Mind the Gap

Our brains are hard wired to focus on the bad and ignore the good.  There is a good reason for this, as the human race started to evolve, we had to survive and in order to survive we had to constantly identify and magnify potential threats to our survival.  Today, this is less useful as it keeps pushing the brain to look for things that might go wrong.

This is why when we get feedback, we only hear the negative aspects or when we are asked about our strengths, most of us really struggle with this question as it is so much easier to share our perceived weaknesses or what we are not good at.

One of my development needs that came up time and again at my appraisal was that I needed to improve my use of Microsoft Excel.  So I went on numerous courses, sat down with people who were good at Excel, used online tutorials to improve my skills.  I learned enough to get by but the learning wasn’t sustained and what would take a colleague minutes to do would take me a lot longer.  If my manager had focused on my strengths and enabled me to develop these further and allowed my colleague who was exceptional at Excel and enjoyed it to focus on tasks requiring this level of detail, we would have been a much more productive team.

Not everyone is going to be good at everything.  We are unique, we have strengths in different areas and enjoy different activities.  If we can find out what our strengths are and tap into these, we will be more productive.

Kluger and Nir (2010) talk about the ‘Feed Forward Discussion ‘. We are more likely to improve if we attempt to build on our strengths, develop a deeper understanding of what we do well naturally and look for opportunities to develop, replicate and spread these successes.  People actually respond better to understanding their strengths rather than highlighting their gaps.

We know that people who use their strengths every day are much more likely to be engaged at work. So how do we focus on strengths more?

To help you identify your own strengths consider:

-What kind of activities give you a real buzz and time goes really quickly when you are doing them? These activities are likely to be playing to your strengths.

-What are the key moments in life where you’ve felt successful? Our strengths often have roots from our earlier lives and reflecting on our successes can give us valuable insights.

-Get feedback from friends or colleagues on what you do well. It’s sometimes hard to recognise strengths ourselves whereas other people can more easily describe your value.

To enable you to spot strengths in others:

-Give feedback to people on their achievements and what they do really well at without even trying.

-Notice the activities that seem to come naturally to those around you.

-Observe your new starters – what are the tasks they learn quickly? Often strengths are indicated by rapid learning.

-In conversation, when people are talking about a strength, they tend to be more engaged, passionate and you’ll notice a change in body language. Listen carefully and observe these changes to uncover people’s strengths.

StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Gallup is a fantastic resource you can purchase to enable you to identify your strengths.  Delve can support you with a coaching conversation based on this so get in touch at [email protected] to book in a session for you or your team.