Playing to your strengths

A cliché can often be the downfall of many a promising business conversation.

“Singing from the same hymn sheet”, “blue sky thinking”, to name but two. The list could, unfortunately, go on. And on. And on.

Similarly, “playing to your strengths” is a statement that is very often overused. It conveys so much promise yet often delivers so little. However, its myth as a cliché needs to be truly dispelled right here and right now.

In order to understand the true meaning of “playing to your strengths”, it is best to think at the organisational level and then work back. In order to maximise potential, an organisation will look to identify its unique selling point (USP) and invest in making that USP exceptional. It is commonly known that this is the thing that will make all the difference in the marketplace and in the eyes of the customer. If we take this logic and look at a person as a ‘mini organisation’ then we should look to develop their USP or, in this case, their strengths.

So what are strengths?

Researchers at Gallup recognised that studying success would provide much more useful information than studying failure. In doing so they uncovered a powerful set of traits or strengths which can be observed to some degree or other in everyone.

In simple terms a talent (a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving) becomes a strength (the ability to consistently produce near perfect performance) only if there is an investment in practice, development and knowledge. So, knowing the natural strengths provides a template for focused opportunities to maximise each person’s ability to produce results.

Uncovering strengths is achieved by an online assessment comprising 177 questions. Three reports are instantly generated which identify top five strengths, personalised insights and development ideas to maximise each specific strength.

These 34 strengths have been grouped under four themes – executing, influencing, relationship-building and strategic-thinking and, again, this can show the spread of strengths across the four themes.

Does it work?

Do not confuse ‘playing to your strengths’ as meaning people only doing the bits of the job they enjoy whilst others pick up the rest. Also, it is not about restructuring the job to suit the strengths of an individual.

It is initially about a person becoming aware of their strengths and why they get satisfaction from certain elements of their job.  It does provide a guide as to why some things come naturally whilst other aspects seem really hard to do.

The benefit of the organisation or manager knowing this information is that it enables them to use each individual’s strengths as and when appropriate. Making conscious and positive decisions about productivity rather than random choices.

Becoming more knowledgeable about their strengths provides a number of positive outcomes for the individual.  Firstly, it helps with self-awareness, which we know is a part of becoming more emotionally intelligent, and secondly, it provides a more positive starting point for discussions in helping determine where personal development is best focused or how a person’s strengths might be better deployed.

With over 10 million individual profiles completed and after extensive research, this approach has proved itself a powerful tool within people management showing that people who engage with the ‘play to your strengths’ concept in the real world have found people to be 6 times more productive.

Why a strengths based approach?

Because repairing our weaknesses does not provide a good return on the investment, why interfere and try to patch up a weakness when you could be releasing energy and talent thereby driving an individual’s engagement with the business?  Gallup recommend that we ‘maximise strengths and manage weaknesses’.

Great advice if we want to get the best out of our people and our business.