One more time—focus on your strengths

People & Strategy, Sept, 2008 by Anna Tavis

POINT

Marcus Buckingham

Author, independent consultant and speaker

The Inconvenient Facts

Study performance within any organization and you discover consistent and meaningful differences in performance among teams doing exactly the same work. Unit profitability, individual productivity, employee retention, customer satisfaction, an employee's likelihood to have an accident, to sue, or to steal--all these vary significantly within organizations.

We don't hear much about this range because it implies a lack of control and unpredictability, and for most organizations, particularly publicly traded organizations, lack of control and unpredictability are perceptions they would rather avoid.

Nonetheless, the discovery reappears whenever research is done: Some teams consistently outperform other teams who are doing exactly the same work within the same organization.

This discovery forces leaders within organizations to confront two key questions:

a. What is causing this range in performance?

b. How can we create more teams like our best teams?

The answer to the first question is that, no matter what work the teams are doing, and no matter which organizations or countries they are doing it in, this range in performance is significantly influenced by whether or not the employees on the team believe their strengths are being called upon every day. It doesn't seem to matter whether the employees are "right" in identifying what their strengths are. What matters is simply whether the employees [eel that their strengths are in play most of the time.

This conclusion is drawn from a large body of research conducted over the last 15 years by the Gallup Organization. Gallup's methodology was straightforward. The researchers asked the employees in the high-performance and low-performance teams long lists of employee survey questions. Then they threw out all those questions where employees in both the high- and low-performing teams answered the same. Instead they focused on those very few questions where the high-performing teams strongly agreed and the low-performing teams did not.

After repeating this process across more than 2 million employees, tens of thousands of teams, hundreds of companies, and more than 20 countries, Gallup landed on 12 questions that showed the strongest positive correlations to team performance. (The complete list of 12 questions can be found on page 28 of the book, First, Break All The Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.) These questions measure the basic conditions that must be present for a team to excel. However, subsequent research reveals that one of these questions is more powerful than all the others. One of these questions shows the strongest and most consistent links to the performance of the team:

"At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?"

The teams where most of the employees answer Strongly Agree or Agree outperform their peer teams consistently and significantly.

Obviously, getting people to feel that their strengths are being used is not the only lever a team leader should pull to build a high performing team--the leader should, of course, set clear expectations, give people the materials they need to do their work, praise them when they excel, help each person learn and grow, and draw clear connections between the work of the team and the mission of the organization as a whole.

However, the master lever is getting people to feel they are playing to their strengths most of the time. Pull it, and everything else a team leader does to build a high performing team will be multiplied. Fail to pull it and every other action to improve performance will be diminished.

Why? Because the feeling that your strengths (whatever you happen to believe them to be) are not recognized and used undermines everything else. If you feel that the best of you is not called upon every day at work, expectations always will be unclear for you; praise, even when it comes your way, will be discounted; you never will feel that your leader truly understands you or cares about your growth and development; your motivation suffers, your resilience diminishes, your performance falls, and your sense of victim-hood ("No one here really gets me") rises.

Given this finding, the answer to the second question, "How can an organization build more teams like the best teams?" now becomes: "How can we build more teams where each person feels that his or her strengths are understood and used every day?"

At present, organizations have shown themselves to be surprisingly ineffective at grappling with this question. The last five polls of nationally representative samples of the working population of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, India and China reveal that none of these countries has more than 12 percent of workers who believe that they play to their strengths at work most of the time.

Repeated surveys within individual companies reveal a similar figure. Of course, when this research is conducted with a specific company, you discover a significant range--on some teams more than 80% of people say they play to their strengths most of the time, while on other teams, teams that are doing exactly the same kind of work, 0% say they do. But those teams where the majority says they play to their strengths still outperform those teams where the majority says they don't.