Developing into stars

Conventional wisdom has alleged, for many years, that your weaknesses represent your greatest opportunities for development. However, research shows that reflecting and focusing on an individual’s strengths is what will grow their performance.

In a recent Thriving assessment we ran with a client, two of the poorest performing areas related to the development culture in their workplace and how employees’ skills and capabilities were fostered. It indicated that the organisation was behaving according to conventional wisdom. As a result, they were not getting the best from their people, who reported feeling inadequate, unsupported and lacking awareness around where to focus their efforts in their development journey.

Getting comfortable with feedback

One big driver of a deliberately developmental culture in the workplace is regular and timely strengths-based feedback.

Research and our experience consistently demonstrate that employees want feedback that is:

• Relevant

• Meaningful

• Thoughtfully delivered

• Future-oriented

• Focused on their strengths

And yet, typically leaders are delivering feedback that is:

• Once or twice-yearly and tied to a performance review process

• Formal, rigid and cumbersome

• Poorly prepared and/or impersonal

• Past-oriented

• More likely to focus on weaknesses than strengths  

(Hands up if you know what we’re talking about!)

 The challenge is that what employees want and respond to differs significantly from what they receive (Clifton Strengths).  

Evolving your approach to feedback presents one of the single biggest opportunities for growing high performance in teams 

Providing strengths-based feedback reduces turnover by ~15%, with teams who focus on growing their strengths every day increasing their productivity by up to 12.5%.

But what is strengths-based feedback?

In positive psychology, personal strengths are defined as our built-in capacities for particular ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. At its core, strengths-based feedback is about providing positive feedback on what an employee is doing to succeed, based on their strengths and encouraging them to make more intensive use of strengths.

As a leader, there are a few areas you could focus on to better embed a strengths-based feedback culture:

1. Understand yours and others’ strengths: Run a Clifton Strengths assessment or a free version to better understand yours and your team’s strengths. 

2. Adjust the way you allocate work, to let peoples’ strengths shine: When we run workshops with clients we ask them how they feel when they focus on their areas of strength. The results are astoundingly clear – people feel comfortable, calm, energised, satisfied, positive, confident and open, when working in areas of strength. Conversely, when people are operating in areas that are not a strength they report feeling frustrated, uncertain, lacking in confidence and unsupported. This is when we start to see people “spinning their wheels”, procrastinating, and holding onto unfinished work for too long. Are you allocating work in a way that allows people to illuminate their strengths, or are you constantly nudging them into uncomfortable spaces where they struggle to grow? With the awareness of strengths, comes power. Encourage employees to seek out activities that they get great satisfaction from

3. Practice strengths-based feedback: We have noticed that, despite best intentions, organisations typically struggle to bring a strengths-focus to life, especially when it comes to their feedback culture. In our experience, feedback typically falls somewhere along a spectrum, from:

• Weakness-oriented feedback “You’re not great at X, do better”; to

• The proverbial S**T sandwich “You’re great at Y, terrible at X, and great at Z. Do better at X”; and at the other end of the spectrum

• True strengths-based feedback “You’ve done a great job at Y, could you do more of that, when you are working on X”

When leaders, teams, cultures, and individuals focus on strengths, they have a better chance at succeeding. But it takes practice! And even with practice, we still struggle sometimes.

Follow the four Fs when delivering feedback, ensuring it is:

-          Frequent

-          Future-oriented

-          Focused; and

-          Fact based

And remember, be kind to yourself. It is not easy to keep in strengths territory after a lifetime of being taught to build on our weaknesses.

---------------------------------

We work with leaders to grow high performance. If you want to chat about how we could help you grow a deliberately developmental culture, get in touch today.