AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE the Positive
You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between”
Bing Crosby may have been on to something when he sang these lyrics by Johnny Mercer in the 1944 patriotic film, Here Come the Waves. Whereas in the past, much of psychology and organizational change initiatives focused on fixing what was “broken,” there is now a whole body of research that points to the effectiveness of building on strengths and competencies — focusing on “what’s working,” not “what’s broken.” In the human realm, this emphasis is called Positive Psychology; in the corporate world, it’s called Appreciative Inquiry.
In our work with individuals and organizations, we see the power of this positive emphasis — and, along with our clients — it awes us. During a recent Wunderlin Company workshop built around the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, Chip Keeling, VP of Corporate Communications for E. ON U.S. stood up and said to the group, “I used to say, ‘Don’t let X go to any more writing courses. She is already an excellent writer. Have her go to a workshop that addresses a developmental need.’ I now realize the folly of spending our very-limited training dollars trying to make improvements in areas of weakness. We need to focus our training budget on developing our talents into strengths — making our best writers better.”
In this issue of Changing Times, we share resources and techniques for building on your strengths and also on those of the people you manage, and we share some ways to build a strengths-based organization.
So, as Crosby sings, let’s:
“Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.”
Focus on Exercising Your Strengths
“The real tragedy of life is not that each of us doesn’t have enough strengths, it’s that we fail to use the ones we have.” — from Now, Discover Your Strengths
Ask most people what their strengths are and they have a hard time articulating them. Ask them about their weaknesses and they become experts. They spend untold time and effort trying to repair their flaws while their strengths are consistently underused and underappreciated.
In their book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton help individuals identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistently, excellent performance. Based on the Gallup study of over two million people, the authors introduce 34 dominant themes with thousands of possible combinations, and reveal how individuals can translate them into personal and career success. (The inside flap of the book’s jacket includes a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This web-based assessment analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes.)
Buckingham and Clifton advocate the need to become an expert at finding, describing, applying, practicing, and refining your strengths. The authors challenge their readers to adopt the two following assumptions and launch a strengths revolution in their own organizations:
1. Each person’s talents are enduring and unique.
2. Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strengths.
They believe that these two assumptions explain why great managers are careful to look for talent in every role, why they focus people’s performance on outcomes rather than forcing them into a stylistic mold, why they disobey the Golden Rule and treat each person differently, and why they spend the most time with their best people. In short, they propose, “these two assumptions explain why the world’s best managers break all the rules of conventional management wisdom.”
The authors encourage you to “look inside yourself, try to identify your strongest threads, reinforce them with practice and learning, and then either find or carve out a role that draws on these strengths every day.” They promise, “When you do, you will be more productive, more fulfilled, and more successful.”
How Full is Your Bucket?
Donald Clifton (one of the authors of Now, Discover Your Strengths) collaborated with his grandson, Tom Rath, to write How Full is Your Bucket This slim, upbeat book offers positive strategies for work and life. Organized around a simple theory of a dipper and bucket, the book teaches you how to increase the positive moments in your life — while reducing the negative. The theory goes like this: “Each of us has an invisible dipper. When we use that dipper to fill other people’s bucket — by saying or doing things to increase their positive emotions — we also fill our own bucket. But when we use that dipper to dip from others’ buckets — by saying or doing things that decrease their positive emotions — we diminish ourselves.”
As you read the book, you will discover the power of bucket filling in your own life.
Uncovering and Understanding Your Strengths
Before you can apply and practice and refine your strengths, you need to figure out what they are. We use a number of diagnostic tools to help our clients uncover and understand their strengths.
- We’ve already mentioned the web-based StrengthsFinder Profile that forms the core of the book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The profile uncovers your five signature themes - each of which contains the promise of a strength.
- Ever since founding The Wunderlin Company in 1992, we’ve been an advocate for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® — both Step I and II. We use MBTI® to help individuals gain a deeper understanding of themselves and how they interact with others. We find it to be a powerful tool for helping people transform themselves — improving how they communicate, learn and work.
- Right brain. Left brain. Whole brain. The Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) measures how individuals’ thinking preferences, or “brain dominance,” affect the way they work, learn, and communicate.
- 360° Feedback is literally an opportunity to receive feedback from all the groups of people with whom you work. (Picture yourself at the center of a circle.) Unlike a traditional performance evaluation, 360 feedback includes evaluative data from peers, direct reports, administrative associates, customers and any other group with whom you work directly. Most 360 instruments provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback and can be invaluable in forming a new perspective on areas of strength and opportunities for development. In a previous issue of Changing Times, we featured an article on the use of 360° Feedback in the coaching process. Click here to read that article.
- DISC Personal Profile System is personality testing profiling using a model of normal behavior. Based on the 1928 work of psychologist William Moulton Marston, it helps people explore behavior across four primary dimensions: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness.
- The Predictive Index Survey is a managerial assessment tool that provides insight into the natural workplace behaviors of prospective and existing employees, resulting in improved hiring decisions, team performance, overall communication, and workforce productivity.
We believe that you must know where you are now in order to know where you want to be in the future. You need to know where you excel and where you struggle. This rich and objective data becomes the platform for your professional development.
Strategies for Dealing with Your Weaknesses
We hope by now that we’ve convinced you to stop dwelling on your weakness and instead focus on your strengths. This doesn’t mean you can ignore your weaknesses; instead, we challenge you to find ways to manage them. Here are suggestions offered by the authors of Now, Discover Your Strengths:
- Get a little better at it. While this strategy may not be much fun, it is often the only workable one. Some activities are baseline requirements for almost any role. Authors Buckingham and Clifton cite such examples as communicating your ideas, or listening to others, or organizing your life so that you are where you need to be on any given day. The authors advise you to hunker down “or these weaknesses may well undermine all your great strengths in other areas.”
- Design a support system. Often people will come up with an idiosyncratic support system that serves as a crutch for one of their persistent talent weaknesses. The authors suggest that “it might be as straight-forward as buying a Palm Pilot to help you keep track of your life or as peculiar as imagining your audience naked in order to calm your nerves before a speech.” Whatever it is, if it works, go for it.
- Use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness. We often recommend this strategy to Wunderlin Company coaching clients. For example, one of our clients was a very effective sales person; his customers loved dealing with him because he was always so knowledgeable and a creative problem-solver. However, his internal staff found him very difficult to deal with. Eventually he learned to use the questioning and listening skills that worked so well with his clients on his internal staff to improve results and relationships.
- Find a partner. It takes a strong person to ask for help. It requires a willingness to admit your imperfections. However, if you do, you can often find a complementary partner. Think of the “numbers-blind” entrepreneur who deliberately partners with a “numbers-mad” accountant, or the gene-splitting genius who sensibly seeks out a legal expert to secure approval for their miracle drug. Together, they are strong.
- Just stop doing it. That’s right. As a last resort stop doing it. Three outcomes may surprise you. First, how little anyone cares. Second, how much respect you can earn. And third, how much better you feel. The authors advise, “Confess that you have lost the battle with your unfixable weakness, and you may well win the trust and respect of those around you.”
Each of these strategies can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths. But no matter which strategy you use, advise the authors, “Never lose your perspective.” They explain, “These strategies do not transform your weaknesses into strengths. They are designed to help you manage around a weakness so that it doesn’t get in the way of your strengths.” Think of them as damage control.
Two Ways of Looking at Life
Martin S.P. Seligman, Ph.D. has spent more than 30 years researching the influence of optimism on our lives and developing techniques to help people rise above pessimism and the depression that accompanies negative thoughts and to build a life of rewards and lasting happiness.
In his groundbreaking national bestseller, Learned Optimism: How to change Your Mind and Your Life, Dr. Seligman shows you how to chart a new approach to living with “flexible optimism.” He advocates that optimism can be learned by practicing thought patterns that encourage it. In his book he provides step-by-step techniques designed to change your interior dialogue, allowing you to learn to be optimistic.
In Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Seligman explains that the way we habitually explain bad events indicates our explanatory style. This style reflects a habit of thought, learned in childhood and adolescence. It stems directly from your view of your place in the world. Do you think you are valuable and deserving (optimistic), or worthless and hopeless (pessimistic)? According to Seligman, there are three crucial dimensions to your explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.
Permanence: People who give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent. They believe that the bad events will persist and that they will always be there to affect their lives. If you think about bad things in “always’s” and “nevers,” chances are you have a pessimistic style. However, f you think in “sometimes” and “lately,” using qualifiers and blame bad events on transient conditions, you have an optimistic style. For example:
|
Permanent (Pessimistic) |
Temporary (Optimistic) |
|
“Diets never work.” |
“Diets don’t work when you eat out.“ |
The optimistic style of explaining good events is just the opposite of the optimistic style of explaining bad events. People who believe good events have permanent causes are more optimistic than people who believe they have temporary causes.
|
Temporary (Pessimistic) |
Permanent (Optimistic) |
|
“My rival got tired.” |
“My rival is no good.” |
Pervasiveness. While permanence is about time, pervasiveness is about space. Seligman explains it this way, “Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it — their job, for example, or their love life — is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels.” A pessimist often makes universal explanations for their failures and gives up on everything when failure strikes in one area. Optimists, on the other hand, will make specific explanations and may become helpless in that one area of their lives, yet go forward in the others.
|
Universal (Pessimistic) |
Specific (Optimistic) |
|
“All bosses are unfair.” |
“My boss is unfair.” |
Whether or not we have hope depends on these two dimensions of our explanatory style — pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.
Personalization. When bad things happen, Seligman explains, we can blame ourselves or we can blame other people or circumstances. People who blame themselves when they fail have low self-esteem as a consequence. People who blame external events do not lose self-esteem when bad events strike. On the whole, they like themselves better than people who internalize the blame.
|
Internal (Pessimistic) |
External (Optimistic) |
|
“I’m stupid.” |
“You’re stupid.” |
However the opposite is true when explaining good events. The optimistic style of explaining good events is again the opposite of that used for bad events. It’s internal rather an external. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people and circumstances.
|
External (Pessimistic) |
Internal (Optimistic) |
|
“My teammates’ skill…” |
“My skill…” |
If you tend to have a pessimistic exploratory style, you should be aware that you are likely to get depressed easily; you are probably achieving less at work than your talents warrant; your physical heath and your immune function are probably not what they should be; and life is just not as pleasurable as it should be. Seligman argues that by altering your explanatory style (i.e., learning optimism) you’ll be better equipped to cope with troubled times and keep them from propelling you toward depression.
Bringing Out the Best in Your Organization
Imagine bringing employees together to talk not about problems, but rather about their greatest successes. Imagine asking them “What is it like when our department/organization is working at its best?” And then listening carefully to the responses.
This process, of focusing on what’s working rather than on what’s broken, is called Appreciative Inquiry (AI). In our work with clients we employ it as a powerful mechanism for envisioning a desired future. Working backwards from their vision, they devise the changes that are required to achieve the vision. We have successfully added an appreciative inquiry approach to WorkOuts, leading to even better team results.
Appreciative Inquiry emphasizes and builds on a company’s strengths and potential. It is both pragmatic and hopeful. By asking the right questions, it seeks to locate, highlight and illuminate the “life-giving” forces of an organization’s existence. As David Cooperrider, Diana Whitney and Jackqueline Stavros explain in The Appreciative Inquiry Handbook, “Appreciative Inquiry seeks out the best of what is to help ignite the collective imagination of what might be.” A while back, we published an entire newsletter on this subject. If you want to read more about Appreciative Inquiry and how it might be used within your organization, click here.
Dig Deeper into Your MBTI® Preferences
Chances are, somewhere in your career past, you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) personality inventory. It helped you figure out your preferences on four dichotomies:
- Extraversion - Introversion
- Sensing - Intuition
- Thinking - Feeling
- Judging - Perceiving
The various combinations of these preferences result in 16 unique personality types. You might be an ESTJ or perhaps an ISFP or maybe an INFP. The results of your MBTI® inventory help you identify your natural patterns for accessing information, making decisions, relating to the outside world, and coming to closure.
What the results from the basic inventory are not able to do is explore and identify a person’s unique individuality within the type code that best describes his/her pattern. The MBTI® Step II instrument accomplishes this. Recently we have been administering and interpreting the Step II inventory, providing coaching clients the opportunity to dig deeper into their preferences.
In the MBTI® Step II each of the four dichotomies are composed of five facets; the facets explain the uniqueness of the individual in greater detail, and serve to identify the differences that are experienced between two persons of a given type.
For example, a person who has an overall preference for Extroversion exhibits preferences on the five facets: initiating, expressive, gregarious, active, and enthusiastic. An introvert will exhibit varying strengths in the following facets: receiving, contained, intimate, reflective, and quiet. For each, an individual may be stronger in some facets than others.
If you want to learn more about Step II and how it might help you target areas of personal strength that are clear and specific, click here.
Want to Build a More Positive Approach?
If these approaches intrigue you, we would be delighted to work with you to define the optimal approach to introducing them to your organization, be it via Appreciative Inquiry in a large group, a StrengthsFinder, or an MBTI® workshop, or executive coaching. One of our values is looking for the best in people, situations, and organizations. We’d be honored to partner with you in the spirit of that value. Please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.
In addition, the resource page of our web site features articles, books and web links that we find helpful in understanding how to build on strengths and how to develop strengths-based organizations. Click here to see what we recommend.
You may want to consider attending our newest Wunderlin Company workshop, Discover Your Strengths & Put Them to Work. This workshop for teams and work groups is built around the book Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. Prior to attending, you’ll take the StrengthsFinder Profile which will identify your five most powerful signature themes. Time will be spent at the workshop discovering the source of your strengths and how to manage them.