Positive Leadership: Focus on Employees' Strengths and Potential (Not on Their Weaknesses)

It is much easier to focus on what your employees do well than to try to fix their weaknesses. However, many leaders don’t understand how to translate this truth into how they lead on a day-to-day basis. So how do you make it happen?

Understanding your employees’ potential is going to take some energy and thought on your part, especially if, like many of us, you’re used to focusing on what people are rather than what they could be. 

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Can they do something well that isn’t in their formal training or experience?
• Compare them to others with the same experience—are they doing anything faster or better?
• Do they appear to enjoy certain projects more than others?
• What kind of work do they show the most ownership for?
• What kind of work do they need the least guidance from you to do?
• What have they produced that has genuinely surprised you?
• Once you’ve identified employees’ strengths, take a few minutes in your next one-on-one meeting to tell them what they’re doing especially well, or to describe the potential you see in them in a particular area. Get their perspective. Do they know what they’re good at? How can you help them leverage those strengths? Do what you can, but then get out of the way! 

Now, here are a few practical suggestions to help you bring out hidden strengths in your team members:

• Ask them what they like about their job and what they are less enthusiastic about. Make a list. Add the strengths in them that you see that they have not listed. Discuss how—or whether—these strengths map onto their current job or role.
• Even when giving corrective feedback, talk about the strengths you see in them.
• Instead of viewing them as a problem employee, take the approach that there has to be something they do well and it’s your job to help them find it.
• See whether you can structure the job around their strengths.
• If you can’t offer them a job or project that plays to their strengths, consider whether the employee might thrive in another part of the company.

The lesson is simple: Spend your time and energy developing your employees’ strengths and limit your effort to address their shortcomings; in these weak areas, they need only be passable. This is not the same as saying that you should ignore weaknesses completely. In fact, one of the most important aspects of Positive Leadership is acting swiftly and decisively in the face of poor performance. Nevertheless, even in this situation you must focus more time and energy on developing your team’s strengths.

Once you discover the individual strengths of your employees and provide them with appropriate coaching, you’ll set them on the course to develop their true potential. This will benefit both parties!

Positive Leadership: Focus on Employees' Strengths and Potential (Not on Their Weaknesses)

Positive Leadership: Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone

Douglas Conant is an introvert.

But when he took over as president and CEO of struggling Campbell Soup Co., he realised he had to break out of his comfort zone, get in front of his staff, and make some bold declarations from the get-go……

Campbell was in rough shape when Conant joined the company in January 2001. …Conant took a good long look at staff morale and didn't like what he saw.

"We had a toxic culture. People were understandably jaundiced with management," he said. "It was hard for me to imagine that we could inspire high performance with no employee engagement."….

To improve the culture in the workplace, Conant started at the top. He held weekly staff meetings and used a scorecard that evaluated each leader's performance. He created a leadership model that outlined expectations. The number one expectation was inspiring trust--and that meant managers had to have a certain level of both "competence and character," he said.

"You have to know what you're doing, and you have to do what you say you're going to do. Before you have the moral authority to lead your team, you have to inspire trust," he said. "Trust is the one thing that changes everything. In a high-trust culture, it's so much easier to get things done."…… How could we be a higher-ambition company if we didn't have higher-ambition leaders?"……

Many people weren't cut out for the job. In the first three years, 300 of the top 350 leaders at the company exited. Conant focused on making those who stayed and were committed to the mission feel good about their work. In fact, he went so far as to write 10 to 20 handwritten personal notes to employees at all levels of the organization each day to recognise those who were performing well. During his 10-year tenure as CEO, that added up to over 30,000 notes to his 20,000 employees. Conant started to feel a change in the work atmosphere……..

Conant established two performance metrics to measure progress, one based on economic value, measured by shareholder returns compared to competitor companies; and the other based on social value, measured by the Gallup Employee Engagement Index……

The company made steady progress in both areas. For the six years preceding July 2010, Campbell's cumulative total shareholder return was 64%, nearly five times the 13% return of the S&P 500. And by 2010, the Gallup Employee Engagement Index showed that for every 17 engaged employees, only one was disengaged, a ratio that exceeded Gallup's "world-class" benchmark of 12:1. More impressively, the engagement ratio for the top 350 leaders was an amazing 77:1…..

……And ultimately, Conant found that as CEO, taking centre stage and leading the efforts made all the difference. Perhaps just as importantly, he knew his company subscribed to what he preached.

"CEOs must lead from in front. And we have to behave our way to more credibility," said Conant, who retired from Campbell in 2011 and is now founding CEO of Conant Leadership. "It's not what you say, it's what you do."  

For the full article, see: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7133.html

Positive Leadership: Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone

Positive Leadership: Behaviours Loyal Employees Trust

Here are 5 behaviours for leaders to adopt when struggling to keep employees happy and loyal:

1) Tell the truth. Not everyone is a star. Pick out those with leadership or other valued talent potential and nurture them. This will come back to the business as these individuals, in turn, nurture other workers.

2) Communicate roles and responsibilities. Provide a path to success not only for those with leadership promise but for all employees. Sometimes this will mean difficult changes, but remember the most important skill of a leader: never surprise an employee with bad news. Have a development plan for all, and a get-well plan for those whose performance lags. Make sure everyone knows the plan.

3) Create a workplace culture that values real people relationships. For many employees, workgroup relationships and relationships between managers and workers drive engagement and loyalty more effectively than wearing the corporate branded shirt.

4) Be fair and open. This does not mean treat everyone equally – it means have transparent processes for managing and leading. Employees are more likely to respond positively to change when the process used to manage change is fair.

5) Model the behaviours you seek. Accept your responsibility as a leader and act with engagement, commitment and responsibility. Do this every day.

Each of us possesses skills, strengths, talents and flaws. Each of us seeks to belong, to be engaged, to relate to those around us. Loyalty is built on relationships, shared understanding and trust. Engagement and commitment require loyalty, shared goals and fair treatment. Don’t take loyalty and engagement for granted – create a remarkable culture where there are possible and rewarding outcomes of the workplace.

We are only human after all – Every one of us. Every leader. Every brand. Every workplace. Every person.

Positive Leadership: Behaviours Loyal Employees Trust

3 Steps to Positive Leadership

In 2005, Jerry Krueger and Emily Killham shared the results of Gallup research that showed managers play a crucial role in employee well-being and engagement—but the research didn’t study what managers specifically did to elicit positive responses.

That’s why Margaret Greenberg, president of The Greenberg Group, and Dana Arakawa, a programme associate at the John Templeton Foundation, put the theory of positive leadership to the test. They wanted to know if managers who apply positive leadership practices have teams with higher project performance and employee engagement.

As it turns out, positive managers practice three leadership behaviours:

1. Use a strengths-based approach.
2. Provide frequent recognition and encouragement.
3. Maintain a positive perspective when difficulties arise.

None is an innate behaviour, but all can be learned.

A Strengths-Based Approach

There’s a reason why managers’ focus on strengths and weaknesses is so important. Most organisations are obsessed with fixing weaknesses. They conduct performance reviews, 360-degree assessments and the like to evaluate how well employees and managers are measuring up to predefined goals and competencies. Managers are instructed to look at an employee’s assessed gap and coach for greater performance in areas of weakness. But such assessments usually pay only cursory attention to an employee’s strengths. Performance reviews and subsequent remedial programs focus almost exclusively on weaknesses.

Focus on What Works

Too many managers assume that employees need to be good at many things, rather than excellent in the key areas. Recent studies have firmly established that focusing on what works, followed by a programme to scale it to greater levels, is a more practical and efficient approach to developing people and their performance.

Managers who take a strengths-based approach help employees identify strengths and align their talents with their work. These managers don’t ignore employee weaknesses, but fixing them isn’t their primary focus.

Greenberg and Arakawa found that managers who focused on strengths enjoyed superior team performance, as opposed to managers who focused on weaknesses.

The Problem-Seeking Mindset

It’s not enough to wait for performance reviews and project completion to deliver feedback. Praise must be frequent, ongoing and specific to current behaviours—not vague or general.

Sadly, we’re predisposed to look for the negative: in ourselves, in others and for external events. We rarely scan our environment and ask:

• “What’s working right now… and how can we do more of it?”
• Instead, we look around and ask: “What’s broken—and how can we fix it?”

The problem-seeking mindset is one of the brain’s shortcomings, while also serving as a protective device to spare us from danger and making mistakes.

In Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Dan and Chip Heath write about “finding the bright spots” in our work and lives. After extensive research, the two business school professors have documented how we’re wired to focus on bad over good.

It’s no wonder performance reviews and feedback are usually aimed at what’s not working. Yet, some successful individuals can override this brain tendency and focus on the positive, at least enough to create successful relationships both at work and home.

John Gottman, a psychologist who studies marital conversations, finds that couples who sustain long-term marriages use language that reflects five times more positive statements than negative ones. In fact, he calls this “the magic ratio” and claims it will accurately predict if a marriage will last. He urges managers to use a ratio of 5:1 positive statements in conversations with employees.

When Things Go Wrong

Managing long-term, multimillion-dollar projects that involve dozens of people and several workgroups is a complex challenge, and things are bound to go wrong. How managers respond to problems has a direct and measurable impact on both the employees and the project.

Researchers Greenberg and Arakawa asked employees:

• “When a problem crops up on my project, is my project manager able to help me come up with solutions?”
• “What steps does your project manager take when such a problem arises?”

Here’s what they found:

• Managers who maintain a positive perspective don’t turn setbacks into catastrophes.
• They don’t fly off the handle; they control their emotions.
• They recognise what’s within their sphere of influence (and what’s not).
• They see and discuss the problem as an opportunity.
• They provide a solution-oriented perspective

Greenberg and Arakawa also discovered that managers who maintained a positive perspective when things went awry experienced greater project performance. Managers who scored in the top quartile for positive perspective (as reported by their employees, not self-report) had significantly higher project performance than those in the bottom quartile.

Reflect on how you as a manager and leader can implement positive leadership by practicing these behaviours:

1.      Focus on and work with people’s strengths.

2.      Improve the frequency with which you give praise and recognition.

3.      Respond with a positive, solutions-orientation when the going gets rough.

3 Steps to Positive Leadership

Helping Individuals Succeed

The Chinese have a saying: "There's a different length for all the fingers on a hand." You really need to find out each individual's strengths, to help them compensate for their weaknesses.

Helping Individuals Succeed

Leadership Lessons from the Movies

If you haven't seen the movie "The Blind Side" yet, you should go see it while it is still in cinemas. 

The story is about a Memphis, Tennessee family, Sean and Leigh Anne Touhy, who offer a lost, homeless teenager, Michael Oher, the opportunity to come into their home and become part of their family. Through Mrs. Touhy's nurturing, Michael becomes a standout high school football player, eventually earning a scholarship to the University of Mississippi and being selected as the National Football League's Baltimore Ravens' first round draft selection in the spring of 2009.

It's a touching and powerful real life story with one particular lesson all business leaders and coaches could learn from.

During Oher's early days on the gridiron his football coach was frustrated with his lack of comprehension of how to fulfil the offensive tackle role he had been assigned. The coach, applying his traditional coaching style of yelling louder and more forcefully with each frustrating play at practice, gets no results. Mrs. Touhy, watching her 'adopted' son from the practice sidelines, walks on to the field and addresses Oher, reminding him of his strong will and personal attribute of "protective instincts." In taking the "Student Career Aptitude Test" for admission to a private Christian school Oher scored in the 98th percentile in "Protective Instincts."

Knowing this was his personal strength she used herself as a metaphor for the quarterback, and her youngest son as the tailback, telling him to protect his teammates in those positions as if he were protecting his new family. In the movie Michael immediately "gets it" and transforms into a force on the team's offensive line, much to the amazement of his coach, standing bewildered on the sidelines.

Two leadership lessons in that story:

1) Leaders have to know what makes their people tick. They need to take the time to learn what motivates them and what their true strengths and interests are.

2) Leaders must then take that information and apply it to the role in which they assign to their team members so everyone is working in a role that reinforces their strengths.

To apply this in the most ridiculous way, above the high school level, a rugby team would not put its stand off into the scrum during a match. Yet, few businesses really assess the strengths of their employees and learn what they like to do and feel good doing before they assign a job to them. While in business, unlike sports, it may not be possible to have someone fill only the role they are the perfect fit for, it is possible to identify those strengths and have their role include more of that work than not. It benefits both the individual and the organisation.

Leadership Lessons from the Movies

The Most Effective Leaders Focus On Their People's Strengths

Strengths-Based Leadership is a book which is well worth reading. Why? For a start, on page 10 the authors assert that great historical leaders, such as Winston Churchill or Mahatma Gandhi, have more differences than similarities and that it was the differences that defined them and made them great. Then, their basis for the book is decades of Gallup studies on this topic; the research firm's data includes more than 20000 in-depth interviews with senior leaders, studies of more than a million work teams, and 50 years of polls regarding the world's most admired leaders.

Three interesting findings emerge, which add to our insights into leadership.

The first of these is that the most effective leaders focus on their people's strengths, not their weaknesses. Gallup research shows that focusing on staff strength results in staff who are eight times more engaged in their work than those whose leaders focus on their weaknesses.

Some background is required on the "strengths" referred to in the title. Donald Clifton, an educational psychologist, developed the Clifton Strengths Finder, a measure of personal talent that identifies the areas in which an individual has the greatest potential for growth.

In the last years of his life, Clifton was asked what he had discovered from his 30 years of leadership research. His answer was that a leader needed to know his strengths as a carpenter needed to know his or her tools, so he or she could use the right one at the right time. This, he concluded, was probably all that leaders could be said to have in common. If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything. Being "well rounded" inadvertently breeds mediocrity, and in the area of leadership this is no less true. While the best leaders are not well rounded, the best teams are.

This brings us to the second finding, that the most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people. Think of the team in which you work; the chances are high that members were not recruited because of their complimentary differences. This is as true at entry level as it is at board level. The leader, unaware of the issue of strengths, is most likely to surround himself with people who agree with him and who have similar backgrounds and personalities. A company like this will not grow, adapt or change, and this has been verified by Gallup research on thousands of executive teams.

There are 34 themes in the Strengths Finder model and they cluster about four domains of leadership strength: executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. A leader who is strong at influencing may well be strong in very different ways, using very different strengths, compared to another fine leader also strong in the general domain of influencing. This is because each of the four domains has eight or nine themes and great leaders appear to be strongest only in four or five of these. Where they are not strong, they will call on team members to supplement, resulting in a work group that works.

The third finding to emerge is that the most effective leaders understand their followers' needs. Most of the research conducted in the field of leadership has focused on leaders to the exclusion of followers - an oddity if you consider that you cannot be a leader if no one wants to follow you. One could argue that studying the impact of the leaders should be good enough: did they consistently produce great results in the classroom, boardroom or operating room? But, as Peter Drucker notes, the leaders who made the greatest impact on the 20th century were Hitler, Stalin and Mao and "if that's leadership, I want no part of it".

To explore why people follow, Gallup conducted a formal study of 10000 followers between 2005 and 2008. The questions were very simply and very clever. What leader has the most positive influence in your daily life? (Pause here and answer this for yourself.) Now identify three words that best describe what that person contributes to your life. (Pause again.) What emerged from their research was trust, compassion, stability and hope (or words to that effect.) These concepts deserve reflection: to know I can trust you, that you treat me like a fellow human, that you assure my present and show me the way to a future.

There is much to ponder in this book.

The Most Effective Leaders Focus On Their People's Strengths

A Leadership Task - Aligning Strengths

There is a distinction between leadership and a leader. Leadership as a process is larger than the individual leader. That is important because leadership happens in relationship with others and within a context. There are many kinds of leadership; thought leadership; market leadership; political leadership, spiritual leadership. Leadership as a process brings a vision into reality by harnessing all the organisation’s assets: its products, services, technologies, customers, processes, systems, reputation, individual talents, knowledge, and skills. These collective assets are the strengths of the organisation – the positive core.

Peter Drucker wrote in his 1967 classic, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials): “To make strength productive is the unique purpose of the organisation. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant.”

So if, in fact, a key task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths, then imagine the possibilities of strengths connected to strengths? What might that look like and why might that be worth striving for?

For leadership to create an alignment of strengths, it most likely means looking at organisations with new eyes. What if we were to look at organisation not as problems to be solved, but as miracles to be embraced? What if we were consciously to look for the good and hold up the achievements and the successes; to invest generously and respectfully in inquiring into existing organisational strengths and assets? What if we were to invite people to tell their stories of when they felt most energised, enlivened and valued at work. And we listened. Really listened. What language would employees, customers, vendors, media be using? Is it uplifting and positive? What are their stories of experiences with all the products, services and people?

The most important part of this is when you focus on what works well, and what you want, it creates upward spirals and you begin to know and enact your capabilities, your potential and what you want more of. Performance will improve, as it is most energising and creative to have people talk about what they can do and what they aspire to. Two maxims come to mind:

• What you focus on grows.
• People support what they create.

To connect strengths to strengths and to see anew, with an appreciative eye, and to facilitate the positive leadership capability so that it creates flourishing organisations is work that is meaningful, joyful, rewarding and essential.

A Leadership Task - Aligning Strengths

Discovering Your Strengths

What are the best ways for people to discover their strengths?

It’s ironic that your strengths can be so easy to overlook, because they’re clamoring for your attention in the most basic way: Using them makes you feel strong. All you have to do is teach yourself to pay attention. Try to be conscious of yourself and how you feel as you’re completing your day-to-day tasks. Most of the time, we’re so focused on getting our work done that we don’t really have time to notice how we feel about it. At the end of the day, we go home and tell our loved ones that it was a good day or a bad day, but we haven’t made the effort to notice why the day feels good or bad as it happens.

When you make the conscious effort to notice yourself at work (or at play, for that matter), you will find that you experience what are called “strong-moments” throughout your day—times when you feel invigorated, inquisitive, successful. Those moments are the best clues as to what your strengths are.

There’s also a simple acronym to help you recognise the signs of strength: SIGN.

•S - Success: Do you feel a sense of accomplishment about finishing a task?
•I - Instinct: Do you instinctively look forward to this task?
•G - Growth: Are your synapses firing? Are you mentally focused?
•N - Needs: Does this task fulfill one of your needs?

If you notice yourself feeling any of those feelings while doing a task, chances are that activity is one of your strengths.

Discovering Your Strengths