individual employee who must develop the flexibility and creativity needed to effectively drive growth and deliver results. In facing this challenge, ER Consultants is finding that organisations are turning away from the traditional ‘one size fits all’ training initiatives and instead development is more tailored to the individual.

How can strengths coaching motivate people at work?
Coaching should be about unlocking a person’s potential to maximise his or her own performance, and it all begins with ‘desire’. Desire is the force that motivates us to achieve, and it is a natural self-generating ambition. A great number of talents naturally exist within us. They are an authentic part of our personality, and there is a direct connection between our talents and our achievements.  Talents make it possible to move to higher levels of excellence and to fulfil our potential. Strengths are produced when talents are combined with knowledge and skill.

Identifying and leveraging peoples’ strengths, rather than focusing on their weaknesses, is much more enjoyable for everyone involved in a performance review. It is also much easier to motivate people if you focus on their strengths, as opposed to their weaknesses. Playing to strengths also enhances well-being because we are doing what we naturally do best. This is so obvious to the sporting world, both in individual and team sports. In athletics, coaches have long been employed to help athletes assess their strengths and build on them. Training for the world cup finals, I can’t imagine Sven was working with David Beckham to improve his heading ability (a weakness), but you can be sure, he was spending hours on the training pitch perfecting his free kicks (a strength).

Strengths coaching in practice
So how might one identify strengths? There are some psychological assessment tools that can be helpful in this regard, such as the Clifton Strengths Finder, The Values-in Action (VIA) questionnaire, developed by Seligman (2004), and some of the personality type indicators such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or the Team Management Profile (TMP).  Overall, the crux of the strengths perspective is that it shifts the emphasis of development coaching from problem-focused to potential guided and solution-focused. A strengths coaching script could look like this:

Q1: Within your working environment, what are you best at?

Q2: How do you know you are at your best?

Q3: How do you go about finding solutions to problems?

Q4: Tell me about a time when you were successful at doing this? Who do you know who has done this successfully? How did they do it?

Q5: If I was to wave a magic wand and you were to wake up tomorrow, performing at your absolute best, what would that be like? What would you be doing? What steps do you need to take to get there?

Clearly, the specific questions or prompts should always be shaped by the particular context, but hopefully they give an indication of ER Consultants’ strengths-based approach to coaching, and the extent to which this might have a profound impact on individual motivation at work. People are more likely to do well in jobs they like to do. So by helping to focus employees’ energies on the things they like to do, then they and their organisation are more likely to flourish.

Reference:

¹. Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, Butterworths-Heinemann, 1967 

For more information, contact:

Martyn Sakol  martyn.sakol@erconsultants.co.uk

© erconsultants Topics Issue 2 2006 4