Name: Now, Discover Your Strengths
Rating: 4.1 (103 reviews)
Author: Marcus Buckingham

What’s in it for me? Make your strengths the focal point of your life.

By this point in your life, you probably know all about your flaws and shortcomings. Your punctuation is poor, you have a hard time with networking and basketball just isn’t your sport.

But what are your strengths? What is a strength to begin with? And most importantly, why don’t you focus on them?

In Now, Discover Your Strengths, you’ll find valuable knowledge on strengths, where to spot them, how they’re created and what they consist of. These blinks will also provide some great insights into how you can engage with your employees’ strengths and make your business thrive.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how your brain holds the key to your hidden talents;
why you should hope that showing empathy comes naturally to you; and
whether you’re an analytic type or a commander.

A focus on correcting weaknesses has left our strengths ignored.

In schools and in workplaces, we’re constantly encouraged to seek out and correct our weaknesses in order to improve our productivity. But why? After all, it’s uncovering and using your strengths that will really send you on your way to success.

How do you know a strength when you see one? There are many different answers to this question, but we can stick with the simplest: a strength is an activity that you can perform repeatedly to perfection. In other words, any activity that you can do well time and time again, while also enjoying yourself, is a strength.

It’s no surprise that organizations where employees are able to use their strengths every day are successful and sustainable. The Gallup Organization asked 198,000 employees across different businesses whether they’re able to do what they do best at work each day.

The 20 percent of employees that strongly agreed with the question were 50 percent more likely to work in organizations with lower employee turnover, 38 percent more likely to work in more productive businesses and 44 percent more likely to work for companies with higher customer satisfaction.

Despite this, many organizations still waste time, money and resources by concentrating on fixing employee weaknesses. Think about it: employees get sent off to special training programs not to expand on their strengths, but to correct weaknesses. By focusing on damage control rather than development, the true potential of employees is neglected.

Of course, damage control is sometimes necessary; a clever but inarticulate employee would benefit greatly from a communication class. Still, damage control should not be the focal point of employee management. If you want your employees to develop and grow, and your company to grow with them, you need a different approach.

Combine natural talent with knowledge and skills to build a new strength.

Everyone loves to do things they’re good at. But why are we good at these things in the first place? We often hear that practice makes perfect – but that’s not quite true! You’ve built up the strengths you have because you started off with a natural talent.

Talents are patterns of thought and behavior that make some things easier for you. You might, for example, be great at connecting with strangers. That’s a talent! Others don’t find socializing so easy. Either way, we can’t alter this predisposition.

The neuroscientific basis of natural talents makes them crucial to your strengths.

In the previous blink, we learned that a talent is a pattern of thought or behavior, and that we naturally possess some patterns but not others. But why is that? To find out, we can take a closer look at the neuroscience behind the development of talents.

Up until the age of three, our brains possess a hundred billion neurons that are capable of making around fifteen thousand connections between synapses. These synaptic connections allow brain cells to communicate with each other – which is a lot of communication! Does this mean we all had the brain of a potential genius as toddlers?

Discover your talents by observing your responses to everyday situations.

Take a look at all the people around you. Whether you’re on the train or in your workplace, you’re surrounded by people who possess strengths. Unfortunately, many strengths go to waste when talents remain undetected.

Discovering talents is a crucial task. We’re actually presented with numerous opportunities to uncover talents in our daily lives. But if you want to find talent where you least expect it, start by observing your spontaneous reactions.

Recognize employees’ specific talents so they can do what they do best.

Now that we’ve explored the origins and signs of natural talents, it’s time for you to start seeking them out in your employees. By uncovering their strengths, you’ll help them and your organization achieve top performance and productivity.

In the second blink, we learned that it was important to be specific when describing talents. This is particularly important in the workplace, where different roles have diverse requirements. There are at least 34 types of talents relevant to organizations, so let’s look at a few that might already exist in your workplace.

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