Read this if you're in the mood for: Thinking about your career, whether you're exploring different opportunities or wondering about that elusive "perfect job". Even if you are content with your current position, it is always beneficial to look at things from another point of view.Ultimately, this book may frustrate you as you realize that only in an ideal world with an ideal job with an idea manager with an ideal alignment of the planets (you get the point...this is a consultant speaking after all), will you have the opportunity to fully utilize your strengths.
Staying true to the subtitle of the book, which is Six Powerful Steps to Achieving Outstanding Performance, this book reads like a six week training course where each chapter represents a week of assignments since just reading a book (or, blogging about it) will not change your situation - only focused execution will do so.
This makes the "course" more manageable and provides you more time to really consider your true strengths and how often these strengths are being utilized.
Refreshingly, The Point Is Not To Change
Unlike other books providing advice, Go Put Your Strengths to Work does not try to change you. Rather, the book acknowledges that as you grow, you become more of who you already are and attempting to change this is not a productive use of energy or effort.
Similar to Betheny Frankel's distaste of the word "should" since it represents "Normal" noise, Buckingham states that "[s]hould-ing is a by-product of our cultural obsession with being well rounded and the prevailing corporate demand that we capitalize on our so-called areas of opportunity."
Instead, we should focus on recognizing our strengths and weaknesses, taking ownership to communicate these strengths and weaknesses, and creating a plan to maximize strengths and downplay weaknesses.
And, if you tend to be aware of others who are stronger at your strengths like I am, "...what of it?" Buckingham asks. "You can't control how good someone else is, and you can't control what anyone else thinks of you." So, get over it.
Know Thyself
The secret to a better you, whether personally or professionally, is that you have to work at it. Self-awareness is only part of the equation - most people have a general idea of their strengths and weaknesses, but serious thought is needed to precisely identify true strengths and weaknesses.
Buckingham provides good instructions on getting at these truths with the three C's - capture, clarify and confirm. Following his instructions, which accounted for one week of the six week program, I was able to identify and detail my core strengths.
(And, I am sure I would have been able to do the same for my weaknesses if I had stuck to the program... Not surprisingly, one of my weaknesses is impatience for results.)
The exercises are quite eye-opening. Like everything else, true strengths and weaknesses are determined based on how they make you feel. For example, you may be highly skilled at balancing accounting statements, but if it does not make you feel empowered or excited, what's the point?
Merely being good at something is not good enough when it comes to fulfillment. Buckingham defines true strengths as things that make you feel strong, powerful, passionate, enthusiastic, and confident. These are a lot of feelings to ask for and that's why you really need to consider what your true strengths are.
Likewise for weaknesses, weaknesses are not just things that you are not good at, but things that makes you feel weak, frustrated, drained, and despondent.
It's Always About Communication
After the thoughtful part of knowing thyself and working through your feelings, comes the universal challenge of communication.
"To reach outstanding levels of performance, you must stop tiptoeing. You must learn how to express - using unambiguous words and examples - what strengthens you and what weakens you." You must be able to communicate strengths without bragging and weaknesses without whining.
The art of expressing oneself using "unambiguous words and examples" is actually a useful art that should be applied to every aspect of your life.
According to Buckingham, "[s]o if you find yourself thinking "My manager just doesn't understand me," the best advice is to get over it. She'll never truly understand you.
The burden falls on you to understand yourself in as much detail as possible, so that you can then go to her and describe vividly which activities and situations will draw the best out of you, and which won't."
Similar to when you find yourself upset that your boyfriend or family do not understand you, you need to realize that it is your job to understand yourself and be able to communicate and provide instructions for how others are to understand you.
Strengths and Weaknesses Tools
Tools to discovery your strengths and weaknesses include simple observation exercises and sets of interview questions with clever titles such as: FREE (Focus, Release, Educate, Expand) and STOP (Stop, Team Up, Offer Up, Perceive).
These interview questions are designed to guide you in determining solutions to FREE up your time to spend on your strengths and STOP spinning your wheels on tasks that weaken you.
Part of change includes reviewing the initial impetus for change every few months and recalibrating if necessary. Buckingham provides a measurement tool so that you can track and measure progress as you work on putting your strengths to work, but a unique code is required to access the tool online.
Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of a library book is that the unique code will most likely be used up by the time the book reaches you.
For those who do not possess a lot of work experience or are in a midst of a career change and trying to determine what their strengths are, there is an online strengths assessment test that is part of the book. If you are reading a library book like I did, a unique, one-time use access code is required and can be purchased here - http://www.strengthstest.com/strengths-tests/strengthsfinder-20-access-code.html.
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| One of many of Peter Drucker's works. |
This book builds upon Peter Drucker's 1966 The Effective Executive, which describes an effective executive as someone who builds on strengths - one's own strengths as well as the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinate.
The premise of the movement is that a person or organization will excel only by amplifying strengths and not by fixing weaknesses.
Yet, people and corporation focus on improving weaknesses at least once a year during performance reviews.
This will prove to be a fruitless effort as underlying personalities do not change so if something weakens you and you just don't like doing it, you may get better at it, but you will not excel at it.
Another interesting way to view strengths and weaknesses is to look at the relationship between success and failure. Success and failure are not opposites so looking at failures for lessons learned will not help to achieve success. You need to study success to learn about success.
Similarly, looking at and improving weaknesses will not lead to increasing your strengths.
Not So Good As A Library Book
As mentioned earlier, this book does not work that well as a library book since the self-assessment test that is part of this book require a unique code to access. As part of the TMBC empire though, you can purchase an access code.
(Buckingham knows how to make a buck. He has founded The Marcus Buckingham Company that offers consulting, tests, etc. services. Even his book has messages throughout that point you to his online services, the majority of which require an access fee. It's a bit of a hard sell, which I found off-putting.)
However, if you have enough work experience and self-awareness to have a good idea of what your strengths are, you do not need the online assessment test.
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