Maximise Assets, Minimise Limitations

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on March 24, 2007
Filed Under Leadership

In a recent survey by prominent employment researcher, Marcus Buckingham, workers from five nations indicated that improving their weakest job skills would increase their job performance. Buckingham told the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2007 Global Forum Conference in Los Angeles on March 21 that they should be working to improve their strengths instead.

In 2000 and 2006, workers from China, France, Japan, the UK and the US were asked if building their strengths or fixing their weaknesses would help them be more successful on the job. In 2000, 41 percent of workers said building their strengths would help them be more successful on the job, while 59 percent said fixing their weaknesses would help them.

In 2006, 37 percent of workers said building their strengths would help them be more successful on the job and 63 percent said fixing their weaknesses would help. Buckingham, who has a new book, Go Put Your Strengths To Work (Free Press, 2007), said that managers who say they build their strengths to achieve success are in the minority. Because most people focus on fixing their weaknesses, it is clear that we live in a remedial world.

In another survey, workers were asked: “When you talk with your manager about your performance, what do you spend the most time talking about?” Respondents could select strengths or weaknesses. From those choices, 24 percent of workers said strengths, 36 percent of workers said weaknesses, and 40 percent replied, “We don’t talk about those things here.”

In addition, only two out of 10 workers spend their days playing to their strengths, Buckingham said. In 2005, 17 percent of workers said they spend their day playing to their strengths, while in 2006 the percentage of workers who spend their days playing to their strengths dropped to 14 percent. The results suggest that “organizations have been inefficient in getting the most out of human beings,” he said.

Buckingham concluded that before managers propose changes designed to increase employees’ ability to build up, or use, their strengths, those managers need to determine if they are part of the minority of from 14 percent to 17 percent of employees who spend their day playing to their strengths. Because if managers are not playing to their strengths, then the manager is not ready to implement a program, he said.