Now, Discover Your Strengths

Strong Insights, Weak Management Tool

"Casting a critical eye on our weaknesses . . . will only help us prevent failure. It will not help us reach excellence," they write in their thought-provoking book, the follow-up to the outstanding and best-selling Gallup work, FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES (Simon & Schuster, 1999).

Most organizations fail to achieve excellence, the authors contend, because they also fall into the "overcome your weaknesses" trap. Companies do a poor job of tapping the potential already present on their payroll because they try to make employees into something they're not-at the expense of exploiting individuals' innate talents.

Furthermore, Gallup researchers conclude that most of the energy, time, and money that organizations place on trying to hire, train, and develop well-rounded employees is wasted. "When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well-rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp," the authors quip.

Internet Connection. To actually discover your strengths, you cannot rely on the book's pages. You must go online to complete an innovative web-based assessment that identifies your top five individual talent-strengths (and provides you with a brief custom report that you can print or email to someone, like your spouse or boss).

Oddly, if you like the assessment, you cannot purchase additional assessments for your staff, spouse, kids, or anyone else. For them to access the assessment, they must each buy another book.

Other Weaknesses. The book encourages managers to review and become familiar with their direct reports' strength analyses (so as to manage to each individual uniquely). But the authors provide neither a mechanism nor a process to do this.

You are told to consult the book for suggestions on managing your employees who each embody unique mixes of some 34 different strengths. Dauntingly, the authors tell us there are "over thirty-three million possible combinations of the top five strengths." A well-intending manager apparently has a lot of customizing to do. The book provides scant help for that.

Putting the Strengths concept to work more broadly in the organization is even more complex and overwhelming. Selecting and promoting people, as suggested in the book's "Practical Guide," requires profiling at least 100 employees who are all working in the same job (50 top achievers and 50 clunkers). Then you build a database of statistically significant trait patterns. Then you buy every candidate a book, give them a web connection... Then you try to do pattern matching...

The so-called Practical Guide quickly appears all but practical to all but the largest operations.

Target: HR Folk. The authors also take a swing at their firm's consulting customers-HR departments. They assail broad competency training efforts and write: "Many human resources departments have an inferiority complex. With the best of intentions they do everything they can to highlight the importance of people, but when sitting around the boardroom table, they suspect that they don't get the same respect as finance, marketing, or operations. In many instances they are right, but, unfortunately, in many instances they don't deserve to. Why? Because they don't have any data."

Unfortunately, this book does NOT provide them with meaningful solutions for closing that gap (other than, presumably, hiring Gallup consultants for large scale projects).

My Motivation. Gallup's StrengthFinder report tells me that my top personal strengths include the Maximizer tendency-which compels me to "transform something strong into something superb." And the Command strength--characterized as feeling "compelled to present the facts or the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be."

The truth is this: One can't help but think that the well-constructed concept advanced in this enlightening and occasionally entertaining book might have gone from strong to superb. But instead, it seems to have been rushed to market to quickly capitalize on the success of FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES. And that's too bad. Because this worthwhile book, as is true of many of the people it intends to help, has considerable strengths undermined by what are otherwise correctable weaknesses.

Pretty Good Psych -- Some Insights on People Management

A key to this book is an internet-based test that allows an individual to obtain a measurement of their top five strengths. To take this test, you log onto a specific website and type in the unique password that is printed in thte inside cover of the book. (This means you only take the test once -- your friends will need to buy the book to take the test!). The test is based on work that the Gallup Organization has done and has (according to the book) been been administered to 2 million people in a large number of different type of organizations.

Once on the site, you answer 180 questions in which you are asked to make a two-way choice as to what word better describes you, which action you would rather take, and so forth. It takes about 20-30 minutes in total to get through these, but once you do, a report is generated on screen (along with an with the same information) that lists your top five strengths and provides a description of what they are. Many of the strengths involve how you deal with people, how you process information, and how you see yourself in the world.

The book gives short descriptions of each strength and gives short (one-paragraph)write-ups from people who have the particular strength describing themselves. The book is meant to be a management tool, in that it talks about how to manage people with each of the strength in the book and make best use of these strengths.

I feel that the book is a better popular psychology book rather than a management book. Although the descriptions of strength seemed fairly clear, the discussion could have been better when it described how to manage people. It tended to be a list of "do this" without much discussion of why a manager might want to encourage an employee to do certain things or take on certain types of assignments. What the book really lacked was a description of the downside that certain strengths might bring (e.g., a person who is deliberative may seem to take a long time to do something). A better discussion of what the strengths really mean would have been helpful.

The book is well-written and taking the test is fun. Learning about one own attributes as measured by the test is helpful, both in personal and business life. It will make you think about yourself in a constructive and stimulating way. This in itself makes the book worth buying.

The book provides some good insight into how to manage individual types of people and help them develop on the job. I found it a bit weak on management from the standpoint of what an organization should do, in that it just seemed too general beyond saying figure out what everybody can do well and encourage them to do it. It may be, however, that some of this material is discussed in the book's (earlier) companion book ("First, Break All the Rules").

Let Well-Established, Good Habits Take You Forward!

The concept of building companies around "desirable" pyschological profiles has been in application for some time. The Walt Disney organization uses this approach to locate people who will enjoy working in their company, and to match the person to the task they will be most focused on. More and more companies are experimenting with this approach. The evidence is that it works.

So the first argument simply takes that experience one step further by formalizing it a bit. The book has many persuasive examples of how people usually do not have jobs that use their best talents. This provides another perspective on the Peter Principle. So far so good.

Next, 34 patterns of mental habits are described based on millions of interviews over 25 years. These include achiever, activator, adaptability, analytical, arranger, belief, command, communication, competition, connectedness, context, deliberative, developer, discipline, empathy, fairness, focus, futuristic, harmony, ideation, inclusiveness, individualization, input, intellection, learner, maximizer, positivity, relator, responsibility, restorative, self-assurance, significance, strategic, and woo. You need to see the descriptions to understand what these patterns reflect.

The argument is that these labels capture patterns of thinking habits that condition behavior in any situation. I find it difficult to relate to all of the patterns because there are so many. Also, without knowing what patterns work well in a particular job, I wasn't sure how relevant they are. Connection of patterns to success needs to be shown as cause and effect in a given company before this will be totally useful.

Small companies may not be able to use this tool very well because they will never have enough people doing the same task to figure out which profile is best. Everyone working in that role may have a very inappropriate profile. You will just be picking the best of a poorly-fitting lot if you select around one of them.

Then, I took the personality test on-line. There were no surprises there for me in my top 5 patterns. I also suspect that there would be no surprises for you in putting me into these categories. You would probably have pegged me as an achiever, learner, relator, focus, input person from the fact that I read so many nonfiction books, write so many book reviews, and keep books and notes everywhere (just in case I might need them again). On the relator front, if you had noticed who I like to work with and how I work with them, you would have spotted me in a few days.

However, my actual job competence is a lot different from this. Most clients tell me that they find me most helpful to them when exposing them to new perspectives on their work that allow them to make faster progress. So, I was left wondering if the tool is strong enough to do the task of making people most effective in their work without more help. Someone might develop or be born with a great talent that has little to do with the psychological profile of how she or he likes to spend their time.

To state the opposite proposition to the ones in the book, complexity science would suggest that it is a mistake to overly organize the workplace in any way. You should have as much diversity as possible. When we leave lots of room for open space and time, people will self-organize outstanding solutions. Having people focused on tasks they love might make them less aware of what else needs to be done. Behavioral scientists would argue that learning continues throughout life, and that major new habits can be formed at any time. Old dogs can learn new tricks. Why cannot new psychological mindsets be learned as well. I suspect that they can. These kinds of counter-observations were not addressed in the book, and it would have been helpful to me if they had been.

So while I was impressed by the concept that the "great organization must not only accommodate the fact each is different; it must capitalize on these differences," I wasn't sure that the authors have the best method to get there yet.

I do recommend that you read the book and consider its messages. I suspect that its application will work best in focusing people on tasks that require great persistence and consistency in order to be effective. I am less clear on how well it will work to help people accomplish more in creative tasks. Time will tell.

I suggest that you take the test and discuss your results with someone else who has also taken the test. Ask each other what insights you got from your own results and from hearing the other person's results. That discussion should start to help you imagine ways to use these insights more effectively.

May you always "derive intrinsic satisfaction" from the activities you do!