I am sure many of you have heard or read the books Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham or Strengthfinder 2.0 written by Tom Rath. These books emphasize the need for us to identify our strengths and focus on building those instead of beating ourselves up for our weaknesses. Access to an online assessment is found in both of these books that will identifying your top five strengths along with definitions for each strength. Because these are inexpensive assessments, just the cost of the books, many organizations have embarked on purchasing them, reading them, taking the assessment and sharing the results with each other.

I believe this is a great start. However, when I ask them what they do differently as a result of this new knowledge, they quickly share that they post the results on their office doors or cubicles and share the results at a team meeting. Self-awareness is always the first step in a change process but I believe this information could be used much further by better aligning employee's strengths to the work and ultimately making the organization more productive.

So, how do you take any of the information from these strength based assessments and use them in a way that makes a sustainable difference to the organization?

Great question for this week's newsletter!

Great strength finding,

"Globally, only twenty percent of employees working in the large organizations we surveyed feel that their strengths are in play every day"

 From Marcus Buckingham's book, Now Discover Your Strengths

I am a maximizer. In other words, I like to take ideas, projects and people that are average and make them excellent. I did not understand this until I read Buckingham and Rath's booksand used the password code inside the books to uncover my five signature strengths. According to Buckingham a strength is a consistent near perfect performance in an activity. After maximizer, my second strength is ideation which means I am fascinated by new perspectives on familiar challenges. So, how should an employee use their strengths for better engagement and how should managers use this information to improve productivity?

The following ideas (here I go again) are suggestions that may help:

1. Develop a list of 3-5 key responsibility areas (KRA's) for each employee. You may find these on their job descriptions or in their performance evaluation forms. In other words, you want the top 3-5 most important aspects of their job listed on a page.

    

2. If you are a manager, assign your employees the task of taking the Strengthfinder 2.0 online assessment and read the results, definitions and how to manage their strengths sections. If they already have their results, ask them to dust them off, reread the portion of the book identifying their strengths and how to manage those strengths. In addition email the key responsibility list for each employee and ask them to come prepared to discuss one-on-one with you the ways they can better use their top two themed strengths in their key responsibility areas or KRA's.

     

3. Schedule one-on-one meetings with each employee to best understand their strengths, how to manage them and how to use their strengths in their top KRA's. Gain agreement on how you will proceed.

    

4. Reflect on all of your one-on-one meetings. Do you see opportunities for moving tasks around to best tap into these strengths? If so, schedule meetings individually with those whose jobs you may change or tweak to gain buy in. If expectations are clear....

    

5. Call a special meeting of your team/employees whose purpose is to share the results of each person's strengths, how to manage those strengths and use them in their KRA's. As the manager, I advise you to go first and show the vulnerability in discussing what you are good at and how others may be better in certain areas. Reveal any proposed task changes to gain acceptance. Be willing to change your strategy, if needed.

    

6. Based on the information from the special meeting, create new performance evaluations or tweak existing ones to show the new expectations.

    

7. Continue to evaluate individually and as a team twice a year to make certain your strategy is working.

    

I realize that not every job will have the needs of every strength of your teammates but I believe the 80/20 rule applies here. If your employees are using their strengths in 80% of their KRA's, you will get improved productivity from them and also reduce turnover.

Question for You:

Have you taken the Strengthfinder 1.0 or 2.0 assessment or one similar only to have it collect dust on your shelf? Did you make an early attempt with this information only to have it become another underutilized tool? Do you need to better engage your employees in this New Year? Are you an employee who is underutilizing a strength that may really make a difference in your department or team?

Action for You:

Aligning employee's strengths to their work is not an easy job. It requires the creation of a strategy to that is implemented and used in all of your systems that recognize and evaluate employee performance. Anything short of this will just be another "flavor of the month" that management introduced and is nowhere to be seen.

"People who have the opportunity to focus on their strengths every day are six     times as likely to be engaged in their jobs"

Tom Rath Strengthsfinder 2.0

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