Achievers position themselves to play to their strengths; Leaders position the members of their team so they play to their strengths.
Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much of my time recently helping people identify, develop and leverage their strengths to dramatically increase their personal performance and improve their results; or maybe it’s that I naturally did this as a leader (hey, even I’m good at some things!); but it continues to surprise me how few leaders understands the talents, strengths and gifts of their people and position them so that those talents will benefit the company. (I guess I also have the ‘talent’ of writing really long sentences!)
I’ve heard it described as ‘playing chess with your people, rather than checkers’ (using the unique abilities of the piece, rather than treating them as if they all do exactly the same thing). But it has simply always made complete sense to me to find out what people are good at…and simply let them do it!
While executives like to say “our people are our greatest asset”, that’s simply not true. The talents or strengths of their people are the greatest (and most appreciable) asset of the organization, the rest of the person is just baggage. I know that was crass; but I wanted to make a point. I’ve heard it said that we ‘hired Joe for his abilities, unfortunately on Monday the whole person showed up.’ And most organizations invest most of their ‘people time’ focused on trying to fix (or eliminate, one way or another) the weakness of their people.
When people can be up to 16 times more productive when they play to their strengths, why doesn’t every company use that talent management strategy? Got me! (I do really understand it’s because most [people] management systems have been created, not for the performance of the organization, but instead for the convenience of the management team.) When people are treated as equals (like interchangeable units of resource), I describe it that the management team is “exposing the results of the organization to the sum of all the weaknesses of every employee.” That just doesn’t make any sense. Why would you pay someone to do something they’re not very good at?
What are the results for allowing team members to play to their strengths (rather than requiring them to do ‘everything on their job description’ regardless of how good they are at it)? Well, a corporate director’s team was 7 times more productive than the second place team (out of 10); leaders a professional services organization got a 75% increase in profit (changing the roles of just 3 people); and a corporate IT organization saved $26 million in IT spend in a single year.
It’s really that simple.
