Some Leaders Do Not Work Strengths-Oriented
The Jaggedness Principle
Just a few years after the war, the U.S. air force began to address an issue, which they had noticed had been steadily worsening for over two decades. Flying had always been a risky business, but with the advent of new jet technologies, safely controlling the ever-faster planes appeared to have become more and more challenging. The number of accidents had risen markedly, and most were blamed on human error as the aeronautic engineers insisted that mechanical failure was only at fault in the minority of cases.
Disgruntled pilots asserted that they should not burden all of the responsibility for the incidents, and so investigations were launched. All aspects of the flying experience were scrutinized, and in particular, the cockpit. It turned out that all pilot seat dimensions and their respective distance to pedals and other controls used by the U.S. Air Force had, since their design in 1926, remained the same. The assumption was made that the average pilot build might have changed in the last 20 odd years, and so data was collected to ascertain the 1950 pilot average body shape.
The hope behind the study was that, upon establishing the average foot size, waist girth, leg length, arm length, and myriad other pilot body dimensions, the engineers would be able to adjust the distance that the joysticks, controls, pedals, and so on find themselves from their pilots to optimize pilot competency, and so reduce accident statistics. In other words, the belief was that, if the cockpit is designed around the average pilot body shape, then the average pilot will be easily able to reach the controls, and so cause fewer accidents.
This assumption followed a popular scientific paradigm of the first half of the 20th century known as “typing” (Ogata 2001). Typing, its advocates claimed, was the science of drawing logical conclusions based on apparent data alignment. For example, if a group of thieves had been found to have had unusually large hands, then large hands might have been considered a strong indicator of criminal intent. If that had been the case, then goalkeepers, pianists, and basketball players with long fingers would, presumably, not have been trusted with one’s valuables. But, by the same token, the assumption was that the average-sized pilot would make fewer mistakes if his or her plane controls were engineered in such a way that they were easily reachable.
So, in total, 4,063 pilots based in Ohio were rigorously measured. Then, using the body dimension data from the pilots, the Air Force designed a seat and cockpit that exactly fit the average U.S. pilot body shape. What do you think? How many of the 4,063 pilots represented exactly the body shape of this fictional average U.S. pilot?
Zero. Not one of them did.
Following the typing principle and falsely believing that the concept of average exists in humans and can be used to shape human surroundings, the U.S. Air Force ended up designing a seat that, while intended to fit everyone, indeed, fit no one. Not for the first time in the history of leadership and strategy had an assumption led to huge misunderstandings and the development of an ill-fitting strategy. The wrong environment was designed, based on the assumption that there is such a concept as the average person.
There is no such thing as average.
Certainly not with regards to developing an environment for humans to function in effectively. The people who work in your team are not average or even similar and should not be treated as such. Each human being is spectacularly unique, and I am not just talking about one person being taller than the other, and one having blue eyes and one brown. We have also evolved to be tremendously diverse with regards to our cognitive ability, and in particular, our personality. Social scientists call it the jaggedness principle (Rose 2017). Just as a knife’s edge is jagged to allow it to slice through the bread, so too are we jagged in our difference from one another, in order to help us slice through the myriad and varied challenges of life on this planet.
As a leader, you have the challenge to tune your antenna to try to read and understand the people you surround yourself with. You should also enter into transparent discussion with your colleagues and invite them to share their opinions, values, and foci. You do not have to be their friend, but you have a professional responsibility to appreciate their difference, and not to consider them as typical or average, and so run the risk of making the mother of all leadership errors: treating them all the same.
Do You Want to Be a Bee?
Adding to our appreciation of colleagues as each being unique, let us turn our attention to our surroundings and how we interpret them.
Question: What do bees spend most of their waking hours doing?
They spend most of their time searching for pollen. And, where do the bees find most of the pollen? They find it in flowers and plants. Right? In other words, bees find what they are looking for in the beautiful things in the world. In order to achieve their goals, bees keep a lookout for and their antennae tuned in to what is great in the world. Bees recognize that, to produce more of their delicious product honey and to improve, to grow as a species, to be successful, they have to search for and highlight what is budding, prosperous, healthy, and successful in their environment.
Now, what do flies usually spend a lot of their time searching for?
That is right—shit!
Flies search for what is dirty; they search for where bacteria collects; they search for ugly, rotting, disappointing, decomposing, failed trash. Flies have developed a fantastic ability and super-fast reactions to enable them to find the ugliest things in the world.
My question to you is: Would you like to be a fly or would you like to be a bee?
Would you like to go through life only noticing mistakes and failure?, that is seeing the world through your fly glasses. Or, would you like to live with your eyes open and your antennae up, searching for and noticing what is good about what you see around you?, that is, bee glasses.
At a first glance, this might seem like a typically superficial self-help message: the type of calls to positive action that have become so popular on the Internet and social media memes, but I would sincerely like to invite you to read the next pages on the bee mindset (that is, strengths orientation) and then pass judgment. Strengths orientation and the benefits of positive psychology are not some hokum pseudoscience. They are grounded in decades of academic research (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000; Seligman 1994, 1998, 1999) and have been shown to help productivity and increase performance (Asplund et al. 2016). So, let me share with you some concepts and research on strengths orientation effectiveness, and we will speak again at the end of this chapter. Okay?
Strengths Orientation
Let us go back to school!
What do you notice about the following picture (Figure 4.1)?
Figure 4.1 Math problem
Was the first thing that you noticed: the fact that one answer is wrong? The fourth equation is wrong. Did you notice the error first?
If so, okay. So, now, have another look (Figure 4.2). What else do you notice?
Five Are Right!
Five have been answered correctly, and yet, the vast majority of us notice first that one is wrong and neglect the fact that the positives in this example far outweigh the negative. We have developed an ability in the western world to identify what is wrong with any given situation first (fly glasses?), often to the detriment of what is good. The Germans refer to this as finding Die Haar in der Suppe (the hair in the soup). Admittedly, a hair in your soup is not nice, but throwing the whole soup out or ignoring it or leaving it all to waste because of one discrepancy or investing all your energy complaining and addressing one small negative is not a high-performance attitude. What about a mindset of eliminating the weakness, but spending our time, energy, and money investing in developing what is already strong? What might happen if we invested in strengths?
Let us say that the math tasks we have just looked at were written by little Johnny. At the end of the semester, Johnny returns home with his report card and it looks something like the one shown in Figure 4.3.
Figure 4.3 Johnny’s report card
When shown this report card, what would most parents probably focus on and assert their child to do? I predict that lots would spend time quizzing the child about the whys and hows of the poor math grade. Many would surely advise their child to work much harder in that subject in the future, maybe even if it means sacrificing other time-consuming pursuits to invest more time in math. No more tennis practice until your math grade improves!. Some would question or even chastise the teacher in a search for culpability. Some parents might find the time to support and coach their child with their math homework themselves, after school, and countless, no doubt, would pay hard-earned money for their child to attend extracurricular math tutoring, courses, or camps.
All of these approaches seem ostensibly meritorious, but they are squandering valuable energy, time, emotion, and in many cases, money. Assets that could be invested in developing strengths into excellence. Assuming that the reason for Johnny’s modest grade in math is a lack of talent in the subject and not, for example, a poor relationship with his teacher or any other social barrier that hinders his performance in class, then no matter how much time, money, or energy we invest, Johnny will probably never become best in class in math. Think back to your school time and the subjects where you showed no obvious talent. Did extra classes or more determination lead to As?
I know that I was most certainly poor at math at school, and my mother and father dutifully spent hours helping me with my math homework, often met with my teacher to better understand my errors, and they must have spent thousands of dollars over my time at high school, paying for extra math tuition that I hated going to every Wednesday for six long years. And, after all that time energy and money, how did I finish school? I scraped through with a just passed C minus in math. That is ok, I guess. But, I have spent the last decades reflecting on what might have come of me, had I spent even some of those Wednesday afternoons working on my talents instead of on my weaknesses.
Unquestionably, in most school systems that we have established across the world, failure in any subject, and in particular, in math is unacceptable. Many education systems expect at least a passing grade in math (and some other subjects) before the student can progress to the next grade or educational institution. Put another way, there is an acceptable standard expected of every student. In this case, math must be passed. Mine is not a critique of education systems here, nor of the need to be adequate at numerous subjects. If the school requires a certain acceptable standard in a particular subject, then so be it. If a company expects an associate to have abilities in several areas, so be it. As the student and his or her parents should work hard to achieve those goals, so must the modern employee be a jack of all trades. But, just passing or being a jack of all trades is not elite performance. Acceptable standard is not best in class.
If you want top performance, you have to develop strengths, not focus on weaknesses (Buckingham and Clifton 2001).
Now, with that statement, I am not proposing that you ignore deficiencies from now on. If you spot that the ceiling is about to fall in and injure a colleague, I am not suggesting you look the other way and let the plaster crash onto the acquaintance’s head, mumbling, as you do, that you are employing a solely strengths-oriented approach. Acceptable standard, in this case, is that the ceiling remains safe and hung from the roof. Fix it. Have it fixed. Solve the problem. But, fixing the hole in the ceiling will not make it competition in terms of quality or beauty with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Investing time, energy, and money into having the ceiling fixed will give you ... a fixed ceiling.
Fixing weaknesses leads to: fixed weaknesses. Nothing more.
If you want quality and best-in-class performance, you have to focus on strengths.
If a couple at home, wanted to get something down from a high shelf, the shorter partner would ask their taller spouse to reach up and get it. The taller person has a natural (physical) proclivity (height) that enables him or her to be able to reach high things. The shorter person could probably work around the situation with the help of a chair, stepladder, or by jumping, but all of those would exert unnecessary energy and time and probably not lead to perfect execution. If you want best-in-class, easy-to-implement performance with the minimum of energy wastage, get the person with the right talents doing what suits those talents. We seem palpably aware of people’s physical abilities, but seem to have far greater difficulty identifying their mental talents.
The problem is that many of us have been working with certain assumptions (particularly in the business world) for a long while now.
Typical (False) Assumptions:
- Anyone can achieve anything they want. They just need to want it hard enough and work hard enough at it. Anything can be learned.
- People achieve success in the same way.
- Eliminating failure leads to high performance.
Let us take a closer look at each of these assumptions, one by one. We have already seen that fixing errors does not lead to success, it just leads to fixed errors so that we can disregard assumption three, right off the bat.
What about assumption number one? We have heard this a million times, haven’t we? It is what parents often tell their children, filled with parental pride. “You can achieve anything you want to, darling.” “Follow your dreams. If you want it bad enough and work hard at it, you can become anything you would like!” “You would like to be a concert pianist, when you grow up? No problem. Keep going to music lessons and you’ll play Carnegie Hall one day!” These statements and their intentions of support, love, and positivity are not what I am taking issue with here. I am, of course, an advocate for supportive, loving parenting and understand why parents tell their children such things. My issue is with the mindset that ensues after hearing such rhetoric again and again. It is the unrealistic mindset that anything can be learned, that anything can be achieved. Sadly, that is just not true. We all have different strengths and talents, and so, by definition, cannot all achieve anything we like. The tallest woman in the tribe is the only one who can reach the high-lying fruits (because she has a particular predisposition: height), and by the same token, the one with certain talents (predispositions) is the only one who can achieve greatness in any particular field. This is a fact of nature, and to be able to lead a high-performance team, we must accept that people have different talents, and that they cannot all achieve anything they want.
Let me give you an example. I was a good soccer player as a child. I represented my school through all age groups, played for a local club at the weekends, represented my district a couple of times, and there was talk that scouts from pro clubs were interested. The thing is, I wanted to become a pro soccer player so badly. It is all I thought about. I worked incredibly hard at it, too. I would practice at school in PE, then practice with the school team after school was out, then rush over to my club to train there, and then, come home and kick balls against the house wall (much to my parent’s chagrin) until after the sun had gone down. I wanted it so badly. No one can accuse me of not trying hard enough, and I was quite good. But, (what I realize now is that) I did not have a natural talent; a predisposition for the technique required to be a top-class soccer player. I was told that I could read the game well (i.e., predict where the ball and the players would go), and this gave me an obvious advantage over my competitors. I knew every rule of the game and could use all the gray areas to my advantage over referees and opponents. However, I was a slower-than-average runner, not as agile as high-level soccer players, my ball control and technique was only okay, not great—despite hundreds of hours of practice—and my ability to convert the coach’s tactics into plays on the field was patchy, at best, despite dedication and focus on my part. In summary, I had the knowledge and skills, but I did not have natural disposition (talent) (Figure 4.4).
Figure 4.4 Strengths are the combination of talent, skills, and knowledge
Regarding the second assumption: one often hears from leaders: “I have had success leading by directive, so I expect you to manage your team with the same amount of command as I do.” Or, “Sarah won the contract at the new client by creating lots of detailed reports for them so I look forward to seeing your analyses.” We hear the assumption that people can achieve something that others have previously achieved and in the same way, but this is fundamentally untrue. People achieve success in different ways. Sarah clearly has a gift for compiling detailed statistical reports, but I cannot assume that her colleague will have the same analytical talent. The boss, in the preceding example, succeeded with transactional leadership (see Chapter 8), but it is incorrect to assume that his protégé will not be able to lead his team productively with a more transformational (see Chapter 8) approach. You would not ask a quarterback to block. You probably would not expect the baseball player with the weakest arm to play at catcher behind first base, and you probably would not expect the drummer and guitarist in your favorite band to swap instruments for a big concert. Do not expect your team to all accomplish tasks in the same way, either. As the saying goes, “many roads lead to Rome.”
We can develop new assumptions to work with a strengths-oriented mindset:
- Some things can be learned, but most are impossible to master. There is a difference between skills, talent, and knowledge.
- Everyone is on a different journey toward success. People get there in different ways and using different talents. There is no perfect way to achieve excellence.
- Eliminating mistakes leads to eliminated mistakes (acceptable standard). To achieve best in class, we need to focus on existing strengths and talents with strengths-oriented leadership.
But, do not just take my word for it—take a look at some of the huge body of research that has emerged in the last few decades advocating a strengths-based approach.
Strengths Research
In a groundbreaking study, and the one that some argue began the strengths-orientation movement, Glock (1955) (Figure 4.5) found that greater personal development is possible when working with subjects who already have a natural talent for the pursuit. Glock took a group of students and looked at the speed at which they could read, and then had them train their reading skills in a series of speed-reading techniques. Before training began, reading speed was tested, and one group could read around 90 words per minute, while some showed an apparent disposition for speed reading and (without any learned skills) could read 350 words before the training started (group 2). After training, the first group showed, on average, an improvement in reading speed from around 90 words to 150 words per minute. So, the motto here could be: training works.
Figure 4.5 The effects of talent-oriented training. Example: speed reading
However, those who could read the fastest before the training was implemented (i.e., they showed a talent for reading quickly before they learned the skills and acquired the knowledge) could increase their reading speed in a marked degree from around 300 words per minute to 2,900 words per minute. The motto here is clearly: to get excellence, work with existing talent. Developing existing talents can lead to best-in-class high performance.
But, what about in management? How can a leader use the strengths-oriented approach to develop his or her team to be high performers? A large body of quantitative and qualitative academic and experiment-based research supports the effectiveness of strengths-based management. To mention all the studies that have shown positive managerial results from strengths-oriented leadership would, sadly, stretch the scope of this book, but here is a sample of such studies to whet your appetite and hopefully strengthen your interest in strengths-focused leadership.
One study (Figure 4.6) found that managers who focus on their associates’ strengths are able to stimulate engagement in 99 percent of their employees (Gallup organization 2001), while another noted employees to be nearly 8 percent more productive in their role, when working in a strengths-developed environment (gallupstrengthscenter.com).
Figure 4.6 Strengths-based leadership leads to employee engagement
Another study of 2,000 leaders found that managers had an 86 percent chance (1.9 times greater than otherwise) of increased project success if they adopted a strengths-based approach to leadership, including matching task delegation to talents and prioritizing talent over seniority or experience (Gallup organization 2002). In a further study, workers who felt that they regularly had the opportunity to complete tasks in which they are gifted were found to be far more productive and exhibit a more competitive edge than those who do not (Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio 2007). Indeed, one study found that employees who benefited from strengths-oriented interventions are 44 percent more likely to score higher on customer relation appraisals and 38 percent more likely to show higher-than-average productivity than those who did not (Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes 2002; Harter and Schmidt 2002). A strengths-based approach to leadership leads to employee satisfaction, and numerous studies have shown that improved employee satisfaction leads to greater customer satisfaction (see Chapter 5). Using standard utility analysis techniques (Schmidt et al. 1979) to transpose these findings to quantitative profitability, it can be asserted that companies that embrace positive psychology and strengths orientation to leadership can generate over 1,000 U.S. dollars more productivity per employee (Schmidt and Rauschenberger 1986).
Most recently, in 2016, Asplund et al. conducted a huge meta-analysis of 43 studies investigating the relationship between strengths-based development and business performance outcomes (2016, p. 01). The study looked at 1.2 million people in 49,000 departments and teams from organizations in 45 countries. Asplund et al. (2016) note remarkable increases in customer engagement (between 3.4 and 6.9 percent), in employee engagement (9.0–15.0 percent), in profit (14.4–29.4 percent), and in sales (10.3–19.3 percent) and decreases in safety incidents (22.0–59.0 percent) in the business units explored in the research in which staff had the benefit of strengths-based interventions.
Focusing on associates’ talents, assigning responsibilities according to their abilities, and embracing the philosophies of positive psychology in the workplace are not wishy-washy, the-glass-is-half-full, pseudo-science. It works. It helps managers and staff alike to be more productive (Albrecht et al. 2015; Buckingham and Coffman 2014). Indeed, “the relationship between strengths-based employee development and performance at the business/work unit level is substantial and generalizable across organizations” (Aspund et al. 2016).
I think that is enough science for a while. Suffice to say, the evidence is overwhelming: strengths-based leadership leads to increased productivity and higher performance across all sectors. Do you lead strengths-oriented?
Chapter Leadership Challenge
A well-established, powerful self-reflection and team-development exercise is the talent profile.
The scientists at Gallup, under the leadership of the godfather of strengths-based leadership, Donald Clifton, designed the Gallup Strengthsfinder™ (now named Cliftonstrengths™), an ingenious assessment tool grounded in and based on decades of research from interviews conducted with over two million employees, in over 190,000 work units, and at over 200 organizations (Clifton and Harter 2003). The assessment (by using 177 simple multiple-choice questions) “measures your natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, so when you’re done you’ll have discovered your talents” (gallupstrengthscenter.com). The online test has been taken by nearly 18 million people,1 including staff at over 90 percent of the Fortune 500 companies (gallupstrengthscenter.com), and if you find yourself with a spare 45 minutes or so, I strongly recommend you take the online test to receive feedback on which talents you are strongest in.
Reflecting on and creating your own strengths profile can be hugely rewarding and facilitate your task management and leadership. If you purchase a Gallup Strengthsfinder© (Gallup organization 2000) code, then base your profile on the top five strengths that the test spits out for you. If you choose not to take the test yet (and you can absolutely begin to reflect on your strengths without the algorithms), then simply use your own vocabulary and your own self-assessment of what you are good at.
Now, with your top five talents in hand, take a large piece of paper (working analog may seem old fashioned, but it fires up creative synapses that staring at displays and screens just does not muster) and create your talent profile similar to mine as shown in Figure 4.7.
Figure 4.7 Top five talent profiles, Matt Beadle
Which way you organize your talents on the page and how you present them is, of course, entirely up to you. The exercise should serve as self-reflection and be honest and genuine. Gallup has found that people who have reflected on and identify with their talents are three times as likely to have superb quality of life and six times as likely to engage themselves in subjects and tasks that they do best (gallupstrengthscenter.com). Have a go.
After you have completed your profile, invite your team to create theirs and get together to discuss your combined strengths and how you can all apply them in the most effective way.
1 As of February 2018.