Weaknesses? Forget 'em
Guardian Work
Published on Saturday October 21, 2006
Arts and Books | Business | Careers | Features
Play to your strengths, leadership guru Marcus Buckingham tells Chris Alden
On Thursday, bestselling business author Buckingham returns from the US to the UK to deliver the keynote speech at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development conference, on the subject of “what great managers do”. Managers, he suggests, should get team members to build on their strengths – instead of always trying to remedy their weaknesses.
Why are you so interested in productivity at work?
My degree was in social psychology, and at the time that meant studying deviant behaviour, neurosis and psychosis. I was always interested in why people do what they do, but I wasn’t interested in people who were sick. Psychology was always about what’s wrong with people.
I came across a man by the name of Donald Clifton, who at the time was a professor of psychology at Nebraska. He was also chairman of Gallup. Gallup was known for its polls, but also for measuring things that are hard to measure – and one of the things that’s hard to measure is people’s talents. So I joined Gallup after university, trying to study what was right with people.
So, examining “strength” versus “weakness”?
That’s right. The conventional wisdom is that you learn from your mistakes.
But the “strength” movement’s approach would be: no, you learn a lot about mistakes from mistakes. Studying a person’s weakness will tell you nothing about their strengths.
That’s why I wrote Now, Discover Your Strengths. There’s a personality test in it measuring 34 themes of talent; when you’re done with it, it spits out your top five. We created the test because there’s no language to describe what’s right with you.
Do you find there is more of a market for this kind of analysis in the States?
There has certainly been a huge market for the book in the States, to my great surprise – right now it’s selling 7,500 copies a week, six years after it came out. It was number two in the New York Times business list last week, and I’m not doing anything- apart from my mother, who’s desperately buying as many copies as she can. But in the UK, it’s selling well, too.
In the book, we quote a big study of different companies. The data came back clear – those teams where people say they use their strengths a lot are more productive than those who say they don’t get to use their strengths so much.
But what if you were to ask the UK workforce: “Which do you think will help you be most effective at work -building on your strengths or fixing your weaknesses?” Back in 2000, 38% of people said their strengths, while 62% said their weaknesses. Six years on, 34% now say strengths, and 66% say weaknesses. We live in a weakness-obsessed culture.
But if you then say to people: “What would you describe as your ideal job?”, 58% of people say: “Pretty much what I’m doing now, either slightly more focused or with slightly more responsibility.” Most of us are in the right zone, yet we’re not using our strengths at work. We have the freedom to modify our job, but most of us don’t, and then we whine about it.
Surely, of all the levers that you can pull to get productivity out of people, the master lever must be “how do I arrange my organisation so I can get more people using their strengths?”
What practical steps can managers take to make that happen?
The first one would be: get your mindset right. You’re not going to change people; they’re not going to grow most in the areas of weakness; and the essence of teamwork is not putting aside your strengths. The essence of teamwork is getting complementary strengths together into an organised whole.
Do you take lessons from this yourself, as an individual?
Confucius said: “Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work again.” When I hear that, I just want to slap him. No one has a job they love – no one has a job that has one activity in it and they love that one.
One of the smart things to do is to sort out which activities invigorate you, and which ones bore you or deplete you. And you have to drill down. For example, I do a fair amount of presentations. I’ve discovered I love presenting to a large group of people about a subject I know a lot about. But I don’t love presenting. If you want to really freak me out, have me stand up and do an after-dinner speech.
Here’s something you can do to challenge your workers. Say: “Take a notepad around with you, and what I want you to do, Mr Employee, is to put a line down the middle of the pad, and every time you find yourself doing something that invigorates you, scribble that down. And on the flipside, whenever you find yourself going “oh crap”, scribble that down, too. And then come back and sit down with me. We won’t fix things overnight, but we’ll talk about how can we deliberately inch things, tilt the seesaw.”
But one of the reasons why the survey data isn’t changing much is that most managers don’t pay attention to individuals. So most individuals are on their own.
So, what’s your next book going to be about?
It’s going to be called Go Put Your Strengths to Work. It’s a prosaic title, but we don’t put our strengths to work. So, faced with a world that doesn’t really care at all about you and your strengths, stop whining – and start figuring out how to put a discipline in your life that gets you to do more of what you want to do.
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