Positions of Strength

It’s the latest wrinkle in management: Hire employees for what they do best and build your organization around those strengths. You’ll love the results.

Mike Morrison is strong in Strategic, Ideation, and Relator. Can he have a positive conversation with someone like me, whose top themes include Input, Analytical, and Intellection? Or will my challenging — some would say nitpicking — questions put off the Dean for Associate Education and Development at the University of Toyota in Torrance, California, who has tendencies toward long-range visionary thinking and a preference for talking with close friends?

Welcome to the world of strengths, an emerging trend in management, training, and career development that could be to the new decade what Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits were to the 1990s — or what mood rings and signs of the zodiac were to the 1970s and 1980s. One difference is that, instead of Covey’s sometimes enigmatic admonitions to Sharpen the Saw and astrologers’ moony predictions that we will experience financial problems in the coming year, strengths thinking is built around 34 themes of talent that all of us possess to some degree. Someone with a talent for Ideation, for example, loves ideas and new concepts. An Analytical type, on the other hand, has a bent for skewering nice ideas with pointed questions. Hence my concern about my interview with Morrison — which, in fact, went quite well.

Strengths theory, as it’s sometimes called, has at its core a simple idea: We’ll all do better if we concentrate on getting better at what we’re already good at, rather than trying to learn something we stink at. That may sound like common sense. But according to surveys by the Gallup Organization, it’s not common practice. In interviews with 1.7 million employees at 101 companies in 63 countries, the Princeton, New Jersey, management consulting and trend-tracking company discovered just 20 percent of people said they got to do what they do best at work every day. To Marcus Buckingham, that’s “a tragedy.”

Buckingham, a Gallup researcher who co-authored 1999’s 400,000-copy-selling manual for managers called First, Break All the Rules, has teamed up with Donald O. Clifton, another Gallup researcher, on Now, Discover Your Strengths, just published by The Free Press. Applying the results of Gallup’s studies, Buckingham and Clifton prescribe a complete regimen for identifying your strengths and those of your employees, then building an entire company around everyone doing what he or she does best.

It’s a powerful prescription, according to those who have tried it. When Toyota University ran a pilot program two years ago, offering managers of Toyota’s 10,000 U.S. employees a training program on identifying their strengths, the response was overwhelming. “Word of mouth coming out was electric, and we had a yearlong waiting list within a few weeks,” reports Morrison. “That’s unheard of for training.”??Strengths fans say the philosophy has the power to greatly improve performance at both corporate and individual levels. “We’ve put a couple of thousand associates through it, and we’re seeing evidence on an anecdotal basis with people self-reporting the increase in performance,” Morrison says. “All the indicators are that this investment is paying back big-time for Toyota.”

Reevaluating an Old Problem

The obvious question is that, if catering to our strengths is so helpful, why hasn’t anyone thought of it before? They have, of course. Separating people according to various inclinations or personality types is an ancient field of psychology. Carl Jung, for example, classified people as introverts or extroverts. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a test based on Jung’s theories, has been administered to countless job applicants and career planners for many years.

The problem with most of the type indicators in use is that they are so venerable, says Philip J. Stone, a Harvard psychology professor. “Carl Jung was a great guy, but his concepts are far removed from the modern workplace,” says Stone.

More recent initiatives, such as the positive psychology movement led by Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, have had limited influence, however, on what Buckingham and Clifton describe as a pervasive emphasis on fixing what’s wrong with people. Their studies found that, around the world, people and societies are obsessed with remedying weaknesses but discount talents as unworthy of attention. Many people, in fact, don’t have any idea what their strengths might be, though they’re painfully aware of their failings, Buckingham reports. “The bottom line is, we live in a remedial world,” he says.

Fascination with failings, Buckingham adds, combines with an unfortunate but strong corporate tendency toward the Peter Principle — promoting people into jobs where they are incompetent. The result? The longer people are in their jobs, the less likely they are to be doing what they do best.

Finding a New Approach

The Gallup Organization has been tracking employee strengths for the last 30 years, while interviewing some 2 million employees, including 80,000 managers. In talking with employees whose companies consistently exceed expectations with noticeably low turnover, as well as employees of companies with rapid turnover, the researchers uncovered 34 themes of human talent — those naturally occurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior. Combined with knowledge (the facts and lessons learned) and skills (the steps of an activity), these become an individual’s strengths. And, the interviews made clear, drawing on strengths has positive effects for both the individual and the employer. In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Buckingham and Clifton show how these discoveries can be applied within corporations.

The new book is only the beginning, however. The Gallup Organization also offers training courses for corporations and individuals, as well as an innovative Web-based survey offered to — and only to — purchasers of the book. Each copy of Now, Discover Your Strengths comes with a unique code number printed inside, which the purchaser can punch in at a Web site to take a free, online test that identifies the test-taker’s top five signature themes. (For more information, log onto www.strengthsfinder.com.)

The results are uniformly intriguing. They tend to reinforce what people already know about themselves, while revealing heretofore misperceived talents. For instance, I wasn’t surprised to find Analytical, Intellection, and Learner on my list. Being able to sort through masses of data, think about things, and learn new topics quickly are essential skills for a freelance writer. But Input, the theme of curiosity, was a revelation.

Unlike, say, astrological signs or Jung’s either-or types, strengths don’t have opposites. The Gallup strengths are described in terms that are broad enough to encompass a large number of people, but fine enough that you will be able to recognize when one applies to you and when it doesn’t. As an aside, there are 32 million possible combinations of the themes, enough to make it a virtual certainty that you will never meet anyone with your same combination.

Making It Work

So what do you do with the StrengthsFinder survey findings? First, you talk about them. Any discussion of strengths is likely to include a request to reveal your own, followed by a discussion of what this could mean in the context of the strengths of the person you are talking with.

But be careful. People can be finicky or even protective about their themes. When Buckingham said, after learning about my five, “Those are all mind candy,” I was taken aback. Mind candy? That means you think a lot about things, was Buckingham’s essential explanation.

So should I give up weightlifting and basketball to concentrate on chess and philosophy, two things for which I have little taste? Not at all, Professor Stone would argue. One of the issues of the strengths philosophy, in his view, is that it seems to recommend that you opt for all-out excellence in any activity for which you show a talent. Stone advises striving instead for a level at which you are comfortable, but challenged and engaged in your areas of strength.

Besides, turning a talent into a strength is not easy. Each one can require years of study, work, and behavior modification to become a strength. Maxing out all five of your signature themes could require a lifetime.

Business executives, of course, don’t have a lifetime. They have to show results, next year if not next quarter. That’s true even of an appealing and not horribly costly philosophy like strengths, which offers ways to get maximum performance out of employees for minimum pay. But it has some costs: The book costs $26, though the online survey that gives you your top five themes used to cost $150 per person, Buckingham says. For full-scale training to indoctrinate managers in how to work with employees based on strengths, Gallup charges $4,000 for four days. For custom training programs like those implemented at Toyota University, the sky is basically the limit.

The Payoff

The potential for strength-based strategy is also boundless, say fans. Michele Australie has put about 250 managers at The St. Paul Companies Inc. through strengths training in the past year. Like Toyota’s Morrison, Australie, manager of curriculum development for the Minnesota-based insurance company, says that interest and attendance have been amazingly strong. More importantly, however, she predicts that she’ll be seeing positive bottom-line results within the next year.

“I can’t measure it directly right now, but give me about a year and I think we’ll see higher levels of engagement, higher levels of job satisfaction, and higher productivity from employees because they’re doing the work that they do best,” says Australie. “In a nutshell, we’ll have the right people in the right jobs.”