Topic 5.2: Working with and building strengths

In Module 1, you explored your own strengths and in Module 2, you were asked to think about some of the strengths you see in your team members. The strengths-based approach to both self-development and to developing others is increasingly recognised as not only more positive and preferable to a problem / weakness focused approach, but also more effective.

And it’s not even a new idea. The late Peter Drucker (2017, p12) noted that: “It takes far more energy and work to improve from in-competence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence”^[1]. It’s just that too often our “negativity bias” is so strong and instinctive that we can too easily overlook or neglect the positives and strengths in ourselves and others. And yet, there remains a tempting tendency to find out what’s wrong and fix it while ignoring what’s working well and simply take it for granted.

This is something that often arises in “performance appraisals”. In an issue of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (2016)^[2] devoted to performance appraisal processes, Marianne van Woerkom & Maaike Bruijn argue that excellent performance comes from focusing on uniqueness rather than conformity:  “one of the reasons why performance appraisal is unable to get the most out of employees is the way in which employees are evaluated against a uniform set of criteria, leading to a focus on deficits and little attention for unique individual qualities and strengths. By comparing the performance of an employee with a set of predetermined criteria, and by expecting the employee to perform well across all these criteria, the performance appraisal tends to focus on those areas where employees perform below the norm, irrespective of how excellently they may perform in other areas. For many employees, this leads to the frustrating experience that there is more attention for their weaknesses than for the areas in which they excel. By focusing on employee strengths and on how to make optimal use of those strengths, and by allowing for diversity in the way that employees execute their jobs, the performance review can be replaced by a dialogue about development that may truly stimulate the motivation for performance improvement“.

Marcus Buckingham, Donald Clifton and Tom Rath are among the authors and researchers associated with strengths-based development, and it has been incorporated into the work of the Gallup Organisation -the most renowned organisation for exploration of Employee Engagement. (You can revisit some of the strengths development material in Module 1 if you want to refresh your recall of this material.)

So, as we turn our attention to the two key areas that managers use in developing others – coaching and performance conversations – you’ll see that we encourage and assume a positive, strengths-based, solution-focused orientation.

This does not mean we should not be prepared to confidently respond to challenges in managing others from time to time. But it does remind us that if we are going to engage effectively with others we are going to do ourselves, them, our ongoing relationship, and the desired outcome a much greater service if we begin with a positive, proactive, supportive orientation than with a negative, reactive, critical one. If you’re not sure about that, ask what tends to work best for you in terms of your performance development.