The gift that keeps on giving

Photo by Saquan Stimpson/monstersh aq2000’s

A few weeks ago I realized that a very good friend of mine’s birthday is coming up. I am really bad at buying presents, especially for women. So, I decided to enlist two other friends to help me with buying the gift. After I approached them, without me doing anything else, one came up with the idea, the other implemented it. Before I knew it, without really needing to do anything else, a great present was bought and given (including a card, which I signed a minute before we gave the present(. My friend was really excited with the present and it was a big success.

Now, this sounds a little like laziness on my side. I had to do some work that I was not good at (buying a present) and instead of doing it, I just made other people do it. But, when you think about it, what I did was actually to put into practice two very important concepts for managers:

The first one, is Use your strengths and manage around your weakness. In my e-book I quoted a paragraph from, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton book: “Now, Discover Your Strength“.

“…[Y]ou will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. This is not the same as saying ‘ignore your weakness’. The people we described did not ignore their weakness. Instead, they did something much more effective. They found ways to manage around their weakness, thereby freeing them up to hone their strengths to a sharper point. Each of them did this a little differently. Pam liberated herself by hiring an outside consultant to write the strategic plan. Bill Gates did something similar. He selected a partner, Steve Ballmer, to run the company, allowing him to return to software development and rediscover his strengths’ path…”.

I had a weakness in buying presents. I do not know how to do it and it is highly unlikely that I will ever learn. I do know how to manage, find the right people and bring them together. Sometimes, doing the work is not actually about doing the work.

The second one is “Get the right people on the bus” – this is a term I borrowed from Jon Gordon. Check out this quote:

“This principle of identifying the right people was echoed by the Director of Learning at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. He told me how the Ritz has saved millions of dollars by identifying the key characteristics, strengths and traits of each job/position at the hotel and then creating a benchmark that every potential employee is measured against. Utilizing a company called Talent Plus they interview each potential employee and then identify how they measure up to the benchmark of the position they are applying for. As a result they are better able to identify who the right people are for each job at the hotel”.

Sometimes, doing the work is not about doing the work, but about choosing the right people. Check out this inspiring example for how to implement this idea.  

So, as a manger, how do you choose the people you work with? How does their strength compare to yours?

Elad

The real you

Photo by Elven*Nicky

I was reading Marshall Goldsmith post on the Harvard Business review blog titled: “Do You Have an Excessive Need to Be Yourself?“. He talks about the fact that people use the excuse “That’s just the way I am!” to avoid tackling hard challenges and important tasks. He uses an example of a manager who avoided giving recognition to his employees because he felt like a phony and excused it by saying: “it’s just not me”. This is how Goldsmith ends the post:

Keep this in mind the next time you find yourself resisting change because you are clinging to a false — and probably pointless — notion of “me”

While I agree that many times the “That’s just the way I am!” thinking is used as an excuse, there is a difference between a “false — and probably pointless — notion of ‘me’” and an actual weakness. There are differences between inherent talents and skills or behaviours. While I agree that we should try and see if we can do things, we should be careful from falling prey to the notion that everybody can be good at anything. There is a difference between just recognizing employees and doing it all heartedly and with empathy.  The technical part, almost everybody can do. Excelling at it is reserved to those who have the inherent talent. And if you don’t have it, you might be able to get to the technical level of mastering it, but you will never excel at it.

Off course, that does not mean that you should give up. Because usually, if you are weak in one thing, your strength lies somewhere else and that strength can help you circumvent your weakness. Or you can use a process to make sure that something is done properly. Or you can partner with someone who has the opposite strengths to help complete you.

This is why I am not fond of the title of goldsmith’s post. You should try to be as much yourself as you can. You just need to make sure you understand who you really are before you go about doing that. Thus, I do agree with the main message that comes out of Goldsmith’s post: you have to try. You have to discover yourself and realize what your true strengths and weakness are and what are just “false — and probably pointless — notion[s] of ‘me’”.

So, when is the last time you tried finding out who the “real you” is?

 Elad

The right side of the graph

In the last few days in class, we have been going through a phase of self reflection. This phase included surveys, inventories and questioners, as well as group discussions and self reflection, both written and mental.

The last day, our facilitator presented us with the following graph:

 

The basic idea is to think about our parts in teams and later about our jobs and pinpoint actions we employ daily to their respective places on the graph. I think this is a very simple but usable tool in order to self reflect.

But looking at it, made me think about how managers can use this. Because of this simplicity, managers can use this simple tool to know a lot more about their employees.

I believe good managers should focus almost all their efforts on helping people find their strengths and concentrate on them, because this is the way to help people truly excel. As I elaborate in my e-book, I believe people can achieve remarkable accomplishments if they focus on their comparative advantages and use them constantly.

 Thus, great managers should focus their time on their employees’ strengths instead of focusing it on their weaknesses and areas of improvement. That said it is important to understand that there are different kinds of weakness and different kinds of strengths.

If the weakness is a result of insufficient knowledge or skill, then the manager role is to supply the knowledge, teach the skill or get the employee to learn the skill from an outside source. This is true in a limited number of cases. Sometime people feel incompetent and dislike certain actions, because they don’t know enough about them and never had proper training although they truly have a talent for it. In addition, most skills can be learned to a certain degree.

But in order to excel in certain skills you need talent. And different people have different talents.  And with talent I mean not only to quality of being good at something, but actually having the right mental state and the natural inclination for certain skills. And most of time, this talent, if used correctly, can help overcome any weakness much more efficiently then dealing directly with the weakness. Therefore, when a manager recognizes a weakness he should explore which kind of weakness it is and if training or knowledge will help the employee overcome it.

On the other hand, many times as managers, we perceive strengths of people but forget to ask them an important question: do you enjoy doing that role/action? Because some people are really good at something, but they hate doing it. if they don’t feel good when they are doing it, when they don’t reach a state of flow, than they would not be able to that for a long time and they would not be able to truly excel. And what great managers do is find ways to make their employees excel.

So, where are your employees’ actions, skills and talents on this graph and how can you move them to right side of the graph?

Elad