Coming Out of the Shadows

A couple of years ago I was facilitating a personal development workshop when a participant said something that stopped me in my tracks. Let's call her Gloria.

Gloria said, "It feels like coming out of the shadows where my boss can see me as I really am." 

Wow. Coming out of the shadows where my boss can see me as I really am. I've never heard it described better.

The "It" she was describing was an exercise from the workshop. An exercise that helped her to describe her strengths in specific and concrete language.

How many of us spend most of our days at work in the shadows? How many of us feel our best talents are underutilized? How many of us feel disengaged at work because we don't have enough opportunities for our best selves to shine? Well, the data shows it's a lot of us. According to research by Gallup, only 17% of us have an opportunity to do what we do best at work every day.

Isn't that odd? I mean, when you really think about it, a big part of manager's job is to match the available work with the available talent. So why are we only successful 17% of the time?

One reason we fail is that we are missing a critical piece of information―knowledge of the employee's strengths. We can't assign work that matches an employee's strengths if we don't know their strengths. And more often than not, we don't know. And the reason we don't know is that the employee doesn't know their strengths either. Or they know but they don't have the words to describe them.

Imagine your supervisor has a superpower. A superpower to know exactly which activities energize you at work, and which ones drain you. And she uses that knowledge to assign work to you that best matches your strengths. She also sometimes assigns work that plays to your weaknesses. (This may be a world with superpowers, but it's not a utopia!) But she assigns work that plays to your weaknesses only when there is no other option, and never as a primary job responsibility.

Imagine working in that world. Imagine how it would feel to have a manager to coach you and challenge you precisely in those areas where you have the most natural ability, the most curiosity, the most internal drive. Imagine how it would feel to leave work after a day like that. And imagine how your team, your project, your customer would benefit from the commitment and passion and extra effort and creativity and innovation that comes from you playing to your strengths.

That's what coming out of the shadows feels like. And that's what we can gain from taking deliberate action to discover and develop our unique strengths. How? Oh geez. So many ways. Take a strengths assessment. Take a strengths class. Find a life coach. Read a book on strengths.

I don't know if Gloria shared her strength statement with her supervisor. I hope she did. But even if she didn't, Gloria's strengths are out of the shadows. She can never un-see her own strengths.