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Discovering Your Strengths

By Scott Derrick

Develop your strengths and manage around your weaknesses – that’s the message of Now, Discover Your Strengths (The Free Press, 2001) by authors Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, researchers with the Gallup Organization. As you’re probably aware, individuals in the working world have traditionally been encouraged to recognize and rectify their weaknesses in order to improve performance and contribute to their organization’s mission and goals. The authors argue, however, that managers and employees should focus on understanding each employee’s own talents and work to build strengths instead. For the authors, managerial success is recognizing where each employee’s natural talents lie and figuring out how to help each employee develop the skills and knowledge to convert those talents into strong individual and organizational performance.

Simply put, the authors say that Strength = Talent x Knowledge x Skills. Talents, which are formed early in life and are generally fixed, relate to recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that can be productively applied; knowledge consists of facts and lessons learned; and skills are the steps of an activity. Together, these three—talents, knowledge, and skills—combine to create your strengths. The authors contend that knowledge and skills can be improved with time, training and practice, but that some aspects of behavior—namely, talent—are difficult if not impossible to teach.

According to the authors, Gallup has conducted over two million interviews in the past 30 years to help determine how excellent performers perform. On the basis of this information, Gallup researchers identified thirty-four patterns or “themes” of human talent, such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Strategic, Futuristic, or Responsibility. For example, if you have the theme of Responsibility, you take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and whether large or small, you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion. To help readers identify their themes of talent, the book contains a reference to an online survey, “StrengthsFinder,” where readers respond to 180 statements and then are given a profile of their five dominant themes. These themes of talent may not yet be strengths; each theme represents the promise of a strength. With this information and concerted attention, individuals should be in a better position to identify their talents and “put their strengths to work.”

One of the more interesting sections of the book is a description of how you can manage around your weaknesses. (A weakness is defined as anything that gets in the way of excellent performance). The authors state that the first thing you have to do is identify whether the weakness is a skills weakness, a knowledge weakness, or a talent weakness. How do you know for certain that the missing ingredient is knowledge, skill, or talent? Answer: If, after acquiring the knowledge and skill you feel you need, your performance is still subpar, then by process of elimination the missing ingredient must be talent. According to the authors, at this point you should stop wasting time trying to study your way to excellence and, instead, turn to a more creative strategy to manage a talent weakness. One strategy, for example, is finding a partner whose strengths match your weaknesses. The authors write that scores of Gallup interviews found that successful people clearly recognized their weaknesses and actively built partnerships on complementary themes of talent.

The book is a fast and fascinating read into the thinking behind a strengths-based approach to performance. Yet, the material covered in the book and its accompanying Web site would be much more informative if the authors had provided further insight into roles or occupations that might best complement the five talents that are identified through the “StrengthsFinder” online survey. If Gallup indeed has data from millions of related interviews, the researchers should be able to identify the successful roles or occupations that best link with the myriad of various talent combinations. Overall, however, the book and Web site provide a compelling and convincing argument for focusing on what you do well versus what you don’t.