.jpg)
We are fortunate to have a very talented team at Gibson. Seeing them put their various strengths to work in the name of our #1 core value, Clients Come First, is one of my greatest joys. I feel blessed to work with a group of folks so devoted to excellence.
I’ve spent some time recently thinking about what drives excellence. Is there a process to become even better at utilizing the strengths of our people?
I work with a gifted CEO advisor named Larry Linne. One of the things he is helping me with is identifying my personal strengths along with challenging me to devote more time and attention to leveraging these strengths. His point is that I can contribute at even a higher level this way.
My partners tell me that I’m pretty good at developing and articulating vision and strategy and then persuading people to buy in to that shared vision. I like big ideas and the process of speaking, writing and generally influencing people in pursuit of those ideas. Larry is challenging me to spend more time on the things I am uniquely good at instead of the countless administrative concerns that demand part of my time and attention.
Larry’s message ties directly into something my colleague Jerry Scott has talked to me about. He often speaks of a pair of books – ‘First Break All The Rules’ and ‘Now, Discover Your Strengths’ – co-authored by Marcus Buckingham and based on research by the Gallup Organization. Jerry told me, “These books challenged the conventional wisdom of developing and improving employee performance through a focus on improving on their weaknesses. The vastly better approach is to identify their strengths and to find a way to capitalize on those!”
In essence, everyone’s greatest room for growth is in the area of their greatest strengths. “Exactly,” said Jerry. “They define a strength as consistent near perfect performance in an activity. You must also derive some measure of intrinsic satisfaction from the activity. The ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully.”
I know when I am using my greatest strengths. I know it by what I accomplish and by how it feels. Operating from strength just seems to flow. It’s natural, easy, and has an immediate and instinctive feedback of pure satisfaction and often joy. “’Flawless and sublime’ is a phase used in the books,” added Jerry. “We all know people with pronounced strengths and often talk about them having ‘real’ creativity or ‘real’ leadership qualities. You just know it when you see it!”
The authors encourage us to learn how to distinguish natural talents from things we can learn.
- Talents are described as naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior.
- Knowledge consists of the facts and lessons learned.
- Skills are the steps of an activity.
So the key to building a strength is to identify your dominant talents and refine them with knowledge and skills.
Larry’s coaching in this area also extends to our organization. He encourages us to have our team members spend 70-80% of their time doing what they do best. It’s pretty simple. What you do best gives you energy instead of draining your energy. And it’s what people are most interested in and passionate about.
It’s all part of getting the right person on the bus and in the right seat. We focus our teams on having all the members stay within their unique abilities (Jerry calls this “factory installed equipment”) 70% of the time. Obviously, to actually make this happen you have to identify what people are good at or said another way, their greatest strengths.
As an example, a couple of years ago we studied our core commercial insurance service role. After talking with and evaluating all our team members, along with profile testing, we split the work group in to two roles. Going forward Client Managers would be people who loved external interaction with clients, salespeople, and underwriters. They would focus on outward facing activities. Account Managers would be people who loved systems, detail, and organization. They would focus on internal administration. We believed this change would put our people in a position to do more of what they enjoy most. We would leverage their strengths to the greatest degree possible. Our team has already experienced a 10% boost in productivity while developing even greater expertise in their specific areas
This presents a challenge for leaders in growing organizations. The books describe the need to understand and work with each direct report as an individual or an “exception”. Every employee is unique and their talents and strengths must be uncovered and understood in order to be nurtured. But it’s all worth it when you uncover an unexpected and potentially game changing talent in one of your people!
What’s the Risk?
A few years ago we went through a corporate rebrand and introduced the tagline ‘Strength Against Risk’. It’s the perfect description of what we deliver to our clients every day. Additionally, it’s perfect for describing what we owe ourselves.
Have you identified your people’s greatest strengths and followed an intentional process to develop and leverage those strengths? If not you face a serious risk of losing your best and brightest and institutionalizing a culture of average performance. It’s time to break the old rules about constantly working on your weaknesses and instead start playing to your strengths!
