Putting Your Strengths to Work

At the end of May I had the opportunity to be at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom with some of the doctoral students from Azusa Pacific University's Higher Education program. Alex Linley, Director of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology, met with us and updated us on what was happening in his part of the world.

There are a number of threads that are beginning to weave together around issues of strengths-based teams. While Marcus Buckingham's new book Go Put Your Strengths to Work emphasizes how an individual can capitalize on his or her strengths so that more time at work is spent doing the things that are energizing, the work that Alex is doing seems congruent with not only what The Gallup Organization does with strengths-based teams, but also with my own experience in the Noel Academy as we have tried to practice what we preach and become a model of a strengths-based team ourselves.

Alex told the story of a large company whose executive team members were each delegated to specific tasks that would enable the company to meet its goals and fulfill its mission. After months of listing these tasks at each meeting, Alex came in and worked with them on how to become a strengths-based team. He pointed out that there were a number of items that remained on this "snag list" (as he called it) month after month and never got done. So he challenged the whole team to examine the list together and see whose strengths were better suited for managing some of those tasks.


Sounds simple and even rather obvious, right? If a job isn't getting done, find a person who can do it. But we tend to be confined to our job descriptions, afraid to step on others' toes by offering to do something that clearly isn't in their area of strength but happens to be something that energizes us. We may even believe that they should do that task because it's their job and they're getting paid for it -- no one else should do it for them. But if we really believe in strengths-based organizations, wouldn't we look at the task list as our list--something that collectively we hope to accomplish? When we do, amazing things happen. As Alex pointed out, the 12 or so tasks that had languished on the snag list for month after month were all completed within one month of the meeting in which people volunteered to take them on because they fit their strengths.

When we tried this in the Noel Academy, not everything on the snag list was grabbed by others eager to utilize their strengths to get them done, however! As I've thought about that, I think there were a couple of key differences in our situation--differences that might be useful for other teams to think about as they endeavor to become strengths-based.

First, the strengths constellations among the five faculty who are associated with the Noel Academy are remarkably similar! We ALL have Achiever (which can be dangerous at times!), we all have Learner, and many of us are Strategic as well. So there wasn't a lot of differentiation among our strengths--meaning we all enjoy doing many of the same things and are energized in somewhat similar ways. A good team probably has a little more variety in the strengths represented--and in searching for team members when an opening becomes available, this is something to remember.

Second, many of the things we put on our snag list were not necessarily important tasks that were crucial to accomplishing the mission of the Academy. The list tended to include items that simply had to be done by someone. But I think if we had started with mission (instead of starting with just what energized us and what "weakened" us, in Buckingham's terms), we would have had a different list--and a list of things that we all realized were vital to our success as a team. Then perhaps some of us would've realized ways our strengths could've been leveraged to accomplish those tasks.

In thinking about putting our collective strengths to work, then, there are a couple of lessons I think I've learned: (1) start with mission -- what is vital to our collective success as a team? (2) Create teams that have a variety of strengths represented. And if those don't exist on the team, then think creatively about who can be brought in for particular projects or who else within the organization might be a good partner on some tasks. (3) Emphasize collective success and goals, rather than getting hung up on job descriptions and titles. (4) Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do--and that no one else wants to do, either! Hopefully, that's not the majority of your job, but sometimes you just have to dig in and do it.

Because the strengths philosophy is such a paradigm shift for most of us, it will take time to reframe our work in this way. But I think in the long run it will pay off with higher morale, higher productivity as a team, and a better product at the end.