In my latest quarterly meetings I’m sharing the concepts from a phenomenal book. “Now Discover Your Strengths,” by Marcus Buckingham. It changes how people look at their own growth and development. The book works from a couple of essential rules.

First, we tend to be obsessed with our weaknesses and try to improve on them. The reality is that in any area where we’re truly weak, we can climb from pathetic up to really bad. So if you’re not good at math, you’ll never be good at it, no matter how hard you try.

Second, there’s a big difference between a skill and a strength. Many people spend time using skills, but not achieving peak performance. Buckingham’s definition of a strength is something you’re pulled toward and want to do. When you’re doing it, you’re highly engaged. You’re curious about how you can do it better. When you’re finished, you feel energized and want to do it again. If you look at your workday through that filter, you’d probably put your focus in different areas.

For example, I’m a person who’s good with numbers and finance, statistics and so forth. Although this is a skill of mine, if I spent all my time crunching numbers for a company, it would drain me. However, if you give me a chance to work with a challenging CEO or leadership team of a company, I’ll be there in a second. And even though I’ve worked hard, when I’m done I’m energized and want to do more. That’s a strength.

In an ideal situation, you should spend 80 percent of your time playing to your strengths, and spend 20 percent polishing your skills so they’re reasonable. This can create a new environment for growth. According to Buckingham, less than 20 percent of us get to play to our strengths.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

Are there areas that your company can focus its training to develop employee strengths? Where can you leverage the desire to improve strengths, so you come away with a net energy gain?

It is one thing to look at how to cut costs and survive the recession – here is another angle…make it a time to build your market share!

Gulfnews: Acer looks to capitalise on recession

 

•  Where could you be getting caught up in your own success in away that could lead to your demise?
• What can you do to get a good reality check?

Two weeks ago I came back from Ensenada, Mexico on a trip to build a house for a family of nine who couldn’t afford it. I took my son who’s six and my dad with me, and it was an amazing experience. We stayed in an old hotel room with five bunk beds in it. Now, people give money to charities and that’s good. But I saw that when you can stretch yourself out of your comfort zone to give, it’s questionable who really benefits from the act. Is it the other person, or it is you? From what I experienced, I think both.

I got started much closer than Ensenada. In my hometown of Vancouver, the homeless people come to the Downtown East Side to survive the Canadian winters. A few friends and I wanted to help them directly. We sent an e-mail and a dozen people showed up to give out blankets and gloves to the East Side people at Christmastime. Two magical things happened. The first time we got onto the streets, we quickly realized these people felt more like a community than any neighborhood I’d lived in.

The second thing is that these people told us they didn’t really need blankets—they needed socks. By the time we did this four years later, we got together socks, gloves, hats, a thousand bags of these things to give out. It was all given away to people to needed it in just over 30 minutes.

We got out of our comfort zones to do this. Mexico was similar, a couple of days of building a house. I came away with these insights about both experiences.

 • We were helping people less fortunate, and that let us see how lucky we were in our own lives.

• We got to spend high-quality time with friends and family. It’s a very different experience doing charity work together than watching a movie or TV show.

• We met incredibly interesting people in an environment where almost anyone would be at their best.

 It changes how you feel about things, and what you see. Giving of yourself is about as equal to a win-win as is possible on this planet.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

Look at ways of giving that are not only extremely meaningful for you, but create a change or stretch within yourself and your family. What would you like to do, but aren’t quite comfortable enough to commit to?

In the book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins shows how every great company has a fundamental set of core values. At 3M, their core set of values includes “Value and develop our employees’ diverse talents, initiative and leadership.”

When Dr. Spencer Silver first invented the unique, repositionable adhesive that made Post-It notes possible, there was no one at 3M who could figure out a commercial application for the adhesive. Nine years later along came Art Fry, a new product development engineer at 3M who had a problem. Art was a tenor in his church choir. His bookmarks kept falling out of his hymn book. Not wanting to lose his place, Art came up with the idea to use Dr. Silver’s adhesive to coat a piece of paper that could be positioned over and over to mark each week’s choir music.

What made Fry’s inspiration come to life was his passion for the idea, which was supported by the entrepreneurial spirit which is at the core of 3M’s culture that values their employees’ initiative and leadership. Fry was also helped by an official “bootlegging” policy that let him spend 15% of his time on a project of his own choosing (another policy that promotes 3M’s core values).

There are now 600 Post-It products being sold in more than 100 countries.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:

Great companies have a defined set of core values that drives the culture and people of the organization to deliver value to their stakeholders. Focus energy on these areas of core values:

• Make sure that your core values are written down and visible to all employees
• Design your compensation and reward systems to align employee action with your core values
• Recognize those people who are outstanding at pursuing core values to deliver results (Art Fry was elected to the 3M Circle of Technical Excellence)

Are your people living by the core values of your company?