Strengths are knowledge and skills we possess that enable us to achieve the things that are important to us. Strengths are the answer to the question: What are you good at?

The effective use of our strengths enable the achievement of personal and career goals. Their effective use allows us to be the person we want to be personally, professionally, and for the world.

The most valued strengths are the ones required for success in the various roles (e.g., family, career, community) we play in life. While we all have core strengths, there are additional strengths we develop over time and use to successfully function in our roles.

Leverageable strengths are the ones that are both valued and expandable in a role. So a strength is leverageable when it’s initial successful use offers a high upside with broader use and with greater results going forward.

The successful use of strengths is best measured through feedback. Feedback should include, comparing achievements using the strengths against goals and getting personal feedback on the successful use of strengths from those around you - the use of an appropriate 360 Feedback assessment tool could be helpful here.

Leaders should inventory (i.e., identify and assess) their strengths, determine which ones their organizations value for success, leverage them, and grow them through continuous learning. Finally, the same consideration for identifying, leveraging and growing strengths should be given to leaders’ teams. Leaders should be coached and in turn should coach and mentor their teams in this regard. This will help maximize the effectiveness of leaders and their teams in the various roles they respectively play in life.

Bob Corbett

Leaders, to ensure that your teams experience significant personal improvement and growth, coach them to resist the temptation to overlook the positive (what’s working) and and instead focus on the negative (what’s not working). Coach them to identify what’s working and build on it.

We live in a world and work in organizations that spend far too much time focusing on the negative to the detriment of the positive. Unfortunately our performance management and reward systems reinforce this behavior.

Today employees spend time identifying strengths and weaknesses, then ignore their strengths while spending most of their time fixing weaknesses. As a result, their performance slips because while focusing on weaknesses they failed to pay critical attention to what’s working, i.e., continuing to grow and leverage their strengths.

Instead, coach employees to focus on their strengths. Ask them to also identify ways in which they can leverage strengths by:

• expanding their use
• improving outcomes
• growing them through continuous learning
• linking them to valued organization strengths

Focusing on what’s working and continually leveraging valued organization strengths will ultimately neutralize and overcome weaknesses.

Bob Corbett