Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 90)

IN CONCLUSION Empowering Your Employees Focus on strengths • BY MARCUS BUCKINGHAM Marcus Buckingham is a motivational speaker, trainer, researcher and author. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. n my book First, Break All the Rules, I wrote about how the world’s great managers focus on the strengths of their employees and manage around their weaknesses in order to get the best performance out of each individual. In the years since then, I’ve dedicated myself to helping people recognize what their own speciﬁc strengths are so that they can be more productive and more fulﬁlled in their work. Yet, the most recent surveys indicate that only 45 percent of Americans believe that they will be most successful by focusing on their strengths. Recent years have added a new twist to this challenge: America’s main economic competitor, China, has turned around dramatically on the issue of strengths focus. As recently as 2000, 76 percent of workers surveyed in China preferred to focus on their weaknesses, but now the latest data show that 70 percent of Chinese workers focus on their strengths. In America, the numbers are moving the opposite way. While 45 percent on the whole focus on strengths, 69 percent of Generation Y believes that the best way to make the most of oneself is to focus on weaknesses. In short, the vast majority of the next generation of America’s workforce, 71 million strong, has not gotten the message that the most successful managers and our economic competitors already know. We need to address this deﬁciency to save everyone a lot of time and trouDATA POINT ble by reaching young workers before As recently as 2000, they’ve gone too far down the wrong 76 percent of workers path. Employees need to know their surveyed in China premanagers are willing to make the most ferred to focus on their of what they have to offer, not spend weaknesses, but the all of their time “ﬁxing” their perceived latest data shows that weaknesses. On the other hand, employ70 percent of Chinese ees need to bring a speciﬁc and focused workers focus on their understanding of their own strengths strengths. and weaknesses. The members of Generation Y — through no fault of their own, but let’s be frank — are the most coddled and afﬁrmed cohort in living memory. They haven’t had to go through the reﬁning, pragmatic process of ﬁnding the best way to win because they have been rewarded simply for participation. What that means is that we have a generation entering the workforce whose members simply don’t know how I The vast majority of the next generation of America’s workforce, 71 million strong, has not gotten the message that the most successful managers and our economic competitors already know. to make the best of themselves. The good news is that the best way to get these young professionals headed in the right direction is to ask them to do something they already excel at — pay attention to themselves. Others can notice where an individual excels, but the problem is this: What a person is good at may not be what she loves to do, and if it’s not what she loves to do, then sooner or later, that lack of passion is going to catch up to her and affect her performance. Only by paying attention to how she feels before, while and after performing speciﬁc activities can she learn about her strengths. Decades of empirical data show that the highestperforming teams, diverse as they are, share one key trait: Their members have the chance every day to focus on doing what they do best. It’s clear that the most direct route to achieving high performance is to treat team members as individuals and clear the way for them to play to their particular strengths. The ﬁrst step is to empower people to know what their strengths are. My hope is that managers will be able to use this approach to reach the newest members of America’s workforce early and get them on the right path as soon as possible. CLO 90 Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • December 2008 • www.clomedia.com http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial The Future of Learning CLO Profile Learning Opportunities Embedded in Social Networking ManTech Leverages Knowledge Management Approaches for Social Networking Agility Training for the Learning Organization Creating an Agile Organization With Learning 2.0 2008 Learning In Practice Awards Corporate Social Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute? Union Fenosa Corporate University: How CSR Education Impacted the Bottom Line Training in the 21st Century: Everything Old Is New Again Zions Bancorp.: Connecting the Dots Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

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