This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Dr. Karen Palasek, Director of Educational and Academic Programs for the John Locke Foundation.
I’m following a six-step program this summer. I wasn’t forced to do this — it’s voluntary. But I did think it might be therapeutic, and useful, to write a little about it now that it is coming to an end.
This program is similar to many “help” programs in its general themes — eliminating long-held myths, getting clear, freeing up strengths and stopping weaknesses, speaking up for one’s self, and finally, building strong habits of success.
Specifically, the program I have been attending is a teleconferencing series on developing and using your talents to turn them into strengths at work. The process transcends the workplace, though, and could potentially be used in lots of organizational settings.
The six steps, dubbed the Summer of Development, are the latest addition to discussion of the strengths-based approach to management and leadership. This approach was researched and developed by Marcus Buckingham, in conjunction with the Gallup organization (and several co-authors).
Why the particular interest in this discussion? For the past two years, each new class in the Locke Foundation’s E.A. Morris Fellowship for Emerging Leaders program has used the Gallup/Clifton StrengthsFinder survey to launch its Fellowship year. A legacy to N.C. business and community leader E.A. Morris, the Morris Fellowship for Emerging Leaders has supported young individuals who want to develop their knowledge, skills, and talents, and to promote excellence through a leadership initiative of their own design. Knowledge of one’s own strengths is clearly an ingredient in that recipe.
The recent “Summer of Development” program integrates well with Buckingham’s earlier works, “First Break All the Rules,” “Now Discover Your Strengths,” and “The One Thing You Need to Know … about Great Leading, Great Managing, and Sustained Individual Success.”
And the six-step series itself corresponds, chapter by chapter, to Buckingham’s fourth book in the “strengths” series, “Go Put Your Strengths to Work.”
The first step, “Busting the Myths,” challenges participants to discard longstanding beliefs that may be holding people back, such as the myth that one’s personality changes as she grows.
The second and third steps, “Get Clear” and “Free Your Strengths,” ask participants to identify and “free up” their strengths. The idea is that the more you operate in your areas of strength, the better the job you do, the happier you are, and the more effective you become as part of your team.
Step four, “Stop Your Weaknesses,” guides individuals away from playing to their weaknesses instead of their strengths. And steps five and six, “Speak Up” and “Build Strong Habits,” offer ways to communicate and (self-descriptively) to build long-term habits for effective and invigorated individuals and organizations. At the individual level, when people spend more time doing things they love, and drop the things they loathe, they perform better, stay longer, and are more efficient. According to the studies, activities (love them or hate them) trump the purpose of the task or the people one works with.
What may be most interesting to me about this latest “strengths” discussion is the emphasis on the emotional link to individual, managerial, and organizational success. Some authors, like Mark S. Walton of the Center for Leadership Communication, have made this the central theme in their prescription for success.
Ultimately, we want to know not only how we can get excellence in leadership, but also who is responsible for generating the various ingredients in any given excellence recipe. Using strengths is one important ingredient, but only one among others that include ethical behavior, organizational culture, and strategy. Ethics in leadership experts note that managers determine what happens, creating the group culture. And no matter what your strategy, they say, “culture eats strategy for breakfast every day.” So there are some possible deal breakers out there, potentially standing in the way of this excellence in leadership and performance that we actually want.
The good news may be this — there are actions that virtually everyone can take to play to their strengths. The Buckingham “Go” book proposes some actions that eventually will put people on the path of least resistance to excellence — the one that uses your strengths most of the time. It seems clear that this has applications in education, in government, for (literal) teams — as in sports, businesses, volunteer and other group work, and in individual performance of all kinds.
It’s a simple but powerful message. Whether in a leadership program or a production setting, dropping weaknesses and playing up strengths just seems to make sense.