Transformation Framework PartV: Organization & Individual Level - Discovering Strengths

Gallup Organization’s StrenghtsFinder survey offers employees, managers, organizations, and an enterprise the ability to specify both their and their employee’s strengths. Like the Q12 model shows the twelve drivers describing the best managers, StrengthsFinder locates the strengths that underpin an individual’s high performance in particular functions and roles.[1] Three main factors are involved with a strength: the ability to do it consistently, to a productive end, and derive intrinsic satisfaction from doing it.[2] As previously mentioned, StrengthsFinder’s lexicon includes 34 strengths in three areas: striving, thinking, and relating. For a description of each strength the reader should refer to Buckingham and Clifton’s Now, Discover your Strength’s.?To determine an individual’s strengths, take the corresponding online survey at strengthsfinder.com.

There are three main benefits to leveraging StrengthsFinder. First, it distinguishes natural talent from things one can learn.[3] Second, it identifies dominant strengths based on statistically significant performance-based research.[4] Third, and perhaps most important, it provides a common lexicon supporting our desire to hire, place, and manage based on talent. As the IC leverages a strengths-based approach, we should also realize the three main obstacles to a strengths-based approach and realize there are three main ways to learn as an adult. The three ways to learn are to strengthen existing synapses, lose extraneous synapses, or create new connections. Strengthening existing synapses can be done by using the strengths based interviewing, placement, and training methods previously discussed. Creating new connections is another means of learning. However, it is easily the most difficult and is not recommended. Alternatively, finding areas where you might lose and gain the right connections, which is the most effective method, can be revealed by coincident yearning, satisfaction, and productiveness. To do this an employee and their manager can monitor spontaneous top of mind reactions to the situations they encounter.[5] Similarly, yearnings often reveal the purpose of talent, particularly when felt in every day work or personal life.[6] One example of this is the yearning and rapid learning is that exhibited by the painter Matisse. Though a law clerk well into his thirties Mattise discovered an artistic urge and satisfaction. Following and developing this prompting yielded a remarkably productive string of paintings, continuing the remainder of his career.[7]

???????????Obstacles to a strengths-based approach include individual reluctance, dominance of a weakness, and fear. First, one’s own reluctance can slow the emergence of a strength and talent. For example, different cultures are more open to the positive psychological approach inherent to Q12 and StrenghtsFinder.[8] While forty one percent of U.S. individuals respond positively to such an approach, only twenty four percent in Japan and China show the same attitude.[9] On a personal level, a weakness can also trump a strength if it is manifestly out of balance given the social norms within which we live.[10] For example, an exceptional Relater who is a poor public speaker could enroll in a speaking class. However, a person who is a Communicator could cancel out such potential with a similarly poor display of Empathy.[11] Third, failure and the fear of it can derail strengths.[12] Fear of trusting in an identified strength is anyways a real consideration.[13] Our pervading social bias against conspicuous displays of ego and periodic?sense of schadenfreude others failings indicates a culture somewhat distrustful of a strengths-based approach. Here Carl Jung’s words are instructive: “Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flying in the face of life.”[14] That is, fear can lead us to a reluctance to believe that our individual talents are important enough, quantifiable enough, and reliable enough, to really yield distinctive satisfaction and performance.[15]

This is the singular beauty and elegance of a Gallup’s findings and underlying research. Similar to the altruism engendered by Collin’s L5L visionary CEOs, it suggests satisfaction and performance are not merely possible. Rather, they are mutually supporting, inseparable, and measurable. Despite the obstacles and the somewhat counterintuitive nature of Gallup’s Q12 and StrenghtsFinder models, they provide the reliability, specificity, and instruments to improve employee engagement, management, and organizational and enterprise performance in the IC.

[1] Strengths, 3-4.

[2] Strengths, 26.

[3] Strengths, 31.

[4] Strengths, 31.

[5] Strengths, 67.

[6] Strengths, 69.

[7] Strengths, 69.

[8] Strengths, 121.

[9] Strengths, 121.

[10] Strengths, 122.

[11] Strengths, 123.

[12] Strengths, 124.

[13] Strengths, 128.

[14] Strengths, 127.

[15] Strengths, 129.