Now, Discover Your Strengths
Every Friday my wife and I have dinner with good friends of ours. We haven't known them all that long, but we seemed very comfortable very quickly. We ended up back at their place and our conversation turned to ways to improve customer service - yes some people actually enjoy discussing that kind of thing.
He had just finished some business training on how to improve their automotive repair company, and he mentioned the book Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton.The book explains how the Gallup organization, through literally two million interviews, was able to isolate 34 key talents. Combined with knowledge and skills, these talents could be built into strengths.
The book notes that most organizations are built on two flawed assumptions about people:
- Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything.
- Each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness.
It turns out though, when they interviewed the world's best managers, they found those assumptions to be completely wrong. These two assumptions guided the best managers:
- Each person's talents are enduring and unique.
- Each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.
He spoke so passionately about how learning his strengths had helped him in business, growing sales substantially in what some might feel to be an area of fairly low growth. Yes he was able to grow by impementing changes that others in the same business were afraind to. He had realized that his business was really about dealing with people, so he played to he strengths in that area, and minimized his weaknesses.
His wife had learned her strengths as well and found them very interesting. His trainer, and now his friend, was a great proponent of the book as well, basing a good deal of his training on it. If you can believe it, the four of us actually sat down to watch a couple of very entertaining DVDs by Marcus Buckingham. Mr Buckingham posed the following question:
What percentage of employees do you think strongly agree that they have an opportunity to do what they do best every day? What percentage truly feel that their strengths are in play?The answer?
Twenty percent.
Fully eighty percent of employees were not using their strengths.
Imagine how much more your company could achieve if you could merely double that to forty percent? Or perhaps even fifty percent? The thought intrigued me, and I've actually been trying to determine my strengths. For purchasers the book provides an online tool, strengthsfinder.com, to do just that. This seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, so he loaned me his copy of the book.
I found it so interesting that I read the entire book today. I'll grab my own copy tomorrow so that I can take the assessment test. The book also provides complete descriptions of each strength theme with examples, as well as examples of how the strengths can benefit your organization and how to manage people effectively based on their strengths. It also explains in detail how Human Resources departments could use strengths-based systems to determine accurate metrics on how their employees are actually performing.
I've often felt that Human Resources tries too hard to fit people into predetermined spaces rather than figure out how to actually use their real strenghs, and the book seems to corroborate that. Of course I've never understood why the department is called Human Resources either. Perhaps to distinguish it from the Animal Resources department?
Serendipitously, this seems to be the perfect tool for me at the perfect time. A simple assessment tool that can accurately assess my talents, and lead me toward my strengths. And perhaps toward my passion.
Next step: Discover my strengths.
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