So, I had an “aha” moment as I was sitting listening to Marcus Buckingham woo The Art of Management crowd last week: sometimes people with the best intentions can reek havoc on your career path.  Here’s what I learned:

Having been a disciple of Buckingham since reading his book “First Break all the Rules”, co-authored with Curt Coffman, I am completely enamored with the idea of strengths-based leadership. (If you’re wondering where Coffman is now, check his cool biz here.)

From 2000 on, I tried tirelessly to focus and clear on my own strengths and have “strengths-based” discussions with my direct reports.  I even worked in a consulting firm that embraced the “work to your strengths” philosophy and put a big emphasis on not fitting a “square peg into a round hole” and getting people into the “right seat on the bus”.

What I learned on Friday was that, for all this enthusiasm, I had only a partially correct view of what a “strength” really is.  I always interpreted that my strengths were partly what I enjoyed doing and was good at, but also what other people told me I was good at and what I got rewarded for (performance).  And here lies the problem.

What Buckingham pointed out was that when you’re using your true “strengths” you feel energized and engaged (not exhausted and depleted).  True strengths have less to do with your performance ability and more to do with the personal “juice” you get out of the experience.  In many cases, especially as you get more “seasoned” in leadership, you learn how to “manage” your weakness and can even get quite skilled at things that you don’t particularly enjoy doing.  For example, as a leader, I love the “big ideas” and hate having to wade around in the details of execution.  That being said, if you saw me in action you would think that I’m actually very good with details.  Which is very true… just don’t make me do it all day every day!

Buckingham suggested that we should call these things that we’re good at, that we don’t enjoy, anything BUT strengths.  Strengths are things are you love to do.  Here is a formula he provided to help you pinpoint those things that are truly your strengths:

• Success (A strength makes you feel effective)
• Instinct (You look forward to doing it)
• Growth (You are inquisitive about it, and it provides you with focus)
• Needs (You feel fulfilled when you’re in the task or have completed the task)

To help you begin to catalog the things that are your strengths, he suggested you try this exercise for a week:

Keep a diary and list all the activities that you’re doing in the day.  Jot them down as you do them (don’t try and reflect back at the end of the week).  Notice how you FELT when you were doing the activity.  Catalog your activities under two columns: 

I Loved the Activity

I Loathed the Activity 

The crucial element of the exercise is to clearly define what you loved or loathed about each activity.  Then, at the end of the week write a strengths statement and a weakness statement.  The example Marcus used was:

“I felt strong when I was interviewing Rosa.”  You then drill down to get really specific on what exactly about the situation made you feel strong.  His final draft became:  “I feel strong when I interview a person who excels at his or her job to explore why they excel.”

The key is to make sure it is an activity that YOU are doing, not something that is being done by someone else to you.  (eg: “I feel strong when I receive recognition from my boss.”)

Why not give it a try and see what you come up with.  In the next blog we’ll talk about how to STOP doing some of the activities that don’t play to our strengths.

Happy leading!

In a recent episode of the hit sitcom The Office on NBC, I noticed on Michael Scott’s bookshelf a copy of the 1999 best seller First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. In a nutshell, this book makes claim to the impressive impact that managers make on the overall level of engagement, loyalty, and commitment of employees to their organization; and in turn on the overall performance capacity of the organization. Employee engagement is created when managers are able to establish structure, stability, and direction while allowing for flexibility. Michael Scott, as much as I love you … I have to say you are falling way short in your ability to create an atmosphere that is conducive to building engagement. My advice – read the book and get your employees engaged!

For several years now, ‘employee engagement’ has been a hot topic in corporate  circles. It’s a bit of a buzz phrase that has captured the eyes and ears of business leaders around the world. While employee engagement is regularly talked about, it seems like few really are able to articulate the true essence of the topic, even less could create a clear picture of how they are measuring or building engagement in their organizations.

In 2006, The Conference Board published "Employee Engagement, A Review of Current Research and Its Implications". According to this report, twelve major studies on employee engagement had been published over the prior four years by top research firms such as Gallup, Towers Perrin, Blessing White, the Corporate Leadership Council and others. This is considered to be the foundation of understanding on the topic.

Each of the studies used different definitions and, collectively, came up with 26 key drivers of engagement. For example, some studies emphasized the underlying cognitive issues, others on the underlying emotional issues.

The Conference Board looked across this mass of data and came up with a blended definition and key themes that crossed all of the studies. They define employee engagement as "a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization, that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work".

In the practical application of employee engagement, we define it as, “The reciprocal relationship between an employee and their employer that defines the extent of loyalty, commitment, and satisfaction of the employee and the extent to which the employee contributes to organizational objectives.”

For Michael Scott to have a better chance at growing the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. he needs to do a better job of providing his team with structure, stability, and clear direction. In other words, give to the employees in anticipation that they will reciprocate with their full engagement.

More wisdom for managers from First, Break All the Rules:

1. Know what can be taught, and what requires a natural talent.

2. Set the right outcomes, not steps. Standardize the end but not the means. As long as the means are within the company’s legal boundaries and industry standards, let the employee use his own style to deliver the result or outcome you want.

3. Motivate by focusing on strengths, not weaknesses.

4. Casting is important, if an employee is not performing at excellence, maybe she is not cast in the right role.

5. Every role is noble, respect it enough to hire for talent to match.

6. A manager must excel in the art of the interview. See if the candidate’s recurring patterns of behavior match the role he is to fulfill. Ask open-ended questions and let him talk. Listen for specifics.

7. Find ways to measure, count, and reward outcomes.

8. Spend time with your best people. Give constant feedback. If you can’t spend an hour every quarter talking to an employee, then you shouldn’t be a manager.

9. There are many ways of alleviating a problem or non-talent. Devise a support system, find a complementary partner for him, or an alternative role.

10. Do not promote someone until he reaches his level of incompetence; simply offer bigger rewards within the same range of his work. It is better to have an excellent highly paid waitress or bartender on your team than promote him or her to a poor starting-level bar manager.

11. Some homework to do: Study the best managers in the company and revise training to incorporate what they know. Send your talented people to learn new skills or knowledge. Change recruiting practices to hire for talent, revise employee job descriptions and qualifications.

Engagement Summit

This two-day event is designed to build employee engagement through an experiential series of group activities and training modules.  Increasing employee engagement is about getting employees to be passionate, loyal, and committed to their organizations.

Throughout the Engagement Summit, we refer to the broad scope of data showing a positive relationship between employee engagement and business outcomes such as productivity, profitability, customer loyalty, and staff retention.  We also draw clear connections between the needs of your organization and the direct impact that employee engagement has on your organization.

Of primary importance for participants is to leave the Engagement Summit with an increased connection tot he organization and commitment to moving the organization forward.  Our encouragement to participants is to return to their organization and get others engaged in their jobs.  We begin this process by getting participants engaged!  The Engagement Summit is fun, yet full of information, tools, and resources that can be applied immediately.

Over the years I’ve been involved with leadership development from several perspectives:

Even during a recession, hiring, retaining and developing leaders is important.  You do not have to take it from me, just read George Buckley’s interview with USA Today published this week.  George Buckley has been the 3M CEO since 2005 and is cultivating an environment of growing leaders from within the company.   You can read the article at http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/advice/2009-05-17-buckley-3m-leadership_N.htm

Highlights from the article:

- Yes, the economy is in a recession but a company has to look to the future and develop tomorrow’s leaders today.

- “You can’t plant leadership in a person, but you certainly can enhance it in a person.”  Therefore, you have to hire people who have leadership potential and then develop them.  This doesn’t necessarily mean training them, but it means giving them the appropriate assignments to grow into more responsibility.

- On the question of, “Why not save money on leadership development and recruit top talent from others?”, Buckley answers, “I’d sooner own a fish farm than be reliant on catching a few fish.”  To have a fish farm, a company has to populate the pond with those who have demonstrated leadership potential.  This bodes well for a JMO.

- It is best to stay in positions approximately 4 years in order to experience the success AND failures.  This is inline with what the Gallup Poll reported in the book First Break All the Rules, which said it takes a minimum of 5 years to hit your stride and start making contributions.  Too often, JMOs are anxious to change positions every 18 months like they did in the military and once in a business career, former JMOs would be better served thinking about their career in 4-5 year increments in order to get the full experience from each position.

I was first attracted to this book by both the title, and the fact that it was co-written by Marcus Buckingham, a proponent of the ’strengths’ philosophy that I have embraced in the work place.

This is a deck of slides I have compiled for the Alt-MBA group that has spun out of Seth Godin’s Triiibes.

UPDATE:  Slideshare selected this as a featured presentation.  Nice to know it resonated with some.

With all of the strength-based leadership talk that has been going on lately I read an post by Dan McCarthy that made me realize you can’t just focus on strengths.

I have read Marcus Buckingham’s book First Break all the Rules, and I really enjoyed it.  Being my usual self I dove in and took what I learned from that book and tried to apply it.  The problem with focusing solely on your strengths is you never end up doing the hard work of changing the things you really don’t want ton but need to. 

I know I would rather focus on my strengths!  It makes me feel better about myself and I feel like I am more productive.  As a leader I cannot afford to just focus on my strengths.  If you are just a cog in the machine or in a factory you could just focus on your strengths.  But in leadership there is way more to it.  If I say organization is not one of my strengths and don’t focus on improving it then that will continue to hamper my abilities to be a great leader.

I know that overcoming adversity or tough circumstances makes you stronger than successes.  Don’t you think it is the same way with your weaknesses and strengths.  Strengths are like victories that feel great and you learn how good you are at things.  But weaknesses are like failures or defeats and once you come out of them you are a lot better off.

Several years ago, the late Don Clifton of SRI/Gallup created a way for us to identify and measure Program Director talents.

You may be familiar with this approach through books like “First Break All The Rules” and “Go Put Your Strengths To Work”.

Clifton’s team studied a group of the most successful PDs by observing their work and asking lots of questions.

The result was an hour long interview that we could use to evaluate PD skills. This became a fairly reliable way of identifying strong applicants for our openings.

One of the most interesting findings was how successful Program Directors talked about the station they heard in their head. In almost every case they described the station they wanted or heard in extreme detail.

Over the years, I’ve only really found a few PDs who talked about their station in this way. But in every case they were a breed apart from the average PD.

This type of talent often showed itself when the station was off track to the PD’s ears. Many of us seem to have an internal ’something’ that knows when the station is right and when it is not firing on all eight.

In my experience, a PD with this ability will be edgy and unhappy until the station is right to his ears.

Recently, I’ve been surprised by PDs who tell me they don’t listen to their station. They’re too busy.

What??

Frankly it shows. Many of these stations sound sloppy and unfocused.

I don’t think they’re too busy. Today’s software has made them lazy.

Automation and voice tracking is no reason to think that everything is running properly on your station.

These systems require tremendous attention to detail.

Every PD should make time to be a listener. It’s part of the job.

Spend time away from the station focused on the morning show or listening to the night talent. Have a notebook in hand and use it.

Even network shows need attention. Listen for the crossfades, liners, IDs–and how the whole package goes together.

Listen for the music mix. Make sure you are getting the tempos and textures you want all of the time. Sit with the log. Take notes.

Listen carefully to your imaging and talent presentation. Make sure the right message is on air often enough, in the right way.

Paul drew was famous for listening to KHJ all day with a transistor radio. Sony makes several models that cost under $25 that are perfect for this purpose.

The PD is responsible for every element on the air. Take the time to make sure all of them are working as intended.

Review the music log every single day before you load it to the automation system.

Review the entire log for music, spots, sweepers and voicetracks before leaving each night. Reposition tracks or add crossfades where needed. Be tight. Make it flow.

Pay attention to the smallest detail.

Take time to create systems that will make sure your station sounds right all of the the time.

No job in the world shows how well or how poorly you perform like that of Program Director. Your work is on display for all to hear 24/7.

Make sure you are making a great impression.

“As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness.”  Psalm 17:15

I discovered this verse in high school and it quickly became my life verse.  To me it speaks to that constant pursuit of being Christ-like – refusing to be satisfied until I awake in His likeness.

I think what I connected with in this verse is that idea of a constant pursuit, a striving, a desire to achieve.  Unfortunately I don’t always apply that relentless striving to the right things.  I wrote this in my journal last year:

I have this overwhelming, insatiable need for validation/to be acknowledged/to be right/to be taken seriously/to be valued.  So much so that I never lighten up/relax/let my guard down.  I always feel the need to prove myself.  It doesn’t matter what it is… work… house cleaning… exercise… decorating, etc.  Important or trivial I always have this underlying drive to prove myself.

Marcus Buckingham describes this as the striving talent of “achiever”.  In his book First, Break All The Rules he says this of achievers: “They may not have to win, but they do feel a burning need to achieve something tangible every single day.  And these kind of people mean ‘every single day.’  For them, everday – workday, weekend, vacation – every day starts at zero.  They have to rack up some numbers by the end of the day in order to feel good about themselves.  This burning flame may dwindle as evening comes, but the next morning it rekindles itself, spurring its host to look for new items to cross off his list.  These people are the fabled ’self-starters.’”

I wish that I applied my “achiever” nature as much to the pursuit of being Christ-like as I do to all the other things in my life.  It’s kind of humbling that I seemed to have more clarity on this back in high school than I do now as an adult. 

How about you?  What about your personality, taken to the extreme, creates imbalance in your life?  

I guess I’m in the mood to think about how we define the terms that we throw about so easily these days. Last post leader, this post engagement.

We are continually hearing about the poor state of employee engagement. Surveys show that only about 30 percent of the North American workforce is fully engaged. I don’t think I know of any organizations that aren’t working to improve engagement.

In 1999 Curt Coffman and Marcus Buckingham introduced me to the Gallup Q12 survey in their book First Break All the Rules. The Q12 are the 12 Characteristics that create a strong workplace. Covering resources, expectations, leveraging employee strengths, and more, the characteristics he laid out were, for my undefined definition, the characteristics that cause engagement.

But what exactly is engagement? How do you know if employees are engaged? Once again, I went back to Coffman to see what Gallup had uncovered:

In Follow This Path Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina provide a list of the traits of engaged employees. I think this list goes a long way, to explain what engagement means.

Engaged employees:

• Use their talents everyday.
• Demonstrate consistent levels of high performance.
• Show natural innovation and drive for efficiency.
• Intentionally build supportive relationships.
• Are clear about the desired outcomes of their role.
• Emotionally commit to what they do.
• Challenge purpose to achieve goals.
• Work with high energy and enthusiasm.
• Never run out of things to do, but create positive things to act on.
• Broaden what they do and build on it.
• Commit to company, work group, and role.

This is a list that fits my view of engagment. Based on what is listed here, would you say you are engaged?
Why or why not?