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Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance [AUDIOBOOK] [UNABRIDGED] (Audio CD) (Audio CD)
by Marcus Buckingham
| Category:
Management, Leadership, Developing potential, Self help |
| Market price: ¥ 328.00
MSL price:
¥ 288.00
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An excellent follow-up to Now, Discover Your Strengths, this new book shows you how to identify your strengths and put them into action. |
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Author: Marcus Buckingham
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio; Unabridged edition
Pub. in: March, 2007
ISBN: 0743566696
Pages:
Measurements: 5.8 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BB00078
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0743566698
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- Awards & Credential -
From million-copy selling author of Now, Discover Your Strengths and First, Break All the Rules. |
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- MSL Picks -
Buckingham, an authority on workplace issues, provides a road map for managers to learn for themselves and then teach their employees how to approach their work by emphasizing their strengths rather than weaknesses. He offers a six-step plan for six weeks of reading and habit-forming action for discerning strengths, along with optional tools to enhance the process such as online questions for measuring strengths and downloaded films (two of which are free). The steps of his plan are belief that the best way to compete is capitalizing on your strengths, identifying your strengths and weaknesses, volunteering your strengths at work, lessening the impact of your weaknesses on your team, effectively communicating the value of your strengths while limiting work utilizing weaknesses, and building habits and pushing activities that play to strength. Although everyone will not agree with all the elements of Buckingham's approach, he offers valuable insight into maximizing employees' strengths rather than the more common focus on weaknesses and failure.
(From quoting Mary Whaley, Booklist)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, government and nonprofit leaders, business school profs, management consultants, trainers and MBAs.
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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
Beginning with the million-copy bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham jump-started the strengths movement that is now sweeping the work world, from business to government to education. Now that the movement is in full swing, Buckingham's new book answers the ultimate question: How can you actually apply your strengths for maximum success at work?
Research data show that most people do not come close to making full use of their assets at work - in fact, only 17 percent of the workforce believe they use all of their strengths on the job. Go Put Your Strengths to Work aims to change that through a six-step, six-week experience that will reveal the hidden dimensions of your strengths. Buckingham shows you how to seize control of your assets and rewrite your job description under the nose of your boss. You will learn:
- Why your strengths aren't "what you are good at" and your weaknesses aren't "what you are bad at."
- How to use the four telltale signs to identify your strengths.
- The simple steps you can take each week to push your time at work toward those activities that strengthen you and away from those that don't.
- How to talk to your boss and your colleagues about your strengths without sounding like you're bragging and about your weaknesses without sounding like you're whining.
- The fifteen-minute weekly ritual that will keep you on your strengths path your entire career.
With structured exercises that will become part of your regular workweek and proven tactics from people who have successfully applied the book's lessons, Go Put Your Strengths to Work will arm you with a radically different approach to your work life. As part of the book's program you'll take an online Strengths Engagement Track, a focused and powerful gauge that has proven to be the best way to measure the level of engagement of your strengths or your team's strengths. You can also download the first two segments of the renowned companion film series Trombone Player Wanted.
Go Put Your Strengths to Work will open up exciting uncharted territory for you and your organization. Join the strengths movement and thrive.
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From Introduction
Lead This Movement
THE FIRST STAGE: HOW TO LABEL
It's hard to trace the source of the strengths movement.
Some will identify Peter Drucker, citing his seminal 1966 book, The Effective Executive, in which he wrote: "The effective executive builds on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates; and on the strengths of the situation."
Some will cite a 1987 article that launched a new discipline called Appreciative Inquiry, whose basic premise, according to its founder, David Cooperrider, was "to build organizations around what works rather than fix what doesn't."
Some will make reference to Dr. Martin Seligman's 1999 speech after becoming president of the American Psychological Association. "The most important thing we learned was that psychology was half-baked, literally half-baked," he said. "We've baked the part about mental illness, about repair of damage. The other side's unbaked, the side of strength, the side of what we're good at."
More recently, some might even point to the book I wrote with Donald Clifton for the Gallup organization, Now, Discover Your Strengths, which began with this optimistic statement of intent: "We wrote this book to start a revolution, the strengths revolution."
Whatever its true source, the strengths movement is now in full flood. It is a wave of change that, over the last several years, has swept us all forward. No discipline has been left behind. Whether we work in business, government, education, or health care, this wave has lifted us up, spun us around, and revealed to us all a new world. You may not yet recognize the change - some of us were bowled over by the wave, while others barely noticed it carrying them along. But, with or without our knowledge, it has picked us up and deposited us far from where we were a decade ago. And there's no going back. This wave has forever changed the way we perceive ourselves, our employees, our students, and our children.
Look around you, and you'll see clearly the signs of change.
Many of the world's most successful organizations such as Wells Fargo, Intel, Best Buy, and Accenture have declared their commitment to becoming an explicitly strengths-based organization. All new managers at Toyota must now attend a three-day Great Manager training program that shows them how to spot the strengths of their subordinates. All new managers at Yahoo are required to take an online survey that measures their talents and pinpoints their strongest.
Look beyond business, and you'll see nonprofit organizations such as the U.S. Coast Guard, the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, the American Society on Aging, and the New Zealand Ministry of Youth Development all installing similar strengths-based programs and initiatives.
Universities too have been swept up by the movement. Princeton, with great fanfare, recently set up its own Center for Health and Well-Being, dedicated to the study of all that is right in the world. Over half the faculty are, surprisingly, economists. At Harvard, Professor Tal David Ben-Shahar's class An Introduction to Positive Psychology is now the most popular elective class in the entire curriculum. And Azusa Pacific University now has a Center for Strengths-Based Education, set up by the pioneering educator Edward "Chip" Anderson.
Look further still, and you'll see more signs of the movement's reach. If your child happens to break the law in Ingham County, Michigan, before his day in probate court, he'll be asked to fill out a Strengths Assessment for Juvenile Justice, which will pose strengths-based questions such as "Have you made any good changes in the past? How did you make these changes?" and "What is your first step to get out of this trouble? Who will be the first person to notice this step?"
If you are a psychiatry student learning to work with patients suffering persistent mental disorders, you will be asked to read Charles Rapp's 1997 classic, The Strengths Model, which shows you, case by case, how to "amplify the well part of the patient."
If you are an aspiring soccer coach, Major League Soccer will be happy to sign you up for its Strengths-Based Coaching course. Here you'll learn, among other things, how to hand out "green cards," which draw a child's attention to a particularly good pass or tackle he made, rather than the traditionally punitive yellow and red cards.
Today the strengths movement is everywhere: the corporate world, the worlds of public service, of economics, of education, of faith, of charity - it has affected them all. It has its detractors, of course, but an appeal as universal as this begs the question "Why?" Why do so many people from so many different worlds see such power in the strengths-based perspective?
Because it works better than any other perspective. The radical idea at the core of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure, and that, as such, you will learn little about excellence from studying failure. This seems like an obvious idea until you realize that, before the strengths movement began, virtually all business and academic inquiry was built on the opposite idea: namely, that a deep understanding of failure leads to an equally deep understanding of excellence. That's why we studied unhappy customers to learn about the happy ones, employees' weaknesses to learn how to make them excel, sickness to learn about health, divorce to learn about marriage, and sadness to learn about joy.
What has become evident in virtually every field of human endeavor is that failure and success are not opposites, they are merely different, and so they must be studied separately. Thus, for example, if you want to learn what you should not do after an environmental disaster, Chernobyl will be instructive. But if you want to learn what you should do, Chernobyl is a waste. Only successful cleanups, such as at the Rocky Flats nuclear facility in Colorado, can tell you what excellence looks like.
Study unproductive teams, and you soon discover that the teammates argue a lot. Study successful teams, and you learn that they argue just as much. To find the secrets to a great team, you have to investigate the successful ones and figure out what is going on in the space between the arguments.
Focus your research on people who contract HIV and die, and you gain some useful insights about how the disease wrecks the body's immune system. But focus your research on those few people with HIV who are relatively unaffected by the disease, and you learn something else entirely: namely, how the body fights back.
Conventional wisdom tells us that we learn from our mistakes. The strengths movement says that all we learn from mistakes are the characteristics of mistakes. If we want to learn about our successes, we must study successes.
Fueled by this idea, the first stage of the strengths movement - the stage we are in right now - has been dominated by efforts to label what is right with things. Thus, whereas the World Bank used to rank countries according to their negative qualities, such as poverty, violence, and vulnerability, today it has developed a list of positive labels that capture a country's overall level of well-being, labels such as social capability, economic self-determination, and sustainability of local customs.
In the field of psychology, our descriptors all used to be heavily skewed toward the negatives: neurotic, psychotic, schizophrenic, depressed. Today we have redressed the balance and have added equally detailed labels to describe the positives. For example, Martin Seligman and his colleague Chris Peterson have developed their list of "Character Strengths and Virtues," which includes such qualities as Courage, Justice, Transcendence, and Temperance.
Similarly, Now, Discover Your Strengths introduced Gallup's online personality profile called StrengthsFinder (since renamed the Clifton StrengthsFinder, in Don's memory), which measures you on thirty-four themes of talent, with names like Ideation, Restorative, Significance, and Connectedness.
Our hunger for these labels can be measured in part by the number of people who have taken the Clifton StrengthsFinder profile since 2001. The total is now over two million. More revealing still, each year this number not only increases, but the increase increases. More people took it last year than the year before, and more the year before than the year before that. Clearly, millions of us feel a deep need to label what's right with us.
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Craig Matteson (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-18 00:00>
If you really look at what is holding you back, from really using your best qualities and talents, you will almost surely find that most of it are the images and thoughts you hold between your ears. You are so sure about what could go wrong, or about what you HAVE to do, or about what is just not possible, that you just don't even try to step out.
Well, to say it simply, stop it! This book provides you with a six step process to help you build on your strengths rather than chasing and fixing mistakes. It is based on the ideas you will find in the business philosophies of Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS). The core idea in these movements is that you can't build on your strengths if all you see are your weaknesses. If you want to be a master of something, you have to study those who do it well, not focus on the mistakes of those who aren't very skilled. The term they often use is "positive deviance". That is, that area of performance that deviates ABOVE the norm. The goal is to learn how to create more positive deviance.
In the first step, Buckingham focuses you on giving up belief in three myths: 1) As you grow your personality changes. 2) You will grow in your areas of greatest weakness. 3) A good team member does whatever it takes to help the team. He says that the truths are: 1) As you grow you become more of who you already are. 2) You will grow in your areas of greatest strength. 3) A good team member deliberately volunteers his strengths to the team most of the time.
As he discusses each of these he asks you to examine what you are getting out of believing in these myths. What would it cost you to stop believing in it? Then think carefully about the benefits you would gain by believing the truth. If you sincerely do this, you will likely be shocked and then energized.
The purpose of this book is to help you take charge of your life and especially your work life. You will make it more rewarding, says the author, by centering your work on your strengths rather than just doing whatever comes to you as an assignment. It is a six step process. The first, as I noted above, is to bust the myths. Step 2 is to get clear about your strengths. Three is to free your strengths. Four helps you see and stop your weaknesses (not focus on fixing them). Five coaches you on how to speak up and get your boss supporting your strengths. Six is about keeping the process alive by building strong habits.
Now, Marcus Buckingham is a big-time, high-priced consultant. The book sends you to his website to use some free materials there (but also offers you others to purchase). Underneath this is the desire to sell your company consulting and seminar services with associated materials. It is interesting stuff, but the sheer "salesiness" of it detracts from it a bit for me. |
Dennis DeWilde (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-18 00:00>
I admire books that deliver as advertised! This is a `how-to' book for gaining clarity on a critical component - something Buckingham calls strengths - for individual performance success. As he did in previous books, Buckingham defines Strengths as being our blend of Talent, Skills, & Knowledge; then he goes farther with this book, noting that strengths are not just personality or talent profiles, even if done using the Clifton StrengthFinder profiling tool. What seems to be emerging in step-2 of this 6-step process for finding and using our strengths is the tapping of passion - what work actually gives you energy. If so, Buckingham may now be speaking more about understanding identity, than what gets heard as a traditional strengths and weaknesses assessment. Whatever the case, this, easy to read, understand, and do, book contains practical tools for learning about ourselves and using this understanding to improve personal performance.
Although a book devoted primarily to `how-to' steps, during Step-1, Bust the Myths, Buckingham does a summary of personality development that I particularly liked. He also included a nice bit about how strengths are used to build high performing teams - it is not necessary to lose your identity in order to become a team player! This book is recommended for any individual who is interested in living a happier and more productive life by appreciating who they are and the gifts they have to offer the world.
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H. V. Amavilah (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-18 00:00>
Most self-help and motivational books including classics like Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich advise that in order to grow personally and professionally one must find one's weaknesses, (believed to be always some kind of mental propensity) and delete them. This book tilts that argument for a simpler concept which emphasizes the strengths that someone already has.
The concept has six related steps. The first step is to find out the myths and self-inhibitions that constrain growth and to commit to breaking them. As second and third steps, you identify the strengths you have (Step 2) and put them to work for you (Step 3). In real life, however, strength is a relative and net concept, i.e., to sustain net strength is to maximize gross strength, as well as minimize weakness (Step 4).
Since success is both cumulative and collaborative, Step 5 relates to how to build teams that strengthen you, while Step 6 asks you to become habitual about all six steps. The book expends a good deal of effort explaining how the six steps work and how one can implement them successfully. Each chapter provides a space for self-testing as well as a "Resource Guide" at the end of the book. |
Lindae (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-18 00:00>
Now Discover Your Strengths is the prequel to this title. It isn't necessary to have read this book to obtain insights from this text but I believe having read it enhances what I've learned in this book. I enjoy Buckingham's practical tips and techniquesin this edition of learning about myself and the art of managing others by using my strengths. By focusing on each person's strengths, greater productivity is an end result.
From reading Now Discover Your Strengths, you are provided with a website that allows one to take an assesment of your strengths. Once you know your strengths, you have an understanding of what areas to build up and focus on in your professional and personal life. Buckingham provides another website to help the reader discover how well they are using their strenghts in their work life presently. You have the opportunity to take this assessment three times: once at the onset of reading the book, once as you work through the 6 recommended statges of improvement and a third time either at the end of the book or later as you continue implementing the 6 strategies discovered in the book.
The reader is advised to take 6 weeks to read and work through the 6 steps toward using your strengths everyday at work. Each week you work on one step through specific tasks for each of the 6 steps. As you work through each task you find out what is getting in your way of using your strengths. Then you learn how to clarify your strengths and bring them to the surface for use everyday. Then you are directed to create 3 strength statements that will help you keep your strengths in mind as you work each day.
The next step addresses your weaknesses. You accept this part of yourself and learn techniques to cut out your weaknesses in your daily work. Steps 5 and 6 help you learn to speak up and share your success and your strengths while you continue building strong habits.
I enjoyed this book immensely. No only do you learn about yourself but you become more aware of other people's strengths. Throughout the book, you meet others who have worked through the 6 steps over the six week period of learning and growing. Each step requires a complete week to finish each set of tasks for the step. I would recommend the book to my team mates at work. I think this would be an excellent book for employees and leaders to work through together to create a strong unified work group but an individual can gain equally |
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