Develop strength; deliver value

Good managers, and certainly every coach, asks you what you believe are your strengths. Following shortly after that will be a discussion of the area you want to work on. Marshall Goldsmith and David Ulrich carry this exercise one step further - they ask you to think about how you can build on your strengths in a way that will strengthen others.

Think about the implications of that for just a moment. The question then becomes "How can you build upon your strengths in a way that will deliver improved results through others?"

In an article in Workforce Management, David Ulrich, a leading thinker in Leadership and Human Resources, offers suggestions to HR professionals on how they can build their strengths with the goal of increased value to their organizations. He highlights the following:

• Focus on outcomes, not activities - Always be able to finish your work proposals with "so that ...."
• Help leaders define their results - What is all that development and building on strength going to bring about in terms of business results?
• Build a positive culture from the outside in - Start with what the company wants to be known for by the customers and investors.
• Be a contributor by working with business leaders on their issues - How do your HR programs help the business deliver its financial and customer objectives?
• Be curious - Learn about the business, the leaders, the customers, and focus your learning on how you can help them succeed.

Overestimating Your Capabilities?

David Dunning, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Cornell University explains in a Gallup Management Journal article that most people overestimate their capabilities. If you just had enough time, or started earlier enough, or had the right gear, you too much just play golf like Tiger or tennis like Vanessa or sing like those folks on American Idol; right? A Business Week survey supports Dunning's finding by noting that 90% of American middle managers believed themselves to be in the top 10% of performers.

We overestimate our capabilities because:

1. Normally people will claim credit for their success and blame other people or conditions for their failures. As a consequence, the overall sense is one of success.
2. Feedback from others is often couched in softened terms, may be incomplete or less than honest, and may well not be understood or heard.
3. Frequently people have no way to know how something could have been done differently or better; they are unconsciously incompetent.

Confidence is energizing and can bring its own rewards. Identifying the blind spots and acting on them can be equally rewarding.

Whether with your boss at annual performance appraisal time, with trusted peers, or with an external coach, asking for feedback remains a key step in identifying improvement areas that you just cannot see.

Today's conventional wisdom suggests that you should build on your strengths. That's very true, but without awareness of our weaknesses and finding ways to mitigate them, you may be winning a battle and losing the war. Strong leadership requires that you set high expectations for yourself and others, and demonstrate the ability for continuous learning and growth.

Executive coaching is a tool that supports the identification of blind spots and the development of successful behaviors and skills. To learn more about this investment in your career and the careers of your employees, contact me at Sherry@ReadSolutionsGroup.com .

Turbulence and Agility

An estimated 60% of industries are deemed to be turbulent compared to 20% three decades ago. Turbulence is defined in industries where there are dramatic changes in the profit pool or the "rules of the game" are changing rapidly. (The Secret to Growth? First, Define Your Core by Chris Zook, Bain & Co)

More than 80% of American executives believe the pace of change is increasing around the globe. (AMA’s 2006 Agility and Resilience Survey Reveals the Effects of Change on Business)

What then are the lessons for companies, managers and individuals to succeed in such environments?

• Know your strengths as a company, manager and individual
• Understand how these strengths add value to your organization, clients, and customers
• Understand what differentiators these strengths provide to you
• Evaluate and take action on ways to leverage your strength in the interest of your organization, clients and customers
• Determine the ways or circumstances in which the strength becomes a weakness
• Put systems, structures or people in place to mitigate the weakness
• Invest in learning
• Stay on top of changes in your industry
• Travel and consider how different solutions to everyday problems might be applied in your industry
• Look for innovations in other industries and consider what can be leveraged from your strengths
• Stay agile
  
• Keeping the pipeline full of business ideas,
• Maintaining a personal network
• Be prepared to execute on Plan B
  

When the world is changing at an ever accelerating pace, when companies like Google can generate revenue per employee at rates twice as high as companies like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco (Our Challenge Is Change, Not Globalization by Rich Karlgaard), when the rules of the game organizationally and personally are being rewritten annually, only the agile will keep on top of the game.

- What step could you take to improve your agility? -

Strengths as Weaknesses

Marcus Buckingham, author of such books as First, Break All The Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently and The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success, argues that the best managers share one talent - the ability to find, and then utilize their employees' unique strengths. He has been quoted as saying, "The guiding principle is, 'How can I take this person's talent and turn it into performance?' That's the only way success is possible." With his book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, co-authored with Donald O. Clifton, he kicked off the latest management trend – strength-based management. By focusing on strengths in every management practice, from hiring, assignment, development, motivation and promotion, managers apply the greatest leverage to business success.

Yet, with historical practices focused on strengths and weaknesses, challenges are sure to arise. Consider the standard (and dreaded) interview question, “name your top three strengths and weaknesses”. What about the typical performance review where “areas for improvement” are required? Doesn’t development planning normally focus on three areas “needing improvement”? What about the contention that our greatest strength can be our greatest weaknesses?

As the key proponent of the StrengthsFinder system from Buckingham and Clifton’s book, the Gallup Management Journal touched on this topic in Probing the Dark Side of Employees’ Strengths: Can their talents actually alienate colleagues and hurt your organization? They give as an example, Matt who has a top talent theme of Command. The question is whether this can result in being bossy (bad) versus decisive (good). Gallup falls back on their definition of strength “the ability to consistently produce a nearly perfect positive outcome in a specific task”. If Matt is being bossy, he needs to learn to refine his talent so that it is used in a more productive fashion. In this way, a strength can’t be a weakness. If not used productively, it is not a strength; though can perhaps be developed as one.

Turknett and Anderson in their article, Aggressive Leadership: When Does Strength Become Weakness? argue that aggressiveness, often considered a strength in a leader, can be a weakness when it affects interpersonal relationships. A bit confusing, since if we apply the Gallup definition, the aggressiveness wouldn’t be strength since it’s not consistent produces a positive outcome. Turknett and Anderson argue for learning new behaviors that channel the aggression toward positive outcomes.

In a blog posting titled Are Your Strengths Under Control the theory suggested is that no one has weaknesses – they are merely strengths carried to an excess. In these examples, aggression carried to an extreme leads to bullying. Posited as an approach to having performance reviews with marginal employees, this could be the “softer, gentler” approach to the needed development discussion. When a manager says to you, “you’re so good at this, it’s a problem” I wonder whether the message is received better?

Chris Rodgers of informal coalitions agrees that strengths can be carried to an excess, with the resulting behavior being a problem. He disagrees with the assertion that there are no weaknesses, believing that this leads to a denial of weaknesses and a tendency toward mediocrity. He argues that we need to own our strengths and our weaknesses. With our weaknesses acknowledged, we should work to ensure that our “unavoidable weaknesses” are expressed in the most positive way possible and in support of our strengths.

Gallup recommends that we help people understand their nature patterns so they can be applied in a positive and productive way; therefore, strengths cannot be weaknesses. Turknett and Anderson argue for coaching to build the new behaviors that channel attributes into positive interactions with others. PainFreeLearning requests that we consider whether we have a tendency to overplay any of strengths. Chris Rodgers asks that we manage our “warts and all”.

It is intriguing to me that none of these articles speaks to the interaction of the behavior or attribute with the environment. A strength is neither good nor bad. A weakness is neither good nor bad. The only legitimate question is perhaps alluded to in the definition Gallup gives for a strength, “do the behaviors result in a positive outcome in the context in which they are used?” The commanding presence of Matt may be bullying in a small collaborative high tech company; it may be appropriately decisive in a privately held Chinese company. Without context, without measurable outcomes, the behaviors are neither strengths, nor weaknesses. Perhaps the focus should not be on whether there are strengths and weaknesses, but rather which behaviors are most appropriate when hiring, promoting, developing and motivating staff to support the desired business outcomes in the particular environment.

Are your strengths weaknesses? What could you alter about the behavior or context that would change your answer?