SMART SEQUEL IN THE 'STRENGTH MOVEMENT'

Training & Development, Mar 2007 by Painter, Darin

SMART SEQUEL IN THE 'STRENGTH MOVEMENT' Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance By Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 320 pp., $30)

Reviewed by Darin Painter

Many business leaders and trainers assume excellence is the opposite of failure, and that a deeper understanding of one can bring about a similar understanding of the other. That's why organizations study unhappy customers to Learn about contented ones, and managers responsible for performance reviews probe employees' weaknesses to learn how to make them excel.

That's "bloody crazy, chaps," Britishborn Marcus Buckingham might say. Widely considered one of the world's leading authorities on employee productivity, the Cambridge-educated author and speaker believes companies are much better off when they focus on cultivating employees' strengths rather than improving their weaknesses. Armed with perspective from his 17 years as a lead researcher with the GaIlup Organization, Buckingham developed that idea with co-author Donald O. Clifton in a trio of bestselling books: First, Break All the Rules (1999); Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001); and The One Thing You Need to Know (2005).

Those books confirmed Buckingham as a leader in the positive psychology "strength movement," which asserts a premise that flies in the face of conventional training and development: that the only thing people learn from mistakes is the characteristics of mistakes. Study unproductive teams, the author notes, and you soon will discover that teammates argue a lot. But study successful teams, and you'll discover they argue just as much. To find the secrets of a great team, you have to investigate what's going on between the arguments.

To find sharp, practical advice for achieving outstanding performance on the job, you have to read what's inside Go Put Your Strengths to Work, an articulate, introspective, 320-page book that reads like a sequential, how-to plan for maximizing your strong suits.

The book is a business sequel, but unlike so many of them, it doesn't gloss over the critical premise of its predecessors-that readers must first determine their true strengths. Using an ID printed on the inside back of the book jacket, readers begin by taking a 15-question online survey that measures their success on 34 themes of talent and yields a Strengths Engagement Track (SET) score that reveals how engaged they are with their strengths.

From that clever starting point, the book's structure is smart and entertaining, as it moves readers through a six-step (or six-week) experience that focuses on one main question: How can readers actually apply their strengths for maximum success at work? Mixing compelling research with interesting case studies and anecdotes, Buckingham shows them how to seize control of their assets and essentially rewrite their job descriptions under the noses of their bosses.

Some positive thinking books tutor through hyperbole. Go Put Your Strengths to Work shows us "Heidi," who readers see rising through the ranks at a hotel, then experiencing what most employees encounter, such as promotions and setbacks. Readers will identify well with her and other examples of driven, business-savvy, experienced workers who move from burnout to triumph, thanks to embracing the principles, practices, and structured exercises Buckingham describes.

The book's most potent section is Chapter 3 (entitled "Free Your Strengths"), which informs readers why many employees have given up on the notion that they'll be able to showcase their strengths at work. In the chapter, they learn strategies for volunteering skills to teams and become handy with two tools: one that helps them generate ideas about effective ways to contribute and another that puts these ideas into practice. Chapter 5 also is important, as it succinctly describes how and why to approach a manager to talk about the importance of creating a strength-based culture.

Readers who are leery of authors who use acronyms to illustrate concepts might cringe when they learn how to "FREE" themselves to make the most of talents (by Focusing, Releasing, Educating, and Expanding) or how to look for the "SIGNs" of a weakness (analyzing lack of Success, Instinct, Growth, and Needs), but even these parts of the book are replete with insightful examples and engaging interactivity.

Calling Buckingham a positive thinker is an understatement, but labeling him a Polyanna is inaccurate. A few statements he writes are indeed flowery: "Whatever potential your strengths possess, the world will come to see it, and your performance, and your career and the significance of your contribution will be forever changed." But the book never wavers from being straightforward and pragmatic.

Buckingham's goal is to get readers to not only join the strength movement, but also to do something about it during working hours. His previous books called out a revolutionary concept; this one is a call to action.

Go Put Your Strengths to Work is terrific-worthy of the rare four-cups-of-coffee rating.