BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 29
Getting Stronger
continued
THE “SIGN” OF A STRENGTH
To double-check that an activity is a strength for you, run
the SIGN test:
Success: Do you feel successful and effective as you
perform the activity?
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Instincts: Do you feel effortlessly drawn to the activity?
needs” draws on this strength and would enable her to
“move the needle” beyond 20%.
3. Educate: Identify skills and techniques that could help
you further leverage the strength. In Heidi’s case, she
decided to see if there were some internal best practices
she could learn from and to ask the brand directors at
some of Hampton Inn’s sister brands how they approach
improving hotel performance.
Growth: When you perform the activity, do you have the
sense that your mind is advancing?
4. Expand: Consider how you might share your best
practices with others regarding this strength and expand
n Needs: Does the activity leave you feeling fulfilled?
your role to make better use of it. For example, Heidi
decided to meet with another brand director the following
week to discuss ideas for measuring hotels’ performance
listed in your “I Loathed It” list than in your “I Loved It” results. And she resolved to talk with her manager about
list? “That doesn’t necessarily mean you should leave your how her job might be reconfigured so that she could focus
job and start over,” says Buckingham. Nor does it mean on helping hotel managers achieve superior performance
you ought to completely overhaul your role. As discussed
below, making incremental changes can help you improve
HELPING EMPLOYEES LEVERAGE THEIR
the balance between your two lists.
STRENGTHS
Once you’ve compiled your “Loved It/Loathed It” lists,
look at your “Loved It” list. Identify the three activities
that evoke the strongest positive emotional reactions in
Listen to them and trust their judgment
you. These are the activities you’d like to spend most, if
Your job is not to judge whether an employee is right or
not all, of your time doing during a typical week. They are
wrong when he identifies his strengths and weaknesses. He
your most important strengths.
knows what energizes and engages him and what drains and
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depletes him far better than you do.
FIND WAYS TO PUT YOUR STRENGTHS AT THE
CENTER OF YOUR WORK
Now that you’ve identified your three key strengths, the
next step is making adjustments in your role to spend
more time using them. For each strength, Buckingham
recommends taking this four-step FREE approach:
1. Focus: Identify how you currently use this strength in
your job—and how often. For example, in Go Put Your
Strengths to Work, Buckingham introduces a Hampton
Inn brand director named Heidi, who had identified one
of her key strengths as “helping a hotel manager take
a good hotel and make it #1.” In this step of the FREE
strategy, Heidi determined that she uses this strength at
work when she teaches a general-manager leadership
class and when she plans and conducts preopening and
postopening consultations. And she calculated that she
uses this strength roughly 20% of the time.
2. Release: Consider what situations you could put
yourself into and what actions you could take to use this
strength more. For instance, Heidi realized that “having a
conference call with the ownership group to find out their
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Adjust their jobs whenever possible
Sometimes you need an employee to devote a lot of her time
performing a function that doesn’t play to her strengths. But
let her know that you’re willing to consider other ways that
function could be accomplished in the future; otherwise,
she’ll feel stuck—and it’s unlikely you’ll be satisfied for very
long with her performance.
Help make less desirable tasks less onerous
There will always be some tasks that an employee doesn’t
like doing but yet are necessary adjuncts to his main work—
for instance, filling out call reports for a salesperson. Help
him shift his approach to the task or his perspective on it
so that it seems less burdensome. Can he do it differently
to make it less draining? Can he partner with a colleague to
minimize the time he spends on it? Can he frame the task in
a way that allows him to dispatch it more dispassionately?
Source: Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to
Achieve Outstanding Performance, by Marcus Buckingham
(Free Press, 2007).
HARVARD MANAGEMENT UPDATE | FEBRUARY 2008
