A passage from The Happy Manifesto by Henry Stewart
Here’s a challenge. Let us say that you have two salespeople but you can only afford to send one on a course. Both have been with you for ten years. One brings in £200,000 a year and the other brings in just £50,000. If the aim is to bring the maximum benefit to the company, who do you send on the course?
Your first impulse may have been to send the person selling just £50,000. They clearly need help and development. But, if you want the most return on your investment in training, you are likely to get a far bigger increase in sales from the one already performing well.
The concept behind this comes from Marcus Buckingham and his StrengthsFinder analysis with Gallup. In many of their surveys they ask the question, ‘At work today, did you get to do what you do best?’ They have asked this of over a million people. Only around 20% say yes1.
It is common at appraisals to look at people’s strengths and weaknesses. The next step is often to work out a way to help them improve in their area of weakness. This may mean going on courses, receiving support, mentoring or other methods. However, there is another approach: get people to spend more time on what they are good at, and less time where they are weak.
Buy the book Now, Discover your Strengths and included is a free online survey which reveals your five greatest strengths. One of mine is ‘Woo’ (Win Over Others). This means I am great at networking and meeting people. This is true. I love greeting strangers at corporate exhibitions. I love going to events where I meet new people.
Another of the 33 strengths in the book is ‘Relator’, the ability to build long-term relationships. For years I beat myself up over my failure to follow up on the new people I met. At the same time I would be frustrated by colleagues I took to exhibitions and other events, and who were hesitant to approach people they didn’t know.
The alternative is to get each of us to play to our strengths. I do the meeting and greeting, along with colleagues who are good at that. Others, whose strength is Relator, follow up and build the long-term relationships. Not only are we all happier, but we are all more effective too.
Here is another example. Imagine your child comes home from school with their report card. Reading through it, you find they got 3 As (English, Maths and History), a C (Biology) and an F (French). Which grade do you focus on? Buckingham asked this question of thousands of people across several countries and found that the majority focused on the F grade. In the US 77% focused on the weak area. (In the UK it was lower, but still a majority, at 52%.)
You may feel that some attention may be needed on the French but the question was worded quite carefully, to look at emphasis: ‘Which of these grades would you spend the most time discussing with your son or daughter?’
There is another way. It is okay to congratulate them on how well they have done in their strong subjects. Instead of getting them to focus on improving in the subject where they got the F, a better strategy may be to work out how to make sure they avoid the weak subject.
We came across StrengthsFinder because we were told it is used extensively by Microsoft. They want to know what their people are good at and how to get them to focus on those areas. There are a substantial number of managers who will tell you that they don’t like managing people, and that they don’t feel they are any good at it. One route is to give them development and training. If they are motivated to develop these skills, and want to be good at supporting people, this may work. However there are many for whom managing people is simply not a strength and will never be. And those are likely to be the same managers who people do not like being managed by and may even leave the company to get away from.
Footnotes
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Now, Discover your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham, p. 6. ↩