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Now, Discover Your Strengths (Hardcover)
by Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton
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Management |
| Market price: ¥ 318.00
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¥ 288.00
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Focusing on using strengths rather than weaknesses in developing an effective and efficient workforce, this excellent follow-up to First, Break All The Rules, another top-tier business classic. |
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Author: Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton
Publisher: Free Press
Pub. in: January, 2001
ISBN: 0743201140
Pages: 272
Measurements: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00168
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0743201148
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- Awards & Credential -
Amazon.com's Best of 2001. This bestselling book ranks #121 in books out of millions on Amazon.com as of January 15, 2007.
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- MSL Picks -
This is a great compendium of 34 positive business-related talents... An online test analyzes your immediate inclinations (strongly agree, agree or neutral) on 180 questions. Your answers determine your generalized reactions in life. A tendency to respond consistently in a certain way points toward your personal strengths (a euphemism here to mean your 'proclivities'). Your bottom ranked areas are called non-talents that will never exist and should not really be concentrated on. This is the 'revolution' that is presented.
Employees are to be hired for positions based on heavy-weighted attention to these talents (instead of the traditional weighting on experience and skills). Managers are to manage each employee individually according to his/her specific tested talents.
This book masks much of the precepts of this wild new theory by couching it throughout the book in traditional and conventional Harvard Business School type theory. Solid advice is given on measuring employees performance objectively and through survey. Weaknesses... should be addressed when they interfere with successful action (common sense).
Too much direct association is made with talents, satisfaction, and willingness. The book assumes these all go hand in hand... period. It is hard-wired in our brains. It doesn't ever address the fact that subject A's 10th place talent may be greater than subject B's 1st talent. It doesn't take into account the breadth of one's various talents - only the top five. Our hobbies that we love and enjoy... Are we all that talented in them?
That said, this is a great tool to discover more about yourself and rend you from some of your possible self-delusions, realizing that it is OK to be strong in some areas, but not in 'every' area. Maybe you will get a deeper insight into what you 'love' that will change your life.
Too heavy on conclusions, too heavy a concentration only on strengths (subjective business proclivities) and an almost ambivalence concerning weaknesses, no sense of balance, playing loose with statistics but heavy with the lives affected... Albeit insightful and offers possibilites into the mitigation of the sometimes stressful business world on the human experience. Quality and thought-provoking interview and six-month review questions.
(From quoting Peter Valentine, USA)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, government and non-profit leaders, professionals, management consultants, and MBAs.
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- Better with -
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Marcus Buckingham, senior vice president of The Gallup Organization, is coauthor of the bestselling book First, Break All the Rules. A featured speaker at the Washington Speakers Bureau, he has appeared on CNN International, CNBC's Power Lunch, and NPR's Morning Edition, among other programs. He and his wife, Jane, live in New York City.
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From Publisher
Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.
Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules, and Donald O. Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research & Education Center, have created a revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. At the heart of the book is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder® Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant "themes" with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success. In developing this program, Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with more than two million individuals to help readers learn how to focus and perfect these themes.
So how does it work? This book contains a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This Web-based interview analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes - such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic, or Strategic - you lead with, the book will show you how to leverage them for powerful results at three levels: for your own development, for your success as a manager, and for the success of your organization.
With accessible and profound insights on how to turn talents into strengths, and with the immediate on-line feedback of StrengthsFinder at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and useful business books ever written.
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Introduction: The Strengths Revolution at Work
Guided by the belief that good is the opposite of bad, mankind has for centuries pursued its fixation with fault and failing. Doctors have studied disease in order to learn about health. Psychologists have investigated sadness in order to learn about joy. Therapists have looked into the causes of divorce in order to learn about happy marriage. And in schools and workplaces around the world, each one of us has been encouraged to identify, analyze, and correct our weaknesses in order to become strong.
This advice is well intended but misguided. Faults and failings deserve study, but they reveal little about strengths. Strengths have their own patterns.
To excel in your chosen field and to find lasting satisfaction in doing so, you will need to understand your unique patterns. You will need to become an expert at finding and describing and applying and practicing and refining your strengths. So as you read this book, shift your focus. Suspend whatever interest you may have in weakness and instead explore the intricate detail of your strengths. Take the StrengthsFinder Profile. Learn its language. Discover the source of your strengths.
If by the end of the book you have developed your expertise in what is right about you and your employees, this book will have served its purpose.
The Revolution
"What are the two assumptions on which great organizations must be built?"
We wrote this book to start a revolution, the strengths revolution. At the heart of this revolution is a simple decree: The great organization must not only accommodate the fact that each employee is different, it must capitalize on these differences. It must watch for clues to each employee's natural talents and then position and develop each employee so that his or her talents are transformed into bona fide strengths. By changing the way it selects, measures, develops, and channels the careers of its people, this revolutionary organization must build its entire enterprise around the strengths of each person.
And as it does, this revolutionary organization will be positioned to dramatically outperform its peers. In our latest metaanalysis The Gallup Organization asked this question of 198,000 employees working in 7,939 business units within 36 companies: At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? We then compared the responses to the performance of the business units and discovered the following: When employees answered "strongly agree" to this question, they were 50 percent more likely to work in business units with lower employee turnover, 38 percent more likely to work in more productive business units, and 44 percent more likely to work in business units with higher customer satisfaction scores. And over time those business units that increased the number of employees who strongly agreed saw comparable increases in productivity, customer loyalty, and employee retention. Whichever way you care to slice the data, the organization whose employees feel that their strengths are used every day is more powerful and more robust.
This is very good news for the organization that wants to be on the vanguard of the strengths revolution. Why? Because most organizations remain startlingly inefficient at capitalizing on the strengths of their people. In Gallup's total database we have asked the "opportunity to do what I do best" question of more than 1.7 million employees in 101 companies from 63 countries. What percentage do you think strongly agrees that they have an opportunity to do what they do best every day? What percentage truly feels that their strengths are in play?
Twenty percent. Globally, only 20 percent of employees working in the large organizations we surveyed feel that their strengths are in play every day. Most bizarre of all, the longer an employee stays with an organization and the higher he climbs the traditional career ladder, the less likely he is to strongly agree that he is playing to his strengths.
Alarming though it is to learn that most organizations operate at 20 percent capacity, this discovery actually represents a tremendous opportunity for great organizations. To spur high-margin growth and thereby increase their value, great organizations need only focus inward to find the wealth of unrealized capacity that resides in every single employee. Imagine the increase in productivity and profitability if they doubled this number and so had 40 percent of their employees strongly agreeing that they had a chance to use their strengths every day. Or how about tripling the number? Sixty percent of employees saying "strongly agree" isn't too aggressive a goal for the greatest organizations.
How can they achieve this? Well, to begin with they need to understand why eight out of ten employees feel somewhat miscast in their role. What can explain this widespread inability to position people - in particular senior people who have had the chance to search around for interesting roles - to play to their strengths?
The simplest explanation is that most organizations' basic assumptions about people are wrong. We know this because for the last thirty years Gallup has been conducting research into the best way to maximize a person's potential. At the heart of this research are our interviews with eighty thousand managers - most excellent, some average - in hundreds of organizations around the world. Here the focus was to discover what the world's best managers (whether in Bangalore or Bangor) had in common. We described our discoveries in detail in the book First, Break All the Rules, but the most significant finding was this: Most organizations are built on two flawed assumptions about people:
I. Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything.
2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness.
Presented so baldly, these two assumptions seem too simplistic to be commonly held, so let's play them out and see where they lead. If you want to test whether or not your organization is based on these assumptions, look for these characteristics:
- Your organization spends more money on training people once they are hired than on selecting them properly in the first place.
- Your organization focuses the performance of its employees by legislating work style. This means a heavy emphasis on work rules, policies, procedures, and "behavioral competencies."
- Your organization spends most of its training time and money on trying to plug the gaps in employees' skills or competencies. It calls these gaps "areas of opportunity." Your individual development plan, if you have one, is built around your "areas of opportunity," your weaknesses.
- Your organization promotes people based on the skills or experiences they have acquired. After all, if everyone can learn to be competent in almost anything, those who have learned the most must be the most valuable. Thus, by design, your organization gives the most prestige, the most respect, and the highest salaries to the most experienced well-rounded people.
Finding an organization that doesn't have these characteristics is more difficult than finding one that does. Most organizations take their employees' strengths for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses. They become expert in those areas where their employees struggle, delicately rename these "skill gaps" or "areas of opportunity," and then pack them off to training classes so that the weaknesses can be fixed. This approach is occasionally necessary: If an employee always alienates those around him, some sensitivity training can help; likewise, a remedial communication class can benefit an employee who happens to be smart but inarticulate. But this isn't development, it is damage control. And by itself damage control is a poor strategy for elevating either the employee or the organization to world-class performance.
As long as an organization operates under these assumptions, it will never capitalize on the strengths of each employee.
To break out of this weakness spiral and to launch the strengths revolution in your own organization, you must change your assumptions about people. Start with the right assumptions, and everything else that follows from them - how you select, measure, train, and develop your people - will be right. These are the two assumptions that guide the world's best managers:
I. Each person's talents are enduring and unique.
2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.
These two assumptions are the foundation for everything they do with and for their people. These two assumptions explain why great managers are careful to look for talent in every role, why they focus people's performances on outcomes rather than forcing them into a stylistic mold, why they disobey the Golden Rule and treat each employee differently, and why they spend the most time with their best people. In short, these two assumptions explain why the world's best managers break all the rules of conventional management wisdom.
Now, following the great managers' lead, it is time to change the rules. These two revolutionary assumptions must serve as the central tenets for a new way of working. They are the tenets for a new organization, a stronger organization, an organization designed to reveal and stretch the strengths of each employee.
Most organizations have a process for ensuring the efficient use of their practical resources. Six Sigma or ISO 9000 processes are commonplace. Likewise, most organizations have increasingly efficient processes for exploiting their financial resources. The recent fascination with metrics such as economic value added and return on capital bear testament to this. Few organizations, however, have developed a systematic process for the efficient use of their human resources. (They may experiment with individual development plans, 360-degree surveys, and competencies, but these experiments are mostly focused on fixing each employee's weaknesses rather than building his strengths.)
In this book we want to show you how to design a systematic strength-building process. Specifically, Chapter 7, "Building a Strengths-based Organization," can help. Here we describe what the optimum selection system looks like, which three outcomes all employees should have on their scorecard, how to reallocate those misguided training budgets, and, last, how to change the way you channel each employee's career.
If you are a manager and want to know how best to capitalize on the strengths of your individual direct reports, then Chapter 6, "Managing Strengths," will help. Here we identify virtually every ability or style you might find in your people and explain what you can do to maximize the strengths of each employee...
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| View all 14 comments |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (C. S. and D. J. Davidson Professor of Psychology) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-15 00:00>
Now, Discover Your Strengths, based on years of research by The Gallup Organization, is a refreshingly sensible and user-friendly way to assess your psychological assets and build on them a successful and satisfying life. |
Ed Diener, Ph.D. (Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-15 00:00>
A brilliant book that will help readers to discover and capitalize on their specific strengths, as well as assist managers in supervising people with varying strengths.
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Martin E. P. Seligman (Fox Prof. of Psychology, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Author of Learned Optimism), USA
<2007-01-15 00:00>
The keystone of high achievement and happiness is exercising your strengths, not correcting your weaknesses. The first step is knowing which strengths you own, and this superb book gives you a powerful and accurate way to find out. |
Mike Morrison (Dean, University of Toyota) (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-01-15 00:00>
The code for managing has been broken and the secrets for success are here in this book! We know this from first-hand experience - with over 2,000 Gallup 'strengths' program graduates (and growing) - we will never look at our jobs, or our lives for that matter, the same way again. To achieve our greatest potential, this is by far the most important investment an individual or organization can make!
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