The Olympics' Greatest Feat: An Unpaid, Highly Engaged Workforce - Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones | 7:00 AM August 8, 2012 They are all over the Games. They greet you at the airport. They direct you from the trains. There are 70,000 of them, constituting nearly half of the Olympic workforce, Britain’s biggest peacetime mobilization of people since the Second World War. They are the volunteers … and they are everywhere. Their approach is a joy. When visitors marvel about the spirit of the games, the volunteers are a very big part of it. What’s more, their enthusiasm is contagious. What these workers are doing is exceeding the normal expectations of their roles. A theme of our recent research is that, when people interact with an enterprise, they don’t want to encounter mere role-players—no matter how skilful they might be in their roles. So what can the corporate world learn from all this? The Olympic volunteers remind us what real engagement looks like.
Can You Take Your Strengths Too Far? - Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman | 2:04 PM October 2, 2012 For the past decade, leaders have been encouraged to focus on developing their strengths rather than always gravitating to working on a weakness. But is this too much of a good thing? Lately, a number of business thinkers have suggested so. It’s tempting for those of us strongly committed to developing leadership strengths to ignore such dissent on the grounds that any new practice will attract critics. We don’t think so. Like many of those who are raising doubts about the limits of developing leadership strengths — as Robert E. We also strongly agree with them that serious weaknesses should not be ignored. People can and do behave inappropriately — and they do things to excess. Where we part company is in labeling any those behaviors as a strength. We find it constructive to use a definition of “a strength” based on the work of psychologist Martin Seligman, among others. Instead, we find the data tell a consistent story.
Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths The two of us spend a tremendous amount of time helping organizations build higher levels of employee engagement. We do this not just because it's the right thing to do for employees -- we do it because Gallup's research has proven that the more engaged your employees are, the better results your organization achieves. That same research has shown that managers play an essential role in driving engagement. We've understood this for a long time, but we decided to dig deeper and look more closely at how certain management styles could have a particularly powerful impact on employee engagement. No news is not good news A manager's approach to engagement is a broad topic. employees felt their manager focused mostly on employees' strengthsemployees felt their manager focused mostly on employees' weaknessesemployees did not feel their manager focused on either strengths or weaknesses Why is this important information for managers? Leaving too many employees disengaged
Ringing in a Truly "New" Year Many of our readers soon will celebrate the beginning of a new year. Some will indulge in revelry, reflection, and resolution. Others will enjoy their accomplishments, while thinking about the improvements they want to make in 2002. The desire for self-improvement is integral to the human spirit. Even though many people will start the year determined to eat less, exercise more, find a better job (or just do better at their job), they probably will find themselves, as the year progresses, exercising less, eating more, and stuck in the same old job with the same old headaches. Although the desire for self-improvement is universal, making real improvements seems out of reach. What's wrong with this picture? As a society, we tend to think that the best way to improve is by fixing our weaknesses, not by developing our strengths. This same mistaken notion about development is at the heart of many companies' human resource philosophies. Is this a weakness? Is this a weakness?
Okay -- I have reviewed my top five themes. Now what am I supposed to do? What's next? We advise you to do three things. First, take a moment to reflect on your Signature Themes -- your "top five" -- as revealed by the Clifton StrengthsFinder. Do you agree with your top five? Are there some other themes within the full list of 34 that, in your opinion, capture your spirit, your essence, more accurately? If there are, good. Second, ask yourself this question: How can I use my strongest themes in my current role? Third, ask yourself: Is my manager aware of my strongest themes? Remember, there is power in your awareness of your talents.
Embedding Strengths in Your Company's DNA If you want to build a strengths-based organization -- and enjoy the benefits of reduced turnover and greater productivity and profitability -- you can't go halfway. If you really want everyone in your company talking about their talents, sharing them, and living and breathing the language of strengths, you've got to be all in, or it just won't work. This strengths-based approach is both simple and effective, yet too few companies have implemented it. This means that you must significantly shift your company's language; you must change how managers interact with their employees and how employees interact with their peers. But not enough companies understand this. For those companies that want to demonstrate their commitment to building their employees' strengths, here are three steps executives and managers can take. Help coworkers know and understand each other's strengths Employees spend much of their time interacting with colleagues through email, phone calls, meetings, and teamwork.
Build Your Career Around Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses The best advice I ever received came from my dad, Don Clifton. It was actually a piece of simple, yet profound wisdom that has shaped my life. “Your weaknesses will never develop,” he told me, “while your strengths will develop infinitely.” If he hadn’t taught me this, my development and achievements would have stopped at a very early age -- in college, probably. I couldn’t concentrate in college and flunked or barely passed a lot of easy courses. Later in life, I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which made sense, particularly when thinking back to my college classes. Dad, who taught educational psychology at the University of Nebraska, figured out that my extreme weaknesses in classroom learning would never really develop, and that I would not follow in his footsteps as an educator. Eventually, my best friend and I borrowed $5,000 and started a business selling market-research surveys. Dr. You’ll be in good company. As an example, our late founder, Dr. Dr.