Skills Aren't Enough: How and Why to Bring a Strengths-Based Focus to Your Organization
Taking a strengths-based approach to your talent management practices can pay off for the success of your employees, your teams, and your organization as a whole. Find out why and four ways you can incorporate a strengths-based focus in your work culture.
[Editorial note: This is the third and final article in this series. Read how the career advancement concept of leverage differs from ladders and lattices in part one, and in part two, learn how employees can get the advancement they need to move along a career path without teams having to lose talent to career transitions.]
ADP has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My mother retired from the company after 33 years, and following in her footsteps, I am now celebrating my 19th year as an ADPer. By far, the biggest change I've seen in this stretch of time has been our evolution to becoming a strengths-based organization.
I've witnessed firsthand how choosing to support employee strengths in addition to their skills can be transformational for the employees and the company. Facilitating individual strengths can add up to increased performance, engagement, profitability, and improvements in just about every metric an organization could measure.
Here's why it's worth considering this shift in your organization.
What defines a strengths-based culture?
Skills are the flavor of the decade, and they are undoubtedly valuable, especially when you can measure them through education and certifications.
But strengths have a role to play as well.
Strengths are activities that make you feel strong – what you're good at and love doing. Decades of research, most recently with the ADP Research Institute tells us that strengths are the surest path to high performance – that teams whose employees play to their strengths every day excel in areas of customer satisfaction, productivity, and profitability, and see significant reductions in turnover, absenteeism, and safety incidents.
Four ways to incorporate strengths-based practices
If you're curious about bringing strengths-based concepts into your company, here's where to start:
1. Refocus how employees spend their time at work
While an employee's purpose can be important, it doesn't supersede the reality of their day-to-day tasks. One of the most significant factors in an employee's satisfaction and happiness at work stems from what they actually do. Employees who strongly agree they use their strengths every day at work are not just more productive and more likely to stay (great for the company), but also more likely to report that they like what they do each day (great for the individual). Encourage employees to find ways to do MORE of the activities they love (and less of those they loathe) in their daily work lives.
2. Guide managers to ask different questions
In a strengths-based setting, it's not enough to simply observe the competence of our employees. Instead, we must ask questions that help us to understand how employees feel about the work they're doing to focus them on activities that allow them to contribute their very best.
Some great questions to start with are:
- What work activity did you most love (loathe) last week?
- What specifically about that activity did you love (loathe)?
- What tasks make you feel like you're adding value to the team/company?
- What work tasks or activities would you like to do more of?
This approach leads people managers to more clarity around how to best distribute the daily work. as well as additional tasks, projects, and assignments, between team members to use their strengths. This helps better position the employee, the team, and the organization for optimal success.
3. Modernize your hiring practices
The most recent focus of organizational hiring practices has been around skills, with job descriptions and interview questions focused on the requirements and skills believed to be needed for the open position.
Taking a strengths-based approach to hiring and internal mobility requires you to go beyond requirements and skills and get crystal clear on the main activities of each role.
Once established, update your company's job descriptions to include the specific details of those primary activities, such as "answering client questions via video chat and email to help them complete a process within the benefits software" or "facilitating career development training sessions to large groups of employees who want to grow in their current role." That last one is in my job description!
Strengths-based questions like those in the previous section can be incorporated into your interview process to further home in on a candidate's preferences and feelings towards the tasks they would spend the bulk of their time doing on the job.
This approach will allow candidates, as well as your recruiters and hiring managers, to more accurately assess their fit for the role based on both their aptitude and appetite for the main work activities. Candidates who meet these criteria can be taught other job-specific skills and knowledge when on the job.
4. Establish a strengths-based performance management process
"Measure what matters" is at the core of the performance management process; however, humans are not reliable raters of other people's performance. As a result, traditional performance reviews that rate the skills of employees, "generate unreliable data, which in turn compromises all downstream talent decisions."
A strengths-based approach to performance management has managers answering specific questions about their intentions with their team members on a quarterly or more frequent basis. The most important and telling question is "I always go to this team member for extraordinary results when …" and is measured on a strongly agree to strongly disagree five-point scale.
Humans are in fact reliable raters of our own intentions and feelings – much more so than we are of other people's skills and performance. Through this approach, the organization can gather better data to know how it should respond to each person's performance (i.e. compensation rewards, training and promotions).
Strengths-based cultures can help employees and organizations thrive
If there's anything I've learned in my career, it's that when people find themselves in roles where they do activities they love – and are great at – every day, the improved results are staggering. Bringing a strengths-based focus into all the organization's practices – from hiring, to onboarding, to learning and development, to career transitions and mobility – is a key way to help ensure employees are happier, more engaged and thriving, while also giving the business the critical returns it needs for long-lasting success.
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