One more time—focus on your strengths

People & Strategy, Sept, 2008 by Anna Tavis

However, overall, the data are unequivocal: Organizations do a poor job of addressing the single most important driver of team performance.

Let's restate this positively: Those organizations, which succeed in identifying, focusing and deploying the strengths of each employee, will immediately gain a significant competitive advantage. They will be more attractive to talent; and they will accelerate turning this talent into sustained performance.

The Performance Management Implications

Thus, to build high-performance teams, organizations need an integrated human capital system that is designed explicitly to make people feel their strengths are being called upon at work.

In the end, this integrated system will include the way the organization

--recruits people;

--selects people;

--conducts performance reviews/ appraisals;

--plans succession and readiness for advancement;

--compensates people; and promotes people.

This is too much to tackle all at once.

In an ideal world, and following the practice of every professional sports team the world over, the best place to start would be with the recruiting and selection systems. Hiring the best makes everything go easier. However, in the world of large organizations you rarely have the luxury of filling an empty roster from scratch. Nor do you have the time to wait until candidates from your new strengths-based recruiting and selection system have filled your entire team.

Instead you are compelled to play the game right now, and to win it with the team you have. Given your situation, the best place to start is with your performance system.

Your performance system--the ritual of goal setting, rating and coaching that happens between each employee and his or her manager--is your pivot point. Here, during these regular conversations, is where you can make the best of the team you already have. Here is where you can instill across the entire organization the same strengths-based approach to performance. Here is where you can accelerate turning each employee's strengths into performance. Here is where you can best collect the information for identifying where each person should fit within the organization, both today and into the future, and so here is where you'll collect the information you need for accurate teambuilding and succession planning.

Here, finally, is where you will see the greatest and fastest turnaround.

Why? Because the performance system in most organizations is among the least productive and least popular of organizational rituals. It tends to be disappointing to the employees, frustrating to the managers, and nets little productive output for the organization. It is the equivalent, one might say, of a visit to a bad dentist: Before it happens, you don't look forward to it; while it's happening, you wish it were over; and when it's done, you rarely get the outcomes you wanted.

Five Flaws

What is wrong with most performance systems?

1. They are remedial. Either implicitly or explicitly, they communicate to the employees that the best way to increase their performance and their chances of promotion is to identify their areas of greatest weakness and work on improving them.