Use Your Leadership Strengths to Create High-Performance

Fast-track your career by building on your leadership strengths and minimizing the impact of your weaknesses.

Is all that money, invested in training and developing leaders, well spent by companies? Not if they stick with the old way of trying to make a leader good at everything!

Since the late 1990s, the Strengths movement, championed by Marcus Buckingham, co-author of, "Now, Discover Your Strengths" has been gaining momentum. (Read my review of this book)

This book, (based upon years of research conducted by the Gallup Organization), conclusively shows, that when you focus on enhancing your strengths while applying damage control to your weaknesses, you will transform yourself and your organization.

This doesn't mean ignore weaknesses. But don't waste a lot of time, money, and effort trying to force performance from someone, who is never going to have a strength in a particular area. You are better off putting your efforts into finding ways to work around someone's weaknesses. 

For example, I have a client, a CEO, who has been successfully leading a thriving organization for some years. One of his weaknesses is strategic thinking. His leadership strengths are in communicating the vision in such a way that people are inspired to come together to achieve it. He is a master at building relationships with potential new clients and suppliers.

Rather than spending much time attempting to improve his capability in thinking strategically - he, rather wisely, surrounds himself with people who are naturally good at strategic thinking. He uses their strengths to help him guide his organization forward. And, he gives much more focus to building on and working to his leadership strengths.

Develop Strategies and Systems to Develop Your Strengths and Work Around Your Weaknesses

A well-grounded leadership assessment and development program will enable you and your people to use, grow, and develop your innate skills, talents, abilities. Your program should help you to put in place, strategies and systems to enable you to work around any weaknesses, that cause you to perform at a less than excellent level.

I'm a real fan of the Trimetrix profile. This profile enables you to understand your behaviors, your motivators and how well you are using your Emotional Intelligence. It should be the foundation of any leadership development program. Take a look at the Insights to Success Program, where we use the Trimetrix profile to help kickstart your review of your leadership strengths. 

Make Sure That Your People Love the Type of Activities You Have on Offer

When selecting people into your team, make sure that the activities they will be working on, are things that excite them. Not just what they are good at doing. I'm sure you know plenty of people, who are in occupations that their parents thought would be good for them, but their life force is focused elsewhere.

Now you may be thinking, that's all well and good, but it is impossible to have everyone working to their strengths all of the time. And that's true. You can't necessarily create each job so that people are only working to their strengths.

But if you can get them working to their strengths proportionally more of the time, this will engage and energize them ... just as it will do for you!

Enjoy this video from Marcus Buckingham as he shares how he came to be so passionate about the Strengths movement.