Focusing on Strength

Please enjoy this Bonus Mid-Week Missive. So timely with goal-setting happening for 2009. Summaries, snippets, and takeaways from Inside Drucker's Brain (Jeffrey Krames biography of the father of management - Peter Drucker) via Brand Autopsy.

“Most organizations take their employees’ strengths for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses. They [identify] ‘skill gaps’ or ‘areas of opportunity,’ and then pack them off to training classes so that weaknesses can be fixed. But this isn’t development, it is damage control. And by itself damage control is a poor strategy for elevating either the employee or the organization to world-class performance.” — Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton (2001)

Psst … decades before Marcus Buckingham became the poster child for “building upon strengths, not weakness,” Peter Drucker heralded the cause. In THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT (1954), Drucker actually launched the strengths movement by writing:

“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths ... The focus must be on strength.”

“One can only build on strength. One can achieve only by doing. Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do … a man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths.”

“One cannot do anything with what one cannot do. Once cannot achieve anything with what one does not do … Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do.”

Drucker revisited the concept of strengths-based development with a must-read Harvard Business Review article (MANAGING ONESELF, 1999). He updates his stance by writing:

“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at - and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”

“Waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”

Also in MANAGING ONESELF, Drucker explains how “measuring feedback analysis” is the best way to discover your strengths. He encourages executives to, at the time they make a key decision, write down the expectations they hope come from that decision. Then after nine or twelve months, compare the actual results with the written-down expectations. It’s a process that worked for Drucker to identify areas he excelled and areas where he struggled to meet expectations.
A more scientific way to identify one’s strengths is to use the StrengthsFinder test from Gallup. This online test formed the basis for Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001) and for Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007).