Go Put Your Strengths to Work: Six Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance

Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship, Jan 2008 by Mujtaba, Mustafa G

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: Six Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance Marcus Buckingham Free Press, (2007) 430 pages, Hardcover, $19.80

The key in increasing performance and productivity in the workplace is in making sure that one is prepared and empowered to do more of what he or she likes doing and consistently engaging one's strengths. Go Put Your Strengths to Work: Six Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance provides a clear vehicle for discovering personal and professional success through efficiency, effectiveness and productivity in the workplace. Instead of theorizing and lecturing, Buckingham (2007) provides a number of great reasons for putting one's strengths to work with practical examples and step by step guidelines in the book along with an internet component for surveys and videos to support the concepts of helping people become more productive, creative and focused on their goals. Besides capitalizing on one's strengths, people are also given encouragement and support to also stop their weaknesses or actions that weaken them or how their perceived.

Buckingham and his colleagues have designed the Strengths Engagement Track (SET), which is available to those who own a copy of the book at www.SimplyStrengths.com , to help track the reader's progress toward using his or her strengths and to pinpoint how engaged his or her strengths might be in the workplace. The interactive web survey can reveal how engaged a person's strengths are now and how engaged they will in the future. It is the continuous and focused engagement of a person's strengths that can create personal and professional success. The survey asks questions about ones mind-set and typical behaviors and, as a result, provides some conclusions. The Strengths Engagement Track survey provides a score, known as the Present dial, which reveals how engaged one's strengths are currently in comparison to a national representative population from the United States' workforce. This score is a measure of how well one is doing at living up to his or her potential. The Future dial score, representing a trend line, reveals how engaged one's strengths are going to be in the future. Besides individuals, teams can also take the survey and have a team score that can be compared in the future periods or years for progress. High performing individuals and teams tend to score high on both the Present and Future dials. High performing individuals have their strengths engaged and they know why and how to sustain these levels of engagement regardless of the circumstances surrounding them.

In Go Put Your Strengths to Work, Marcus Buckingham discusses the following concepts and offers practical tools to understand them:

* Using telltale signs to identify one's strengths.

* Taking specific steps each week to create one's desired job by shaping current tasks toward the activities that strengthen a person's potential and eliminating those that do not assist one in this direction.

* Doing certain tasks persuasively enough to make colleagues and bosses want to help put one's strengths to work.

* Behaving consistently and creating habits in life to stay focused on the strengths path regardless of the personal or professional changes that may impact one on a day-to-day basis.

* "Pushing" employees to be more productive by guiding them to their personal and professional strengths.

Go Put Your Strengths to Work is about exercising and identifying what is best and most effective for each person and applying these strengths in the workplace. Buckingham (2007, p. 17) encourages leader, managers, employee, and coaches to do away with the traditional "pull" behaviors and replace them with "push" discipline. With the "pull" approach, managers tell employees what is expected and what goals need to be achieved. On the other side, the "push" discipline is initiated by the employee taking personal responsibility for identifying his or her own strengths as well as weaknesses. Once these strengths are identified, one can take a stand for them, clarify and communicate them to one's colleagues, and seek support from everyone in the department toward them. In other words, the employee must take personal responsibility for pushing his or her strengths in the workplace and seeking more opportunities to use them in worthwhile projects and tasks. One must consistently speak out about one's personal values and strengths in order to create a high performing team or organization. As discussed by Buckingham (2007, p. 19), the six-step discipline for putting one's strengths to work are: busting the myth that fixing weaknesses is a good way to achieve high performance; getting clear about one's personal strengths and goals; freeing one's strengths and making work fun by getting involved in enjoyable tasks; stopping one's weaknesses from weakening one's opportunities; speaking up in regard to one's personal strengths to get more opportunities for doing what one enjoys doing; and building strong habits of being in control, feeling authentic, fulfilled, and valued by constantly staying focused and playing on one's strengths and staying away from activities that can drag one down the pessimistic path.