Human Resources

I have learned to hate reviews.  Not so much the receiving of them (although I have had some surprises in my time—and there really should be no surprises in a good review) but the preparing and reviewing of them.  All too often all of the energy is devoted towards highlighting weaknesses—or in an effort to warm things up a bit: “Areas for Improvement”.  There may be 17 ‘Excellents’ out of 20 categories but the majority of space will be devoted to the three categories that are not excellent.

Why can’t we be more like pro-football?

Why can’t we focus and further develop our strengths?  If you have someone naturally gifted in marketing, why would you ask them to devote their time to budgeting?  If you have an administrative guru, why would you be upset that their closing ratio is below the company average?  (Here I have to confess that the idea for this blog came while listening to my co-instructor, Michael Monroe Kiefer (www.powermindtraining.com), teaching a segment on Personality Styles, a profile assessment tool.  But more on that later.) 

Now I realize that we don’t have NFL-sized budgets; however, does it make sense to hire the right strength for the job, and then find other ‘right’ strengths for the jobs around them?

Often when we talk about someone’s strengths, they may look surprised and think, “Well, everyone does that.”  We tend to minimize the things that we love to do or find easy.  And yet, wouldn’t we be happier if we could spend all of our time doing the things we love?

How do you assess your strengths?

1. Send an e-mail to your family, friends and coworkers asking what they perceive to be your strengths.  People tend to be more ‘real’ when they cannot see your reaction.  The benefit of asking people from different areas of your life is that they will give you a broader perspective on how you are perceived. When you get their responses you can take this information and cut and paste it into a single action plan. 
2. Review your review.  Is there anything your supervisors have consistently said?  Do you see a pattern of strengths and weaknesses?  (Have you noticed that it is much easier to see other people’s strengths and weaknesses?)
3. Take a personality profile assessment.  DiSC is one assessment that is inexpensive and can be done on-line in twenty minutes or so.  As I mentioned earlier, Michael Monroe Kiefer is a huge proponent of focusing on your strengths and offers a profiling analysis geared towards a better understanding of your customers and co-workers and is geared towards understanding how best to communicate with them.  You will discover that we have a lot of subconscious preferences. The results will help you understand your behavior as well as appreciate your coworkers’ differences.
4. What activities entice you to come back?  Generally our strengths include those things that we are drawn to, get lost in or make you feel good.  (Conversely, your weaknesses are things that leave you feeling small and depleted.)   Think about the days when you come home charged up and excited.  What tasks were you performing that day?  Conversely, think about the days when you have come home wiped out and drained.

Play to your strengths | Compensate for weaknesses

If you find yourself in a situation where your job requires you to devote time to an area of weakness, create a personal development plan to improve these areas.  (How do you determine if something is an area of weakness?  Tasks that you ignore, delay, procrastinate, try to hide or are uncomfortable discussing are areas of weakness.)  Where possible, delegate any areas of weakness (e.g. budgeting, scheduling, ordering or reviewing financial line items) to someone on your team better suited to the task.  Bring your team in on the exercise.  Explain that everyone on the team has strengths and weaknesses and that you want to assign tasks based on what each person does best.  P. Alex Linley and Susan Harrington discuss this concept in an article in The Psychologist: 

“By exploring each individual’s pattern of strengths, the emphasis becomes one of optimising what people are best at, while recognising and managing those situations that they may not handle naturally well, and addressing these through appropriate job allocation, complementary partnering, or strengths-based team working, rather than trying perennially to ‘address their weaknesses’ and rectify the fact that people may have been put in the wrong job to begin with.” 

By discussing it as a team, you can brainstorm optimal task assignments and create employee buy-in at the same time.

Building a new team?  Even better!  Take this opportunity to hire for your weaknesses.  All too often we hire people like us.  Resist that temptation and hire a team to balance you out.  Their strengths will supercharge your career! 

That doesn’t mean we totally ignore our weaknesses however.  Linley and Harrington add:

Overall, a strengths-based formula for organisational success would be to play to your strengths (through identifying them and finding a role that is congruent with them), develop your competencies (through ensuring that you are at least minimally effective in critical areas of the job), and manage your weaknesses (through job redesign, complementary partnering, or strengths-based team working).

We tend to spend a lot of time and energy dwelling on our weaknesses.  As in most investments (and shouldn’t our development head up the list of our own investments) apply the 80-20 rule.  Spend 80% of your time making use of your key strengths and 20% of your time developing your weaknesses.

So stop spending so much energy on your weaknesses.  Play to your strengths and focus on what you love.  Life will be much better!

Cheers!  Jim Baumgartner | Rent Soda

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