This advice is well intended but misleading. Of course, faults and failings deserve to be studied but they do not reveal anything about ‘Strengths’. Strengths are way different from weaknesses. They are unique, innate personality traits. ‘Strengths’ have their own patterns.

Building a Revolutionary Organization

A great organization must not only accept the fact that each employee is different, it must also capitalize on these personality differences. It must keep a close view on each employee’s unique personality traits and then position and develop each employee such that his/her talent is transformed into powerful strengths. The organization must channels the careers of it’s people around the strengths of each person. By doing so, the organization will be able to greatly outperform its competitors.

According to Gallup Organization’s latest meta-analysis, they asked 200,000 odd employees working in 8,000 odd business units within 36 organizations, this question: “At work, do you have an opportunity to do what you do best every day?” They then compared the responses to the performance of the business units and discovered the following:

When employees answered “strongly agree” to this question, they were 50% more likely to work in business units with lower employee turnover, 37% more likely to work in more productive business units and 45% more likely to work in business units with higher customer satisfaction scores. And over time those business units that increased the number of employees who strongly agreed saw comparable increases in employee retention, productivity and customer loyalty.

This data clearly reveals that, the organizations whose employees feel that their unique personality traits/strengths are used every day, are more powerful and healthy.

According to Gallup’s total database, the question “At work, do you have an opportunity to do what you do best every day?” has been asked to more than 1.7 million employees in 100 companies from 65 countries. And to their dismay, globally, only 20% of employees working in big organizations feel that their unique personality traits and strengths are actually being used. Most aberrant of all, the longer an employee stays with an organization and the higher he climbs up the conventional success career ladder, the less likely he is to strongly make use of his/her unique personality traits and strengths.

In order to utilize the organization’s full potential and thereby increase their value, organizations need to dig deeper to find the wealth of unrealized capacity that is deep seated in each and every employee. Just imagine the increase in efficiency, productivity and profitability if they doubled this number from 20 to 40 percent of their employees ‘strongly agreeing’ that they get a chance to use their unique personality traits and strengths every single day.

The first step is to figure out why 8 out of 10 employees feel that they are somewhat misfit for the job/role. Is this because of wrong recruitment? Is this because of selecting the right people for the wrong job? Or wrong people for the right job?

1. Each individual can learn to be proficient in almost everything.
2. Each individual’s greatest room for growth lies in his/her weaknesses or what we now call “Areas of Development”.

1. More money is spent on training employees after recruiting them than on selecting the “right people” in the first place.
2. Most of the training time and money is spent on trying to fill the gaps in employees’ skills or competencies.
3. Employees are promoted based on the experience they have acquired over time. (After all, if every individual can learn to be proficient in almost everything, those who have learned the most must be the most worthwhile.) Hence, the most respect, authority, importance and the highest salaries are paid to the most experienced, home grown employees.

As long as an organization functions under the above characteristics, it can never capitalize on the unique talents and strengths of each employee.

In order to break away from this spiral and to launch the talent revolution in your organization, you must alter your judgements about people. You must begin with the “right” assumptions, and everything else will follow!

1. Each individual’s talents are enduring and unique.
2. Each individual’s greatest room for growth lies in his/her unique personality traits and strengths and not “Weaknesses”.

The above assumptions are the foundation for everything good managers do with and for their employees. This is why great managers meticulously look for talent in every role, why they focus on employees’ performance around outcomes, why they do not operate by conventional rules and why they treat each and every employee differently, focusing on each employee’s unique talents and qualities and fully capitalizing on those talents and strengths.

Great managers start by hiring someone; who is not only suitable for the job as per his/her education but; also possesses those talents, personality characteristics and attributes that are uniquely suited for the job. And to this end they may use appropriate personality assessments.

To conclude, it is time for a revolution. It is time to change the rules. These revolutionary assumptions must serve as the central tenets for a new way of working. These are the tenets for a modern organization, a stronger organization, an organization that works on strengths and aims at strengthening the strengths of each employee.