Building a Strengths-based Workplace

From every little acorn an oak tree grows

When I was a kid, I loved seeking out any opportunity for what I’ll politely call an ’on-stage moment’. Looking back, I must have been pretty insufferable for my parents, because I was that one child that would sit quietly and surreptitiously listening in to my parents conversations with friends, nodding sagely in the corner as if I could somehow identify with their adult issues, and occasionally taking it upon myself to verbalize my own opinion – or worse, to offer up a suggestion to them. I was also that kid that raised his hand for every opportunity at school to perform – school plays, PTA meetings, the holidays – you name, I did it. If there had been a Glee club in our school, I would surely have been its most fervent member.

As I reflect back on how those opportunities made me feel, it was like I experienced a real surge of energy and butterflies in my stomach, nervous excitement, perhaps even giddiness. For me, there was an intoxicating thrill of exciting others – of trying to inspire, inform and to win them over. So it was probably no surprise to my Mom that 30 years later, I find myself in many ways, still doing the same thing as a coach and people leader (although I hope now with a greater sense of self-awareness and humility for learning myself!).

I couldn’t have known then that this energy – the bundle of impulses and feelings that felt exciting and fulfilling to do were important somatic signals within myself that at least for me, these kinds of experiences were stimulating areas of natural talent and interest; effectively, an emerging strength for me. As a kid, all I knew is that they just felt good. In fact, I don’t remember ever really being encouraged to think about or focus on my natural strengths at school at all. And for many of us, this isn’t untypical, because for the most part, we live in a world that is fascinated by weaknesses and take these strengths and talents pretty much for granted.

If it aint’ broke, don’t fix it

I mean, think about it – to understand your credit worthiness, we look at the amount of debt you carry; to understand what makes a happy customer, we go study the angry ones, and to fix an underperforming company, we largely focus on where the organization is failing. And for many of us in work, the performance conversation is really just a euphemism for focusing on where you’re failing, the so-called ‘areas for improvement’ as HR prefer you think of them. I get that if you’re not effective at something and it’s really derailing you at work, that you can’t ignore it. But the effort and difficulty to get better at something you don’t enjoy is usually really hard, and you don’t get much bang for your buck.

Which brings me back to 11 year-old Stu, raising his hand for those on-stage moments. It was many years before I understood that, for me, these were the kinds of activities that left me feeling strong. Because when you’re doing a task that is strengthening for you, you’ll likely get an emotional response just as I did: you may feel energized, excited and even in some cases, in flow. And when you’ve done that activity, you’re likely to feel fulfilled and eager to try it again, even if you’re tired. Don’t ignore these feelings, because they reveal something very unique and powerful about you: that this is where the world will see the very best of you. These are your own special and unique superpowers.

Data wins arguments

Sadly though, most of us report that we don’t really feel this way at work – studies by The Gallup organization have found that less that two in ten of us feel that we get to play to our strengths every day. Frankly, this is a depressingly low number and tells us something about the experience of the workplace for most Americans. Gallup also report that for 73% of professionals under the age of 30, there is a prevailing belief that the secret to success in life is fixing your weaknesses.

Developing a focus on applying what is one of the core pillars of the positive psychology movement, namely the engagement of people at work, can lead to dramatic benefits. Studies have found that those organizations that invest in enabling people to play to their strengths at work enjoy up 6X higher levels of engagement, 3X greater reported employee wellbeing and 1.47X greater earnings per share.

A similar picture emerged from the work I was part of during my years at Facebook, where a focus on strengths has been found to be a key driver of performance, both individually and within teams, as well as intent to stay, and overall fulfillment at work. And academic studies in the last few years are also positing that there is a direct link between reported levels of employee wellbeing and innovation on the one hand, and the impact of strengths on the other. In short – strengths are the secret sauce for engagement and performance, as well as innovation and reported employee wellbeing. So why the heck isn’t every organization embracing this insight?. Well, I suspect part of this is educational – the science of positive psychology and strengths is still a relatively new field. It may also be that the internal effort to reorient to what is more than just a set of work practices but is more importantly a philosophy is just too hard or too piecemeal to lead to impact for some.

And of course, let’s not discount the powerful insights of brain science that tell us just how powerful the pull towards safety is, which may inform an obsession with weaknesses and a fixing fixation. Psychologically this may be just too hard for some of us to let go of; something I’ve seen my share of in countless discussions I’ve led about the concept of strengths over the years.

The culture trumps the brand

These insights raise many important implications for how organizations find, manage and develop their talent. Because I believe that a greater focus on inculcating strengths throughout the employee life cycle is a foundational part of effecting positive change; it can also provide a powerful and naturally positive anchor to the culture, breathing new life into potentially stagnant processes.

At the organizational level, this demands a sea-change in thinking amongst those who are the keepers of the cultural keys – especially the HR function. When it comes to people processes, I would argue that what academics sometimes call ‘organizational congruence’, is really key – in shorthand this really just means an organization will function effectively when its strategies and processes all ‘talk nicely’ to each other in an integrated manner and self-reinforce towards an overarching goal. I would argue also that the employee experience is absolutely key here, as those ‘key moments’ in the employee lifecycle that actually touch the employee (and therefore help shape sentiment) need to reflect the overarching goal also – which in this case is leveraging the full impact of strengths on the culture as a means to drive high performance and innovation.

So for instance, the hiring interview, the candidate review, goal-setting conversations, the one-on-one, the team meeting, the performance conversation, the career conversation, the performance assessment, the promotional decision, the performance improvement plan – even the exit interview, are all key moments that need to integrate a proper balance between strengths and weaknesses. On that point note that I didn’t say that strengths should be the only focus in these moments. That doesn’t make sense, because of course you can’t ignore a weakness – particularly and most especially when it is derailing your overall performance. There are some things we have to get better at because it’s just a core expectation we have in our company or culture. These are foundational skills you can’t ignore.

I remember vividly one CTO I worked with would be very ill in the restroom before each company all-hands meeting, as he was terrified of public speaking. Blowing this off as something that is too hard or unsolvable doesn’t cut it in a role that demands at least some competence in speaking, presenting & interviewing. So we found him a presentation coach, and he worked hard at it for several months, going from (by his own admission) terrible to really bad!. But really bad meant he wasn’t throwing up in the restrooms. Before the all-hands, really bad meant he could deliver a major presentation or important interview without falling apart. Our strategy was not to make him excellent at something he’ll likely always find hard. Rather getting him average was enough and enabled this weakness to effectively disappear.

Remember: focusing on your weaknesses will only really get you to average and doesn’t get you as much bang for your buck as focusing on your strengths. So, in most situations the best you might expect to derive from fixing a weakness, is simply that it doesn’t derail you anymore: getting it to be seen and felt by you as a strength is a much more remote prospect.

My point is not this is “either or”, rather it’s “and” – we argue that bringing greater balance to these processes will help deepen the potential for alignment and impact at each key stage in the employee lifecycle.

Understanding your strengths

But for most of us, the journey to living a life that plays to our strengths, has to start with a curiosity to discover more about ourselves – the part which for many of us is largely unexplored territory. And a willingness to abandon some of our deepest held beliefs about what success in life is borne of. Self-assessment tools like The VIA and The Clifton Strengthsfinder provide us with a chance to start that personal discovery, and I would encourage you try them. But it also has to be about noticing how you feel about your typical tasks and activities at work – because this emotional resonance, this feeling, is where the greatest clues lie.

For we are human beings, not human doings. We process the world through an emotional filter, and as we have already discussed, how any particular task makes us feel is crucial – whether it’s the positive and fulfilling experience of a strength, or the draining and depleting experience of a weakness.

Strengths vs. competencies

At this point, it’s useful to draw a distinct between things you may good at, but which don’t also leave you feeling strong. Because they don’t always naturally occur in the same task or activity, it’s clear that you can be good at something for which you seemingly have no appetite. That’s not a strength – that’s a competence, and that’s just not the same thing. And if you don’t share your emotional reaction to tasks and activities at work, your manager won’t easily know – she or he may end up relying on the only data they have when giving you feedback or considering you for greater or more responsibility – namely, observable performance. Without the knowledge of whether you feel this thing you’re great at is a strength or not for you, you run the serious risk of being directed towards work that you may be good at, but which will disengage you, and over time lead you burn out with boredom, or worse – maybe even leave.

Also in this context, strengths don’t have to correlate to excellence either. Because performance is a measurable thing, it’s possible that even though a task or activity work is a strength for you, and indeed you may even be reasonably good at it, that someone else is still just better than you at it – as measured by an objective performance assessment process. Why these differences exist speak at one level to the importance of things like practice, modelling and learning, etc., but at another level, to the complex differences in aptitude and experience that is unique to each one of us.

So where do you start?

When we started the strengths development work at Facebook in early 2009, we couldn’t have known then how important a differentiator in performance and retention terms strengths were; that data didn’t come along until much later. But what it told us was that this dimension mattered and needed to be nurtured. The work Facebook has done since and is doing today is building on that valuable early work – and it shows. Facebook has consistently been ranked as one of the most desirable places in the world to work and has received numerous awards for its progressive work culture. More importantly, Facebook is an organization that exemplifies extreme performance.

This journey towards engaging people around their strengths and the experiences we’ve tackled in implementing a strengths-based culture, has taught us that six really important strategies stand out as key in the process:

1. Engage your senior leaders early

We began the work at Facebook with a conversation with the leaders of the company about the emerging importance of strengths, and they were curious and listened. We got them to analyze their own strengths, and they saw a natural fit with Facebook’s culture. And Mark, Sheryl and other senior leaders shared their own strengths analysis with the entire company – a crucial call to arms, and an implicit endorsement that this positive approach had validity. Since then, they have continued to throw their weight behind Facebook’s investment in this as an important concept, and several, including Sheryl Sandberg have spoken and written publicly about it too.

I’ve already referred to the leadership opportunity that this work presents to the HR function, but your organizations leaders are a key pivot of influence and you can’t ignore how hard or easy it will be for them to engage and internalize this work at a personal level, so they are prepared to drive the message as a performance imperative. You need more than just their tacit agreement – you need their involvement in the journey, because without this, your people will smell a rat. Spend time with them to share the data, connect them to their own strengths and emphasize the impactful nature of those on the organization, and encourage them to think of their own direct reports through the lens of their strengths.

2. Hire for strengths

In my career as an HR leader, many of the performance problems I helped resolve weren’t because we had miscalculated someone’s intelligence or character. No – it was largely a consequence of a bad hiring decision because we didn’t hire for strengths. Of all the key moments in the employee lifecycle – this is the one that matters the most. Get this right, and you set up the potentiality for incredible impact – screw it up, and it, and you may pay dearly for it.

Our traditional approach to hiring is grounded in a belief that where you went to school, what your GPA is, where you worked or even how much responsibility you have had are great indicators of future performance. And at one level, this is useful data that helps us get, at best, an approximation. But if you really want to drive greater potential in your hiring activity for accuracy, then asking strengths-based questions, and calibrating candidates on the usefulness of their strengths for the actual work you need doing is the most effective approach.

And candidates will reveal themselves to you if you ask the right question. For instance, “tell me about the best manager you ever had” will enable a candidate to share how they like to be treated and managed, and what they value: antecedents to the virtues and strengths of the individual.

Getting this right is key, if you’re going to avoid the likely scenario that within a year, one of two conversations may well be playing out: either the individual is asking how soon they can apply for other roles or change responsibilities (a possible indication of boredom or unhappiness) – or worse, the manager is asking HR for help in removing an underperforming employee – a mishire. Because, if your company is doing a good enough job of testing for skills and comprehension, then it’s unlikely you’ve hired someone who can’t, at a technical level, do the job. What is much more possible is that you’ve failed to account for that powerful emotional component that drives how a task or activity would make someone feel. Shame on us. Casting (and miscasting) is something we own, and it doesn’t just hurt the company – it hurts the individual who you never should have been hired into this role in the first place.

One final thought: your internal processes within the internal labor market of current employees, such as who gets promoted, who gets to lead a key new project, etc. should also reflect the same strengths-based rigor as your external hiring practice.

3. Enroll your line managers

Your managers are so close to the coal face that to ignore their role and potential for impact would be a disaster. At Facebook, we coined the phrase ‘the manager trumps the brand’ – precisely because we knew that the age-old adage that ‘people leave managers – not companies’ is quite true. For your people, their sense of community, of opportunity and the experience of the culture at large is directly within the purview of the manager to influence – and in a big way.

So it makes perfect sense that no-one should be a manager if they didn’t have a natural curiosity for managing people to start with. If you’re not strengthened by the job of leading others, then frankly, you’re in it for all the wrong reasons. So becoming a manager should never, ever be a promotion or worth an extra dollar over the same sized individual contributor job. You run the real risk of drawing in mercenaries and gold diggers – people that want to get on, gain power, or make more money more importantly than they want to manage people.

We see two key approaches that managers must deploy:

1. cultivating strengths and positive emotions in the people they manage to create a positively engaged team climate
2. actively hire, goal, assess, recognize, develop and promote to strengths

This speaks in turn, to the importance of selecting and training your managers right out of the gate, with reinforcement on the job. I’ve built a number of strengths-based manager training programs for clients, integrated with a personalized strengths-based coaching program to kick-start this effort. At Facebook, every single manager that graduated from the program, received six hours of coaching with a trained external strengths coach. Internal data showed this created an appreciable and significant difference in the impact of that manager and the team they led. Was it costly? – well, it’s an important opex investment for sure, although scale enables you to drive large cost efficiencies. It was also the core of our development strategy for managers, so the central plank in our funding plan. As an opportunity cost, I would contend that it’s a drop in the ocean. Starting modestly with a control group or a pilot might be the best way for some organizations to step into this level of investment carefully and thoughtfully.

4. Build a culture of care

This is an interesting one, because it doesn’t immediately seem to link to strengths – but in the broader field of measuring what factors engage people to perform at work, research has found that the extent to which you feel your manager cares about you as a person, and that you have strong meaningful friendships at work, are both key drivers of what motivates people to perform and can anchor them to the culture.

This isn’t a new concept – in the early industrial age, organizations like the Quakers brought progressive thinking and a caring sense of community to the factories and mills they managed. At the start of my professional career – when Human Resources was still known as ‘Personnel’, I worked with a company Welfare Officer, whose primary job was to exercise care for the health and wellbeing of employees in the manufacturing facility I worked in. Somewhere along the way, and in the pursuit of greater and greater return on every dollar, we lost sight of the value that an intimate, caring relationship between the employee and company could have on loyalty, trust, fulfillment and performance.

Focusing only on strengths without understanding and leveraging complimentary practices that reinforce employee engagement and help build a positive workplace may amount to leaving value on the table – worse it may be undermined by inappropriate or dysfunctional practices that work against the useful impact of strengths in the workplace.

Broader messaging about the importance and value of showing care to employees, manager training and feedback, complimentary practices such as workplace benefits and wellness programs, and recognition practices are all essential in the scope of building a culture of caring.

5. Review and align your people strategies

This is something I referred to earlier – the critical importance of congruence across people related policies and practices in the workplace. Without being sure that these processes align in such a fashion as to actually create a flywheel effect where the benefits to overall engagement are positively compounded by more than one approach or technique, the good work you’ve started may become undermined – and feel inauthentic to employees.

One possible starting point is to conduct an inventory of your people policies and an analysis of their effects on performance and employee sentiment. Further testing to see how specific policies interact together to affect performance and sentiment is also important. For instance, one example might be the way in which employee incentive schemes foster behaviors in managers that marginalize the importance of spending time with people, which in turn is incongruent with the organization’s messaging about career development or showing care.

Remember: Rome wasn’t built in a day – the size and complexity of your organization and people processes will determine how long such a task might take. And as a rule of thumb, you should always be very sure of your data, and take time to develop through testing and prototyping before you make changes to people practices – particularly the most leveraged ones when it comes to performance.

6. Be your authentic self, because everyone else is taken

Like the showing care dimension, this is a powerful enabling dimension that creates a strong positive cultural effect. Namely, your willingness to encourage and foster a culture where employees feel they can be their authentic selves at work. This is a huge differentiator for employees who very often feel constrained by the pressure to fit in and even to play out a work persona that isn’t them. The only thing you can be sure of in situations like this, is that energy the individual could be spending on performance is getting spent on passing, fitting in and playing the game.

We now beginning to understand how intrinsic a culture of inclusion is to company performance and employee brand perception. Building this takes time and requires good role-modeling and positive reinforcement. Share example with your managers of how to do this well and celebrate successes.

Conclusions

Creating a performance strategy for your workplace built around people’s strengths rather than their weaknesses sounds so compelling and can yield enormous side benefits such as happier more engaged people. But it‘s important to know that it also represents an important philosophical viewpoint, and a major culture-change effort if your current practices are implicitly (or explicitly) don’t emphasize or value strengths. And if you’re founders or senior leaders aren’t enthusiastically behind this effort, then proceed with great care. There’s tons of great data out there that supports these insights, but ultimately, it needs a champion and a receptive culture. Without that, you might do more harm than good trying to emphasize something that people don’t experience on the ground. But if you get it right, your people have the potential to grown and flourish in wonderful and exciting ways.

Stuart Crabb

Further Reading & Related Tools:

1. 'First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest managers Do Differently' by Marcus Buckingham & Jim Harter, Gallup press, May 2016.
2. 'Lean In: Women, Work & the Will to lead' by Sheryl Sandberg, Knopf Publishing, March 2013.
3. 'Standout 2.0: Assess Your Strengths, Find Your EdgeWin at Work' by Marcus Buckingham: HBR Press, July 2015.
4. Tool: The Clifton Strengthsfinder, by The Gallup Organization. https://gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx.
5. Tool: 'The Values in Action' (VIA24) free strengths assessment, University of Pennsylvania, https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu
6. Reference: 'The State of The American Manager' The Gallup Organization, 2017.