Is There Proof That StrengthsFinder Works?

Strengths Focus For This Episode

In this episode Lisa clearly answers the question, "Is there proof that strengths focused development works?" After looking at some business-related ROI, she offers a metaphor to bring the point alive with a visual.

Resources of the Episode

Lisa recommends this classic book by Donald O. Clifton and Paula Nelson, Soar with Your Strengths: A Simple Yet Revolutionary Philosophy of Business and Management.

It starts with a simple fable and then transitions into the powerful lesson of focusing on strengths rather than spending your whole life trying to fix what's missing or broken about you.

Here's An Overview Of The Show

You’re listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings, and today we cover the question, “Is there proof that strengths-based development works?” If you're considering StrengthsFinder or strengths-based development, strengths based culture in your organization. This comes up pretty often. People say, “Hey, if I'm going to move away from this thing that you call a lopsided obsession with weakness fixing, I want to know is it actually going to work?”

What I have for you today is 1) proof points through some Gallup research 2) the other is a metaphor because it's a really clear way of thinking and making it obvious that strengths-based development is the way to amplify performance on the job. First, for your proof point, some researchers at the University of Nebraska did a study to quantify the effects of what it is like when you invest in your strengths, versus when you invest in something that you're just average in.

Data Driven Proof Points For Strengths

Gallup has conducted a bunch of deep studies on strengths. The data shows that when a team or an organization has a strengths intervention, it can positively affect performance outcomes. Yeah, I know the word "intervention" sounds like a TV show for addiction issues, yet I promise it's simply a term used by Organizational Development experts to mean that companies do more than just a single conversation about Strengths or StrengthsFinder - it's when strengths are embedded in organizational processes.

Gallup surveyed 2.1 million individuals and 20,021 work units in a study that examined several business outcomes. Check out these impressive results:

When compared with their peers, employees who received strengths-based development
had:

• 8% to 18% increased performance
• 2% to 10% higher customer metrics
• 20% to 73% lower attrition
• 7% to 23% higher employee engagement
• 4% to 10% increased involvement in company-sponsored activities

Workgroups that received strengths-based development had:

• 14% to 29% increased profit
• 3% to 7% higher customer metrics
• 6% to 72% lower attrition
• 23% to 59% fewer safety incidents
• 10% to 19% increased sales

To read the nitty gritty details of the research, download Gallup’s 2015 Strengths Meta-Analysis.

Visual Way To Imagine Why Strengths Make Sense

So there is a book put out by Donald Clifton and the Gallup organization called Soar With Your Strengths. Now this is an older book and it's actually a fable. It has a really good metaphor in there about taking an animal and sending it to training in something that it’s not good at. I'm going to extend the metaphor and do the Lisa version of it. It's a little bit silly, but this way if you read the book, you can still get something out of it, so imagine this. Imagine you're going to work and at work you have a fish, and at work you have a cat, and it's been a year into their experience at work and you say,

“Fish, it's time for the performance review and I’ve gotta tell ya, we've had you on that responsibility of mouse catching and you've been doing a really cruddy job at catching mice. We're going to really focus in, we're behind you, we want you to be successful, so we're going to spend the next year putting you through a training program so you can be really good at mouse catching. Fish, you're going to go to mouse-catching school."

"Now, Cat, time for your performance review. Gotta tell ya, you did great at mouse catching, but you've also had that responsibility of swimming and you know every time we put you near the pool...you scream...you scratch. You’ve got people in the HR office because their faces are all cut up when they're trying to throw you in the pool. It's been a real nightmare. We want you to be successful though. We're going to send you through a year long training program to make you a great swimmer."

Ok, so got my weird HR conversation here and you can imagine how ridiculous it would be to spend a year trying to teach a fish to catch a mouse and how ridiculous it would be to get a cat to swim. But if you flip that around and send that fish to swimming school and make it the best fish on the planet, you can see what would happen. Oh yeah! That's its natural tendency and that's what it was made to do. Same thing with a cat. It's made to catch a mouse.

This is something that of course it's not as easy and clear with human beings what they were born to do and we're a lot more complicated because we've probably been squashing a lot of those things out of ourselves and hiding them and it's more difficult to make them apparent. But even the notion that you as yourself or that you as a people manager are looking for the genius in that other person that is exactly the path that's going to unleash performance in the organization. So get your fish in fish school. That's the big lesson.

StrengthsFinder Activity: Conversation With Your Team

Now let's talk application. As you listen to this audio and think about yourself personally, think of a time when you learned something new and it came really easily to you...more easily than that same thing would come to most people. If you make yourself think of 5 or 10 of these types of things, you're going to see some trends. You can extend those trends into your current role and think, “all right, if this stuff comes naturally to me, then how can I extend that into my current job?” If you want to apply the same question at a team level because you're a people manager or you're a strength champion (and awesomely) you are bringing this to a bigger conversation, then you can answer the question by going around the table and having a chat about it.

For example, somebody says, “OK, you know, every time we have to learn new software, it is just so easy for me. I don't even know why user manuals exist. I don't know why help screens exists. I can't believe they have to be built out in such detail, because it's just obvious to me how it's going to work.”

Maybe another person in a sales role says, “you know, you're doing a new initiative on storytelling,” and when that gets launched, the person is like, “Yeah! That seems easy and fun. This is how you want me to sell. Okay, no problem. Forget those other models we've been talking about. This is what I've been wishing for all along.”

Or, maybe you have someone in a project management role and they say, “you know, I can really spot the dependent tasks, I mean like nobody's business...even when the rest of the team can't see the connections. They're oblivious to some of these things that are really connected to each other and are going to make the critical path, and others have to experience the whole thing to realize that some of those steps were connected and that they matter.

That's the start of the question as a team, and then of course the magic isn't just knowing that something in the past happened. Then, the next part of the question is:

“How do we amplify this talent? If this is something you're naturally gifted in, how do we get you more of that? How can we get more of your genius on display at work?”

That makes a great team conversation. Based on the size of your team, you can spend however much or little time you have for this. I'd recommend allocating about 5 minutes a person, so it might be a 30 minute conversation, but if you only have 5 total minutes to spare at the beginning of a team meeting, ask people to submit the answer to you in advance. Put it in a spreadsheet. Collect it before you show up in the meeting so that you've done the first-level work in advance.

Then when you get in the room, it's 5 minutes of, "Here we go. Rapid fire. How can we amplify this stuff?" And then you can take it further in the time that you're actually in person together.

Okay, with that, you have a new question. Hopefully you have a newfound appreciation for how strengths based development really does work - how it does amplify your performance more than an obsession with weakness-fixing would. Now you have some questions to discuss as a team, and some things to think about on your own so you can amplify your own performance at work, and the performance of those around you.

So with that, I'll leave you until next time. Thanks for listening to Lead Through Strengths. To find more strengths-focused tools, go out to our website at LeadThroughStrengths.com/resources. There's a whole host of documents and videos and things that you can do to apply this on your team. I'll see you next time.