In Asian philosophy, the concept of yin yang is used to describe how “seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn” (Wiki, 2012).

The central idea is that Yin Yang are not opposing forces, but complementary opposites that interact within a greater whole to give it strength and balance.

Similar to this ancient Asian principle, we believe that development is very much about balancing two opposite and interdependent dualities – optimising strengths and reducing the effect of performance risks, including weaknesses.

Prior to the strengths-based approach to talent development, the emphasis in employee development in most organisations was principally on overcoming deficits or weaknesses in individuals, teams and the organisation. Compelling research over the past 2 decades has shown the limitation of focusing only on remedying weaknesses, which tends to undermine engagement, productively and confidence, amongst other things. Positive psychology and the strengths practitioners have recommended redressing this deficit orientation by focusing on employee strengths and helping them optimise these to maximise performance outcomes, including wellbeing. This focus on employees’ strengths is all well and good, but weaknesses and other performance risks cannot be ignored, as many positive psychology and happiness ‘gurus’ might have you believe.

Achieving success is ensuring a fine balance between optimising individual and team strengths and reducing risks to performance, which we define as limiting weaknesses (as opposed to allowable weaknesses), overdone strengths (strengths that are used in the wrong way and cause unintended negative performance outcomes) and other sources of interference. These sources of interference include internal psychological blockers (e.g., poor self confidence and other limiting beliefs) or external blockers such as a culture that chokes or straightjackets the effective use of certain strengths. Only by understanding and engaging these dynamic and complementary development forces will the organisation be able to unlock the full potential and energy of its workforce.

James Brook, Director, Strengths Partnership Ltd

Dublin saw its first Strengthscope™ accreditation training take place on 1^st May 2012. The event was run by Alex Kotsos, an experienced consultant who joined forces with Strengths Partnership in January 2012 to bring Strengthscope™, a world leading strengths assessment suite,  and pragmatic strengths-based assessment and development solutions to Ireland.

The accreditation was a great success with a mix of delegates from corporate and public organisations as well as management consultants and occupational psychologists. The diverse mix of backgrounds played an essential part in the day’s success with people sharing knowledge and experiences to help further their understanding of using a strengths approach in the workplace.

On the day, Alex was joined by James Brook, co-founder and director of Strengths Partnership.The delegates were delighted to have the opportunity to meet one of the designers  of Strengthscope™ as well as learn about Strengths Partnership’s tools and solutions that are now available in Ireland.

Alex firmly believes that the time is right for this approach to increasing engagement and performance in Irish business; “the recession has hit Ireland very badly with over 300,000 jobs lost in just 4 years , a strengths approach helps organisations focus their employees on what they do best and keep them engaged and motivated during a difficult time.”

One of the delegates, a specialist in career coaching, felt strongly that by enabling someone to understand their strengths this would provide a constructive step to getting them back into the workplace. Delegates comments at the end of the day included: “feeling very positive about the knowledge gained on the day”; that the day itself was “relaxed and informative” and “I am a convert, I can’t wait to get stuck in and start using this with clients!”.

For more information on Strengthscope™ and Strengths Partnership in Ireland please contact Alex Kotsos at alex.kotsos@strengthspartnership.com

As part of Strengths Partnership’s expansion into South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, James Brook was recently in Cape Town and Johannesburg where he facilitated the accreditation training of Strengthscope™ for 20 psychologists and psychometrists from the JvR Group.

The JVR Group, comprised of Jopie van Rooyen and Partners, is a South African leading psychological assessment distributor, and JvR Consulting Psychologists, a premier psychological consultation firm in South Africa. JvR has the values, network and capability to ensure Strengthscope™ is a huge success in this territory.

The feedback from the delegates was extremely positive with all attendees rating the 
programme as excellent. Here are some of the comments we received from the delegates:

“I learned that what I thought was a weakness is actually a strength, if used optimally.”

“Practical application, focused on our specific team.”

“All the practical exercises were very useful and provided additional incremental value and learning outcomes.”

Positive psychology and the strengths-based approach have become largely synonymous with happiness in the popular press and literature. This is owing to the early focus of highly influential positive psychologists like Martin Seligman, who tended to focus on the “happiness” concept more than any other. Moreover, politicians, social scientists and economists have been grappling with how to make people and societies happier given the pressures of the post-industrialised era combined with the stark reality that improvements in income levels and living standards only have a limited impact on happiness.However, a central question that must be asked is whether happiness can and should be pursued as an end in itself and whether happier people are actually more productive at work.

Happiness is a highly subjective state that depends on many complex factors including our genetic make-up, our upbringing and our internal representations of our achievements and progress. Rather than being an end in itself, it is a by-product of success. So, if employers really want to help people to improve their sense of subjective well-being and happiness, there is no panacea or standard formula. They need to ensure they understand each employee’s aspirations, unique strengths and values and help people achieve their goals in a way that is meaningful to them and plays their strengths as much as possible. This will facilitate personal feelings of success and progress, and in all probability, higher levels of subjective wellbeing and happiness.

We are also of the opinion that a focus on happiness as an end in itself produces an insatiable appetite for an easy life rather than a culture of hard work, success and continuous improvement. When taken to the extreme, this fuels an “entitlement mindset” marked by high levels of complacency, passivity and work-shy behaviour; pleasurable pursuits become more important than work, mental stretch and learning. In other words, focusing on making employees happy can actually undermine productivity and longer-term engagement.

In our view, the real value of the strengths approach is to enable employees and teams to unleash their natural strengths, energy and full potential. Hopefully this progress towards self-actualisation will result in greater levels of happiness and emotional wellbeing, however, sometimes it does not. Whether it does depends on the unique psychological makeup of the individual and how they perceive their progress, success and work environment.

James Brook, Director, Strengths Partnership Ltd

Often, when I was working for a well-known US-based Company leading a team of recruiters, we would discuss what was the best way to hire fantastic people, those who would not only do a great job, but who would love to do it as well – as I write this, it reminds me that our Employer Branding tag line was actually ’Love What You Do’! Because that is every hiring manager’s challenge isn’t it? Just because the candidate has given great answers to the several tricky competency based questions, it unfortunately does not mean that they will love the job.

We often hired people who really wanted to join the Company to get a foot in the door, but their ulterior motive was to then focus on the next level up. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with ambition, in fact we loved to see it, but when the person has a clock ticking in their head counting down to ‘their next promotion’ rather than really wanting to do the job they have been employed to do – it’s a problem. Joining as a Store Manager, but really wanting to be an Area Manager instead, would be an example.

So how do you assess whether someone is really energised by the job they have applied to do? It’s a question I’m asked frequently by Companies wanting to provide exemplary service, they put so much effort into finding all the evidence of how the candidate has done this in the past, why would it go wrong? Well, if the candidate is ‘just looking for job’ as opposed to really wanting the job role and all the challenges it brings, it is very likely that they will become disengaged. It stands to reason doesn’t it? If you don’t love working in a service environment, or have a passion for providing great customer service, then each day will become very draining, and guess who suffers? I would say it would be the customer, the Company and potentially the employee.

If only it were that simple I hear you cry! Well it can be! Strengths focused interviewing can provide the missing piece of the jigsaw when it comes to recruiting. Strengths are the things that we are likely to be good at, because we are really energised by them. So if we align the strengths to the key requirements of the role, it stands to reason that if we recruit against these, we will have a much higher degree of success in finding the right people.

We are not suggesting by the way that we throw competency based interviewing out with the bath water, not at all, the ability to do the job is equally important, but by measuring what a candidate loves to do, can provide crucial additional information, and lead to decisions that are right in the long-term for the customer, the Company and the employee.

Alison Warner, Consulting Partner, Strengths Partnership

Evidence is mounting that the notion of ‘talent’ – a gift bestowed upon us at birth (or long before) – is reaching the end of its shelf life.  Where once there was a common belief that no matter what we did, our ‘innate’ talents and gifts would respond little to practice, development and stretch, many researchers and writers are now arguing that the opposite is true – that it is only when we stretch our strengths that we are able to achieve excellence and ultimately, mastery.

Carol Dweck speaks of ‘fixed-‘ versus ‘growth-mindset’ as a way of capturing the difference between people who are able to achieve excellence as a result of learning from failure and setbacks versus those who achieve a moderate level of skill but then seek to protect their position, choosing not to stretch further for fear of failure.  Daniel Coyle in ‘The Talent Code’ describes the vital role of practice in developing musical and sporting excellence, citing neurophysiological evidence of myelination of targeted neural pathways to improve speed of development – the bottom line is that deep practice makes all the difference between being world-class and being a moderate achiever.  Malcolm Gladwell in ‘Outliers’ talks of the famed 10,000 hours (practically speaking, about 10 years) of practice that is required before excellence can be attained, citing many of the world’s most successful business-people and sports-people as evidence for his hypothesis.  Matthew Syed, in ‘Bounce’, builds on Gladwell’s work and develops a very powerful argument for the central role of practice in achieving excellence in all walks of life, so thoroughly debunking the ‘myth’ of talent.

The time seems to have come for us to recognise that making the opportunity for practice is not just desirable, but essential, if we are to attain excellence in what we do.

Dr. Paul Brewerton, Director, Strengths Partnership Ltd

Preceding the successful launch of Strengthscope™ in the USA and Ireland, our world-leading assessment tool first reached Australia in 2011. Strengths Partnership enjoys a fabulous relationship with leadership consultants HCI, who are exclusive distributors for Strengthscope™ across Australia.

To further promote the strengths approach and Strengthscope™ in Australia, Dr Paul Brewerton was recently Down Under speaking at a number of events, focusing on strengths-based leadership and talent development and on how companies all over the world can achieve business success and move from good to great through these pragmatic solutions that optimise performance and help translate strengths into results.

Here are a few highlights and photos from some of the events that took place last week in Australia.

Leveraging Strengths and Talent Seminar – HCI event presented in partnership with the American Chamber of Commerce.

This event took place on the 27^th March at the Melbourne Business School, where 35 delegates learned about this refreshing approach to leadership and talent development, how to leverage learning and development interventions to create resilient and future-focused organisations and also why the investment in leadership development may not be delivering a return. Dr. Paul Brewerton co-facilitated the event with Meena Thuraisingham, author of ‘Derailed!’.

In the following days, Dr. Paul Brewerton spoke at a number of other events, namely at the University of Melbourne Business School, (event organized by the International Coaching Federation), where 35 coaches learned about the STRONG Business Coaching™ process; and the Organisation Development Australia, where 50 delegates learned more about strengths in personal and organisational development.

Dr. Paul Brewerton was also present at the Australian Human Resources Institute, Adelaide chapter, where he shared with around 50 delegates an introduction to strengths in organisations and how it can help today’s leaders in building high-energy, performance-optimised workplaces, with performance management systems, processes and practices that stretch people’s strengths and raise their contribution, positive energy and confidence.

If our strengths (not our weaknesses) are our greatest opportunities for development and growth, a suggestion that is gaining increased currency in business circles, how should we overcome our natural modesty in describing our strengths to others? One of the challenges of a focus on strengths is the word itself – if we are to take a ‘strengths-focused’ approach to our development at work, this presents us with a dilemma – the need to acknowledge and then to accept that indeed we have strengths, and that it is these strengths which make us different from others.  But for many people, this idea can cause a sense of discomfort: does this mean they have to risk sounding over-confident or even arrogant in describing the strengths they have? Or worse, maybe if they acknowledge their strengths to others, they will be setting themselves up for falling short or failing; after all, ‘pride comes before a fall’.

In our work on strengths, we find that our definition of the term neatly sidesteps some of these concerns – we define strengths as underlying qualities that ‘energise’ us, so being closer in nature to intrinsic motivators than to skills and competencies.  Indeed, our strengths may provide the ‘engine’ for us to be better able to deliver the competency requirements of our role.  People tend to find that this definition enables them to ‘own’ their strengths without fear of criticism or reprisal.  After all, their strengths are the things they love and enjoy doing most of all.

In summary, if we are to get value from the approach, we first need to pinpoint our strengths and then to acknowledge and accept that these natural ‘energies’ can set us apart from others and bring us great joy, fulfilment and a sense of empowerment.  By this definition, anyone should be able to describe their strengths with passion and enthusiasm.

Dr. Paul Brewerton, Director, Strengths Partnership Ltd

This is the last post from the blog series about the Strengths Advantage™. You can catch up on the other four by clicking on the following links:

#1 In order to pave the way for success, the organisation needs to attract the right people from the start.

#2 In order to find exceptional performers, the organisation needs to select & assess talent through strengths-focused selection processes.

#3 In order to ensure new hires deliver exceptional results, the organisation needs to optimise and coach talent through effective induction and performance management programs.

#4 In order to build and energise peak performing teams, the organization needs team effectiveness interventions that foster high energy, agility and productive habits.

This week we discuss the fifth reason why you simply can’t afford to ignore this approach:

#5 In order to develop and retain talent, the organization needs the right career & succession and leadership development interventions.

The Strengths Advantage™ incorporates talent development centres, career/transition coaching and the Strengths for Success™ development programme to help participants understand their unique formula for success – the combination of strengths, skills and abilities – and how this can be aligned with business goals and further developed. These programmes also help people to stretch their strengths so they move beyond their comfort zone and learn how to adapt their strengths and style to perform effectively regardless of the situation they find themselves in.

The Strengths for Success™ programme uses a variety of learning methods (including experiential workshops, peer coaching, psychological profiling and knowledge sharing) and focuses on developing improved awareness, agility a strong personal brand and building  personal responsibility for performance improvement and career development. This programme also focuses on developing personal strategies and practical techniques to reduce the risk of negative outcomes arising from weaknesses and overdone strengths..

As part of developing and retaining talent, the Strengths Advantage™ also includes leadership coaching, coaching circles and the StrengthsAccelerator™ Leadership Programme, our innovative, challenging 12 week leadership development programme that is designed to accelerate the strengths and capability of current and future leaders.

The StrengthsAccelerator™ transforms leaders and produces exceptional results. Organisations aiming to accelerate the confidence and capability of future leaders will benefit significantly from this programme designed to fast-track high potential mid-managers into key leadership roles.

What do you think? Leave your comments in the box below.

This is the fourth of a five-post blog series about the Strengths Advantage™. You can catch up on the first three here:

#1 In order to pave the way for success, the organisation needs to attract the right people from the start.

#2 In order to find exceptional performers, the organisation needs to select & assess talent through strengths-focused selection processes.

#3 In order to ensure new hires deliver exceptional results, the organisation needs to optimise and coach talent through effective induction and performance management programs.

This week we discuss the fourth reason why you simply can’t afford to ignore this approach:

#4 In order to build and energise peak performing teams, the organization needs team effectiveness interventions that foster high energy, agility and productive habits.

Peak performing teams arise when they are able to successfully combine their strengths with positive team disciplines and habits.

Strengths Advantage™ incorporates our innovative  StrengthscopeTeam™ profiling system to help build high energy, productive and agile teams.

StrengthscopeTeam™ helps the team leader and team understand not only the strengths each team member brings to the team, but also how well the team applies well-researched team habits productively to translate these strengths into results. It also provides high quality input on performance risk factors including weaker areas and overdone strengths and target areas for skill building for the team.

To create high energy, performance optimized workplaces, the Strengths Advantage™ approach includes solutions-based change interventions supporting the human aspects of change and raising engagement, productivity and commitment, whether the change is systems-wide or involves only a small part of the organisation.

Our ENABLE Transitions Framework™ is based on the well-established Appreciative Inquiry organisation development approach and provides a practical and strengths-focused approach to support change requirements. Significant experience has shown that this approach releases positive energy, commitment and strong outcomes during periods of change, preventing costly productivity dips and declining morale.

What do you think? Leave your comment in the box below.