A NEWSLETTER FROM HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING

ARTICLE REPRINT NO. U0802C

Using Your Strengths to Become Stronger by Lauren Keller Johnson

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Using Your Strengths to Become Stronger Performance expert Marcus Buckingham explains how to identify your core strengths and turn them into potent value drivers—for yourself and your organization. by Lauren Keller Johnson

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mproving performance is about overcoming weaknesses, right? Not according to Marcus THIS ARTICLE DETAILS: Buckingham, author of Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance ■ The defining characteristics of a strength (Free Press, 2007). He says that top performers excel not by focusing on their weaknesses but by focusing on their ■ How to identify your strengths strengths: identifying them, putting them at the center of their work, and building on them. ■ Ways to put your strengths to work But what are strengths, exactly? They’re much more than simply what you do well, says Buckingham, a former researcher at The Gallup Institute (Washington, D.C.) activity is a strength for you. (For more on determining who now heads The Marcus Buckingham Company, if an activity is a strength, see the sidebar “The ‘SIGN’ of based in Beverly Hills, Calif., which provides strengths- a Strength.”) based consulting, training, and e-learning. “The notion Buckingham suggests this exercise: Take a blank pad that your strengths are what you’re good at is incomplete,” of paper and draw a line down the middle of the first few he explains. “Activities that you happen to perform well pages. At the top of the left-hand column on each, write can actually deplete you if you don’t also enjoy them. That “I Loved It.” At the top of the right-hand column, write “I makes them weaknesses for you.” Loathed It.” Every day for a week, assign each activity you Your strengths are the work activities that consistently perform in your job to one column or the other. make you feel productive, energized, and engaged. Teams comprising people who spend most of their time using Identify the three activities you would their strengths at work deliver higher performance than those who do not but are engaged in the same kind of like to spend most, if not all, of your time work, according to a Gallup survey of high-performing doing during a typical week. teams cited by Buckingham. Record all your activities and the feelings they trigger in To generate the most business value from your you as they happen, not at the end of the day or week. Also, strengths, you need to: list activities and your emotions in specific terms—for n Identify them example, “I felt excited when I analyzed the sales numbers n Find ways to put them at the center of your work for the lighting division,” “I was consumed by a feeling of dread when I sat down to write the article on new strategy IDENTIFY YOUR STRENGTHS for the company newsletter,” and “I was really pumped When it comes to identifying your strengths, Buckingham up after I led the meeting on the XS3000 marketing says, “Only you can do it. You’re the expert on which campaign.” Avoid vague language such as “I liked meeting activities enliven you and deplete you. You don’t need the new marketing team,” “I enjoyed the new challenges 360-degree feedback or input from your boss.” that came my way this week,” or “I felt good when I was Determining your strengths requires taking note of learning new things.” Also, make sure you list activities how you feel before, during, and after carrying out each that you performed, rather than instances when you were activity during your workday. If you find yourself looking the recipient of others’ actions. (For example, you wouldn’t forward to a particular activity before you begin tackling write down something like, “I felt energized when the CFO it, you’re able to concentrate on it while performing it, and praised my work during a meeting.”) you feel fulfilled and excited afterward, chances are that What should you do if you have many more activities

Copyright © 2008 by Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Getting Stronger

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THE “SIGN” OF A STRENGTH To double-check that an activity is a strength for you, run the SIGN test: Success: Do you feel successful and effective as you perform the activity?

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Instincts: Do you feel effortlessly drawn to the activity?

needs” draws on this strength and would enable her to “move the needle” beyond 20%. 3. Educate: Identify skills and techniques that could help you further leverage the strength. In Heidi’s case, she decided to see if there were some internal best practices she could learn from and to ask the brand directors at some of Hampton Inn’s sister brands how they approach improving hotel performance.

4. Expand: Consider how you might share your best practices with others regarding this strength and expand n Needs: Does the activity leave you feeling fulfilled? your role to make better use of it. For example, Heidi decided to meet with another brand director the following week to discuss ideas for measuring hotels’ performance listed in your “I Loathed It” list than in your “I Loved It” results. And she resolved to talk with her manager about list? “That doesn’t necessarily mean you should leave your how her job might be reconfigured so that she could focus job and start over,” says Buckingham. Nor does it mean on helping hotel managers achieve superior performance you ought to completely overhaul your role. As discussed below, making incremental changes can help you improve HELPING EMPLOYEES LEVERAGE THEIR the balance between your two lists. STRENGTHS Once you’ve compiled your “Loved It/Loathed It” lists, look at your “Loved It” list. Identify the three activities that evoke the strongest positive emotional reactions in Listen to them and trust their judgment you. These are the activities you’d like to spend most, if Your job is not to judge whether an employee is right or not all, of your time doing during a typical week. They are wrong when he identifies his strengths and weaknesses. He your most important strengths. knows what energizes and engages him and what drains and Growth: When you perform the activity, do you have the sense that your mind is advancing? n

depletes him far better than you do.

FIND WAYS TO PUT YOUR STRENGTHS AT THE CENTER OF YOUR WORK

Now that you’ve identified your three key strengths, the next step is making adjustments in your role to spend more time using them. For each strength, Buckingham recommends taking this four-step FREE approach: 1. Focus: Identify how you currently use this strength in your job—and how often. For example, in Go Put Your Strengths to Work, Buckingham introduces a Hampton Inn brand director named Heidi, who had identified one of her key strengths as “helping a hotel manager take a good hotel and make it #1.” In this step of the FREE strategy, Heidi determined that she uses this strength at work when she teaches a general-manager leadership class and when she plans and conducts preopening and postopening consultations. And she calculated that she uses this strength roughly 20% of the time. 2. Release: Consider what situations you could put yourself into and what actions you could take to use this strength more. For instance, Heidi realized that “having a conference call with the ownership group to find out their 4

Adjust their jobs whenever possible Sometimes you need an employee to devote a lot of her time performing a function that doesn’t play to her strengths. But let her know that you’re willing to consider other ways that function could be accomplished in the future; otherwise, she’ll feel stuck—and it’s unlikely you’ll be satisfied for very long with her performance.

Help make less desirable tasks less onerous There will always be some tasks that an employee doesn’t like doing but yet are necessary adjuncts to his main work— for instance, filling out call reports for a salesperson. Help him shift his approach to the task or his perspective on it so that it seems less burdensome. Can he do it differently to make it less draining? Can he partner with a colleague to minimize the time he spends on it? Can he frame the task in a way that allows him to dispatch it more dispassionately? Source: Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2007).

HARVARD MANAGEMENT UPDATE | FEBRUARY 2008

Getting Stronger

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for their properties. Your goal in making incremental changes is to gradually push your job toward your strengths and away from as many of your weaknesses as possible. “You’re rewriting your job description—right under your boss’s nose,” says Buckingham. “And in all likelihood, your boss wants you to do this. It’s called taking responsibility for your own development.” What do you do about activities that deplete you yet are critical to your job? Buckingham suggests these strategies: Find someone who is strengthened by the very activity that weakens you, and see if he would be interested in taking it on. n

n Keep offering up one of your strengths; it may eventually make your weaknesses irrelevant. Buckingham cites an AT&T executive who loved starting up new projects and systems but who found maintaining an established project deathly dull. She kept asking what new projects and challenges were in the pipeline and volunteering for them. After a while, she became so good at ferreting out and volunteering for innovative projects that her supervisor agreed to reconfigure her career as a series of 18-month assignments. Today, says Buckingham, she’s known as the Startup Queen.

HARVARD MANAGEMENT UPDATE | FEBRUARY 2008

Reframe the weakening activity as a vehicle for leveraging a strength. For example, if you hate designbrief meetings but love helping clients, practice thinking of meetings as means that enable you to better serve clients. “This technique won’t turn a weakening activity into a strength,” Buckingham acknowledges, “but it can help you feel less drained by it.” n

Accept that no job is perfect. Every role will contain at least a small percentage of activities that weaken you but that you can’t avoid—no matter how diligently you reshape your responsibilities in favor of your strengths. The goal is to keep the weaknesses to an absolute minimum. n

Turning your strengths into powerful performance drivers takes time, thought, and the courage to reshape your role as needed. But the investment is well worth it. When you spend most of your time doing activities that tap into your deepest passions, you benefit yourself and your organization. u Lauren Keller Johnson is a Massachusetts-based business writer. She can be reached at [email protected]. Reprint # U0802C: To order a reprint of this article, call 800-668-6705 or 617-783-7474.

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