My coach at work recommended the book by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton to me. It is an easy and good read. You also get to do a Strengthsfinder profile online to identify your five strong “themes”. The theory is you can shape your role in any industry to maximise your strengths, and therefore excel at what you do and live a strong life.
People need to maximise their strengths to perform at their best; not to fix their weaknesses. Damage control i.e. fixing weaknesses can prevent failure; but not bring about excellence.
You must be able to perform an activity consistently for it to be your strength. Nevertheless, you can excel without strengths in every aspect of your role.
Strengths are made up of three elements:
- Talent – naturally recurring thought, feeling, or behaviour
- Knowledge – facts acquired (factual knowledge) and lessons learned (experiential knowledge)
- Skills – steps of an activity; brings structure to experiential knowledge
To develop and maximise strengths, the balanced scorecard of an employee should provide objective picture of performance in three areas: business results, impact on the customer, and impact on the culture. Note that the talent of individual is unique, therefore performance measurement should focus on outcomes; not procedures and competencies.
Ask internal and external clients to provide ratings for three questions to measure impact on customer:
- How well did the service meet expectations overall?
- How likely would you recommend this produce/service to others?
- How likely would you continue using this product/service?
Ask the peers of employee to give ratings for four questions to measure impact on culture:
Is the performance of this person
- timely?
- accurate?
- positive & helpful?
- making you feel your opinions count?
Immediate line manager should have regular and productive meetings with employee to develop strengths. Focus on three questions in every meeting:
- What is the focus of the employee in the next quarter?
- What new discoveries or learning have been planned?
- Who does the employee hope to build new relationship with?
The whole balanced scorecard process should be repeated every six months at least.
The manager of the employee should also strive to achieve highest rating out of 5 to twelve questions:
- Does the employee know what is expected of him/her at work?
- Does the employee have the materials and equipment to do the work properly?
- Does the employee have the opportunity to do what s/he does best every day?
- Has the employee received recognition or praise for good work in the last seven days?
- Does the employee have someone or a supervisor who seems to care about him/her as a person at work?
- Is there someone at work who encourages the development of the employee?
- Does the opinions of the employee seems to count at work?
- Does the mission of the company make the employee feels like his/her work is important?
- Does the employee feel that the co-workers are committed to do quality work?
- Does the employee have a best friend at work?
- In the last six months the employee has talked with someone about progress?
- Does the employee feel that s/he had the opportunities in the last year to learn and grow at work?
Finally, the book intends to make you realise what is right about you and your employees.
