Imagine yourself at your best, when you are in the zone or in “flow” and everything seems to be going really well.  Concentration may be so intense that self-consciousness may no longer be a factor and time may lose all sense of meaning. In this heightened state of awareness, you are also probably tapping into your natural strengths which research suggests can bring about enhanced performance.

 As part of the individual’s journey to find their flow, an awareness of their unique strengths is  a useful strating point. Brook and Brewerton define strengths as ‘ways of thinking, feeling and expressing your emotions that lead to exceptional performance and energise or strengthen you’. Linley suggests that ’strengths feel authentic, whereas weakness often drains us’.  If you are energised through using your strengths, it follows that you may be more likely to demonstrate the persistence and focus required to increase levels of skills related to the task. This in turn may lead to heightened performance or flow experiences.

 When thinking about flow, it is useful to refer to Csikszentmihalyi (1992) a psychologist who has written much on flow and states of optimal human experience. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that ‘flow is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are pursuing for its own sake’.   In other words, when experiencing flow, the individual is likely to be completely engaged in the activity for the sheer pleasure of doing it, rather than for some extrinsic reward.

Interestingly, for the conditions of flow to occur, Csikszentmihalyi emphasises that the goal in question will need to be sufficiently stretching so that the individual will be neither bored nor anxious about the task in question but instead likely to become absorbed in the task and in doing so, transported to another reality. Csikszentmihalyi also suggests that for a person to be in flow most of the time, they are likely to be internally driven. He suggests some simple rules to facilitate flow experiences which include:

• Setting clear goals where the challenge level is appropriately high
• Becoming immersed in the activity lead to a loss of feeing of self-consciousness
• Paying attention to what is happening  where concentration leads to involvement
• Learning to enjoy the immediate experience

Psychometric tools such as Strengthscope (www.strengthscope.com), for instance, can be used with individuals and teams to identify their top 7 strengths from an inventory of work-related strengths. These insights can be integrated into an action plan, where key strengths are explicitly emphasised. By helping the individual to select and choose appropriate goals that feel authentic and aligned with their natural strengths, it is therefore likely that improved performance will follow. By leveraging known strengths to optimise performance the individual, in doing so, may also find their flow.

By Odette Beris, Consulting Partner and Chartered Psychologist

1. Help people find out more about their unique qualities and talents (i.e., their “X-factor”) by raising awareness of their strengths. Use a well established tool like ©Strengthscope (www.strengthscope.com) that provides them with feedback from multiple raters rather than simply their own perspective. This self-awareness should provide the basis of a focused and relevant learning plan to ensure employees build the skills, knowledge and experience to optimise their strengths and personal best at work.
2.  Encourage managers and leaders to focus on and motivate employees’ personality and performance strengths during performance appraisals and discussions. Ensure they understand that arguably their most important role as a leader is to help align employees’ strengths with organisational outcomes and ensure these are amplified as much as possible. Focusing on strengths also helps them shift tough performance conversations from confrontational and anxiety-provoking ‘trials’ to constructive, open and solutions-oriented exchanges.  Introducing professional strengths coaching can help accelerate the competence and confidence of managers/leaders to incorporate strengths concepts, practices and tools in the way they manage and motivate individuals and teams. Click here for further information.
3.  Build a more positive, “can do” work environment by highlighting achievements and successes on the Intranet, staff notice boards, company newsletters or in staff meetings. “Hidden hero” stories are one powerful way of ensuring people who are not normally publicly recognised get the appreciation they deserve. This will help build a cycle of success and confidence that becomes self-generating.
4.  Help employees feel more empowered and energised to overcome and mitigate strengths and performance blockers by promoting complementary pairings or working with co-workers whose strengths and talents are different and help them in areas where they are weaker.
5.  Boost employees’ confidence and empower them to improve by helping them understand that weaknesses are often strengths in overdrive and not competency gaps or weaknesses. To stay in the “peak performance zone”, employees need to understand how to use strengths in balance across different situations. For example, someone who comes across as too intense and over-zealous may simply be demonstrating drive and results focus in overdrive. Similarly, someone who is too focused on the detail of a recommendation or decision may be unaware of the negative implications of their detail orientation when a more efficient, strategic approach is called for.
6.  Find professional and low-cost ways to introduce fun, relaxation and social networking into the workplace. Research clearly shows that fun and positive emotions result in a whole host of positive outcomes including improved creative problem-solving, teamwork, wellbeing (i.e., less sickness absence) and output.      
7.  Build your own social network, knowledge and skills in the area of strengths-based Human Resources and positive psychology by joining the Strengths HR Forum free of charge. The Forum is the largest global networking site of its kind and comprises a virtual Linked In networking site, regular meetings in central London and practical tools and resources. Go to http://www.titantalent.com/events.html for more information.

During difficult and uncertain times, strong social networks help us maintain an optimistic, upbeat outlook and ‘bounce back’ from adverse, difficult experiences at work and life. Below are several tips to help you build and maintain strong relations at work and outside.

•  Try to remain positive and optimistic, even in the face of adversity. Try to search for the opportunity or upside of every challenge, problem or setback, even if this is not obvious or apparent at first. Research shows that people are more attracted to individuals displaying positive emotions and attitudes such as joy, happiness, and a “can do” mindset.
•  Identify and focus on your personality strengths, as these are essential for a strong sense of identity and purpose. They express your personal ‘brand’ or what you can offer to those around you. Complete a strengths profiling tool like ©Strengthscope (www.strengthscope.com) to build awareness about your strengths. If you don’t want to complete such an assessment, there are several cues to help you identify your strengths: What type of tasks and activities do you find particularly energising? What do you find easy to learn? What type of tasks and activities lead to good results and highly positive feedback from others? What tasks and activities would you not want to give up if you are forced to make a choice? So, if you always find yourself showing a deep and genuine concern for the wellbeing and welfare of others during tough times, you are likely to have a compassion strength you can use to support others through these turbulent times.
•  Seek out collaborative partnerships with others who have complementary personalities and strengths as this will ensure you have a strong, diverse network to help you deal with tough times and more challenging situations. We are fortunate in this highly connected Internet age as there are numerous social networking groups and online communities to enable us to make new connections quickly and cheaply. Use these to your advantage to make new connections in areas where you feel you have weaknesses or areas where you would like to explore new opportunities and friendships.  
•  Ensure your likeability factor is high, as this will help you build and maintain productive relationships and ensure ongoing success. People are more likeable when they are decent and trustworthy, have a good sense of humour, are friendly and smile a lot and are considerate and helpful to others. Displaying these behaviours will ensure you initiate and build relationships with equally likeable and successful people. Even if you are generally a more negative, pessimistic person, regularly being in the company of people who are happy, resilient and optimistic will result in a gradual shift in your mindset and behaviours.    

Confidence is at the very heart of effective performance. The media continuously bombards us with very public examples of individuals and teams in the performing arts and professional sports arena buckling under pressure from crises of confidence when strong confidence is call for. For me, people like Susan Boyle and the England rugby squad spring to mind when I think about confidence ‘gaps’ that result in lacklustre performance and failure. So we know just how important this concept it. However, in our experience, few leaders and HR practitioners actually know how to build a culture of confidence and success.

Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard Business School says confidence comprises “positive expectations for favourable outcomes”. Rather than simply being something in people’s personal psychology, she maintains that it becomes embedded in everyday interactions and so, in the culture of teams and organisations. She asserts:

“On the way up, success creates positive momentum. People who believe they are likely to win are also likely to put in the extra effort at difficult moment to ensure that victory. On the way down, failure feeds on itself. As performance starts running on a positive or negative path, the momentum can be hard to stop. Growth cycles produce optimism, decline produces pessimism.”

So, how can we build and maintain a culture where success cycles are amplified and failure cycles are minimised?

Below are some practical approaches for leaders and HR practitioners:

1. Build Awareness of Strengths
   Because people typically don’t get much feedback on their strengths during their life and career, they frequently don’t understand their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Many even experience anxiety, discomfort and embarrassment when talking about their strengths as they have learned to fear complacency, failure and being too different from the rest of the ‘pack’. There are many ways to build self-awareness about strengths, including reflecting more on one’s conscious experience, feedback from colleagues and other stakeholders and keeping a journal or diary of tasks that energise you. However, we have found that the best approach is to use an objective strengths profiling tool such as ©Strengthscope (www.strengthscope.com). The benefit of such a tool is that it provides a common language for people to start exploring their strengths and enables them to focus their energies on relevant opportunities to apply these more fully.
2. Develop Positive Action Routines
   Self-awareness is crucial, but not sufficient. As part of ongoing performance dialogues, managers should work in partnership with employees to explore how their strengths can be made more productive, not only in the person’s current role, but in tasks and projects outside their role. Like professional athletes, employees need to build and practice positive routines or ways of doing their work which reflect who they really are and what comes most naturally to them. These action routines will result in successes which in turn will reinforce confidence.
3. Cultivate a Positive, Appreciative Environment
   When people feel they have been successful and their efforts and achievements are recognised, it generates positive emotions and good moods. This positive emotion becomes contagious and boosts energy, morale and discretionary effort, fuelling the success cycle. By helping executives and line managers understand the importance of sharing and celebrating successes and putting in place organisation-wide mechanisms and processes for facilitating such sharing, a more positive performance culture will prevail. It is important that this is done across organisational boundaries as even others’ successes can make us feel more energised and positive provided these are communicated and celebrated in an appropriate manner. Authentic and frequent recognition and praise for a job well done at local line manager level is also essential in creating a culture where effort and hard work will flourish.
4. Ensure Leaders and Managers Model the Way
   The “shadow of the leader” effect is strong at work in organisations. Leaders and managers should understand the impact that their values, attitudes and actions have on the workforce and should be invited to consider what type of “shadow” they cast now and how this can be strengthened in the future. In our experience, there are still too many leaders out there that cast a long and negative shadow, sapping energy and life from organisations. We would recommend educating and developing leaders and managers to understand and apply positive psychology and strengths-based concepts, principles and techniques in building a culture of success and confidence. This learning needs to be practical, relevant and ideally supported by on-the-job coaching in order to ensure maximum learning transfer.  This type of investment has an added benefit, as managers and leaders are more likely to stay with the organisation if it invests in their development and advancement. Improved retention and stability of leadership will in turn give rise to increased investment of time and trust by leaders in ensuring the organisation is a success and so the success cycle is amplified further.
5. Make Customer and Stakeholder Feedback Visible
   Success brings positive feedback and rewards from customers and other stakeholders on the outside. However, employees often only hear about this feedback when failures occur or performance falls below expectations (e.g., when customers complain or when shareholders are unhappy with company performance). It is important to ensure this feedback is balanced and employees also get positive feedback from shareholders, customers and other stakeholders. This will all contribute to a more appreciative atmosphere and build confidence. One way to do this is to invite teams to interview their own customers (internal or external) and stakeholders using an appreciative inquiry interview process. Once the data has been analysed, this can then be reported back at a team meeting with a view to exploring successes, strengths, weaker areas and opportunities for improvement and growth.
6. Build Strong Cohesive Teams and Social Networks
   Positive emotions produced through success strengthen relationships and give rise to a host of individual and team-based outcomes including improved collaboration, creative problem-solving and employee wellbeing. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they are more likely to be generous, supportive and tolerant of one another. This is turn reinforces teamwork and commitment. It also means people can more freely acknowledge their vulnerability (concerns, fears, etc.), admit their mistakes and learn from them.

In summary, building a culture of confidence is largely about amplifying successes and strengths to ensure the ‘voices’ of possibility, optimism and self-belief drown out the ‘voices’ of self-doubt, negativity and pessimism. To turn around a failure cycle can be tough, particularly when successive failures have occurred, which have sapped the morale and energy from a team and/or organisation. However, like Moss Kanter, we contend that this is primarily a leadership challenge. With the right mindset, approaches and techniques, leaders, supported by their HR practitioners, can build accountability for the turnaround, focus on small ‘wins’ to start rebuilding confidence and inspire people to optimise their strengths and take initiative to get back on track again.

References
Moss Kanter, R (2004). Confidence: Leadership and the Psychology of Turnarounds. London: Random House.

In Spring/Summer 2009, Titan Talent undertook a survey on the views of HR and talent leaders into the importance HR assigns to optimise employees’ strengths and talents.

Participants included Saatchi and Saatchi, Abbott Labs, Mothercare and Thomson Reuters. Respondents spanned multiple sectors including Finance, Media, Retail, Pharmaceuticals, Public, Telecommunications and Engineering.

We asked a total of 25 companies the rate the following statements on a scale of 1-5:

1.Our HR department spends more time and energy helping good people optimise their strengths than fighting fires and dealing with problem employees?

2.The biggest opportunity for HR to contribute greater value to the business is by enabling the productive use of individual, team and organisational strengths?

Results showed that only 32% of participants agreed with statement number 1 and 76% of respondents agreed with statement 2.
These results reveal that many senior HR personnel believe that they are currently spending more time fighting fires than actually aiding employees to grow and develop in their roles through optimising their strengths. Results also suggest that the strengths approach to HR is widely regarded as best practice. However, there is clearly a large gap between current practice and how HR practitioners would ideally like to spend their time and effort to maximise value for the organisation.

Respondents were then asked the following question:

In your opinion, what beliefs, practices or processes would need to change for you to spend more time and energy enabling the productive use of employees’ strengths?

The following areas were identified for improvement:

• High level of top management commitment and support for HR.
• Belief systems – focus needs to shift from weakness fixing to strength building.
• More strategic and talent management focus for HR…change within CIPD.
• Stronger line management skills and capabilities to manage and motivate people.
• Recruitment based on strengths rather than narrow competency focus.
• Courage to move away from “tried and tested approaches”, including job design.
• Higher levels of personal accountability.

Confidence is at the heart of effective performance. But when setbacks or failures occur at work, our confidence often buckles. Internal voices of self-doubt are amplified and tell us we are no good, which starts of a vicious negative spiral of low self-confidence, poor performance and critical feedback.

We have found that focusing on one’s strengths can be a powerful way to help maintain confidence in the face of adversity and setbacks, ensuring you maximise your potential and career success. Here are several practical ways you can put this into action:

1.Identify and focus on your personality and performance strengths. The best way to do this is to identify and reflect on “defining moments” in your career, i.e., times when you felt particularly energised and performed at your peak. What did you learn about yourself and your strengths from these occasions? What type of work do you find really energising and confidence boosting? How can you secure more or this type of work in your current job or elsewhere?

2.Build new skills that build on your strengths and will help you achieve your next job or career goals. There are numerous ways to build new skills, including signing up for a training course, finding other people who can teach you, self-study options, on-the-job development etc.

3.Start understanding the unintended consequences of your strengths, what we refer to as “overplayed strengths”. For example, one of my strengths is “courage”. Being courageous means I am prepared to challenge established ways of doing things and question the ideas and opinions of others in senior positions. However, earlier in my career, I was far too eager to directly and aggressively challenge established views and assumptions. This behaviour was perceived as reckless and even arrogant by others. One of my greatest strengths had gone into overdrive and become a potential weakness. Through understanding that my courage strength has an associated “darkside”, I have been able to build more positive routines that enable me to use it in a more situationally sensitive way. This has left me feeling far more confident about my courage strength and myself.

4. Every time you experience negative self-doubt or are tempted into inaction, think about the opportunities and benefits of channelling your energy more positively. Amplify your positive self-talk and do something to change your situation. Remember that most success is not built overnight. It take concerted effort, disciplined execution and finally, decisive action to grab “Lady Luck” firmly with both hands.

Finally, remember the quote of the famous mountaineer and first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest, Edmund Hillary: “It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves”. If you can amplify your inner voices of strength and possibility, your self-criticism will be silenced or overpowered and your confidence will grow significantly as a result.

In our work, we increasingly hear organisations talking about helping their employees use their strengths more often to achieve a motivated, high performing workforce. This is encouraging and suggests a significant shift in mindset from a deficit or weakness based one to a more strengths-based one. However, the prescription is incomplete. Simply applying strengths more often may result in higher levels of discretionary effort and performance, but it may also backfire in many instances. This is because of the dualistic, yin-yang nature of human strengths. Like jet engines, strengths harbour tremendous power to create positive energy and propel us forward towards our goals. But they can result in negative energy and lead to unintended consequences or even complete failure if used in the wrong way.

For example, when productively applied, my “courage” strength (which has been largely instrumental in my career success to date) means I take on challenges and risks and am prepared to challenge the status quo in support of positive change. However, earlier in my career, I was far too eager to take on risky positions and challenges that had a high probability of failure and challenged established views and assumptions head on. This behaviour was perceived as reckless, obsessive and overpowering by others. One of my greatest strengths had gone into overdrive and become a potential derailer. Through understanding that my courage strength has an associated “darkside”, I have been able to apply it more skillfully based on a careful assessment of the situation. 

There are numerous benefits to introducing this concept into the way we manage, motivate and develop people. Several of those we see in our work include:

1. People feel empowered and motivated to act if they start seeing dysfunctional habits or behaviours as stemming from strengths in overdrive rather than pointing to fundamental character flaws or weaknesses. This means that they are far more likely to bring about lasting changes to their behaviour and attitude, building positive habits and routines to prevent their strengths going into overdrive.  
2. People are more open to constructive and critical feedback when it is framed in strengths in overdrive language. Feedback about weaknesses tends to elicit a whole range of defensive responses, especially from perfectionists and highly intelligent people with strong egos. I am not suggesting that conversations should be dishonest or should never deal with weaker areas. However, the reality is that many examples or poor performance or inadequate performance result from strengths in overdrive, rather than any significant competency shortfalls.
3. A focus on strengths and strengths in overdrive encourages a more appreciative and tolerant team and organisational culture based on individual uniqueness and difference. It helps people recognise that all people have a tendency to use their strengths in overdrive on occasion. They aren’t weak or don’t intend to engage in unhelpful habits and behaviours; it is simply part of human nature to be vulnerable to overdrive in certain situations.  For example, rather than seeing a person who is strong on attention to detail as “anal”, they will have a better understanding that this is simply the less desirable expression of the strength in overdrive.

 At Titan Talent and Strengths Partnership, we have found that exceptional performance is a function of a person’s strengths, the skills they have to fully leverage this strength and the agility they develop to flex their strengths and skills to the needs of the situation. This can be expressed as:

 Performance = f(strengths x skills x agility)

 We encourage people to assess their strengths and potential strengths in overdrive using a profiling tool such as ©Strengthscope which is designed specifically for this purpose. Once people have a good understanding of their strengths and the unproductive behaviours which could arise when these go into overdrive, they can become more intentional or conscious about managing the overdrive behaviour. We then work with people to put in place specific strategies and techniques to assess situations against their strengths more objectively and robustly, as well as replacing toxic or unproductive habits with more positive ones. To ensure ongoing learning and reinforcement, we encourage people to invite regular feedback from key performance stakeholders across different situations to determine the perceived value and benefit of the strength in that particular situation. This ensures that the necessary adjustments can be made in the same way that a pilot needs constant feedback on environmental factors such as wind speed, weather conditions, air traffic, etc. in order to make safe and effective decisions about how best to adjust the engines and fly their plane.

One of the main questions HR decision makers and professionals should be asking themselves is why it is that arguably the most powerful tool available in the HR arsenal is yielding such poor results. In any other discipline, a tool with such a poor track record would almost certainly have been ejected or transformed long ago, but we appear incapable or unwilling to formulate alternatives that leave employees feeling motivated to raise their performance and exert the discretionary effort organisations are so eager to extract.

The reality is that most appraisal systems in use across organisations today are highly mechanistic in nature and involve a lot of tedious form filling which typically takes more time than the conversations themselves. As pointed out by the late management guru and author, Peter Drucker, both manager and employees dislike the process. Managers hate it because of the mounds of paperwork and the fact that they are set up in a way that requires managers to spend a lot of time criticising others. This is because their main purpose (which is often implicit rather than explicit) is to satisfy the requirements of the reward manager and finance department for a fair and objective reward process involving annual adjustments to base pay, bonuses and other variable forms of remuneration. Employees generally dislike the process because they know their manager is compelled to criticise them to justify any pay increase which is average or below average and because most managers are ill-equipped for this type of confrontational discussion, which leaves the employee feeling demotivated and devalued.

So is there a better approach we should be putting to the test? Although I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, I would like to offer some guidance along the lines of that originally put forward by Drucker in the late 1960’s, when everybody was too preoccupied by scientific management (or management by control and numbers) to pay attention. Drucker maintained that in order for appraisal discussions to be effective, they should first and foremost focus on bringing out “what a man can do”. In other words, the appraisal should focus primarily on successes and strengths (or underlying characteristics that are natural to the person and energise them to achieve something extraordinary).

This is the way most coaches of performance artists and sports people operate. They recognise that the players’ strengths need to be honed and perfected to achieve mastery. However, this doesn’t mean weaknesses should be ignored. They need to be surfaced, discussed and addressed, particularly where they are critical to role performance. However, the discussion should recognise that everyone has vulnerabilities and many of those that are deeply ingrained in the person’s core personality are unlikely to change much. Of course the person can learn new skills and behaviours. But trying to develop mastery in someone who doesn’t have the base potential is a rush for fools gold. It simple doesn’t work. It is much easier to find someone else with the right natural strengths to perform the work or to mitigate the negative implications of the weakness as much as possible to prevent the person from failing. There are numerous way to do this, from helping the person to find partners (s)he can pair with who have complementary strengths and capabilities, through mentoring and coaching, to outsourcing parts of the work or finding technology-based solutions to lessen the impact of the weaker area.  

Translating this all into a structure for an appraisal conversation is simpler than one would imagine. Using Drucker’s approach as a start point, we have developed the following key questions:

1. What has the person achieved against the expectations set for them?
2. What has (s)he done particularly well and what strengths or capabilities have underpinned this success?
3. What does (s)he have to learn or acquire to get the full benefit from these strengths?
4. What frustrations or blockers need to be removed to ensure the person is able to perform at his/her best?
5. What weaker areas or unproductive habits need to be managed and mitigated to ensure any vulnerabilities or weaknesses are avoided?
6. How energised and confident does the person feel by the end of the conversation. 

However, all this doesn’t help to deal with the direct and counterproductive linkage most organisations choose to have between their appraisal discussions and the annual pay round. Our prescription for this would simply be to pay for contribution and forget trying to tie pay to competencies and behaviours. So the main question is focused around the specific outcomes the person has achieved and the extent to which these are below, in line with or above expectations. Organisations would in my opinion also benefit from separating this conversation from the main appraisal and development discussions for all the reasons outlined above.

A fascinating 2005 Corporate Leadership Council study involving data from over 90 000 employees in 135 organisations found that focusing on personality and performance strengths had one of the strongest impacts on employee performance of all line manager actions. They found that this focus reinforces performing-enhancing behaviour, increasing employee engagement and promoting stronger identification with their work. However, to achieve these positive effects, most organisations will need to radically rethink the way they structure their appraisal systems and training for line managers. To engender high levels of openness, empowerment and collaboration in appraisals requires implementing strengths-based thinking and practices. Managers will then regard their role less as judge and critical parent and more as facilitator and enabler or productive use of strengths.

References

Drucker, P. (1967). The Effective Executive. Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann.

The starting point for a coaching assignment is typically (but not always) a problem or “gap” which threatens to derail the client’s career. Therefore, upon engagement, the client’s focus of attention and initial expectation are typically centred on their problems and weaknesses. There are two reasons for this. The first is that they have learned through bitter experience that their career success depends largely on overcoming “gaps” and remedying weaknesses to fit into the normative competency standards prescribed by their employer.

Secondly, like most of us, clients are conditioned throughout their lives and careers to focus on remedying their weaker area, as this is assumed to be the quickest path to success. Parents, grandparents, teachers, social leaders, managers and other agents in their development all reinforce this deficit-based mindset. It is hardly surprising then that clients obsess and fear their weaker areas and want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Coaching provides a seemingly ideal way for them to get help with these weaknesses in a confidential, reflective environment.   

Similarly, the coach’s own beliefs and associated practices are jaundiced by weakness-based beliefs and assumptions. Most are brought up in the same deficit-based way as their clients. Like their clients, they also operate in a wider society that favours bad news stories and failure over positive ones. This is fuelled by the inherently sensationalistic and negative nature of today’s mainstream media. In recent times this has been accentuated by the turmoil in world financial markets. However, even before this, when a strong bull market prevailed, problems and failure usually triumphed over opportunity and success.

To shift away from this deficit-based mindset, a coach needs to first reflect on and challenge their underlying beliefs about human growth and excellence. There is broad agreement that executive coaching is by definition facilitating improvement of a client’s performance, development and personal fulfilment. However, there is typically too little appreciation by the coach of the unique strengths, positive action routines and enabling relationships of the client which have contributed to past and current successes. Clients are rarely psychologically impaired or flawed. They are simply imbalanced in the characteristics they have been endowed with, in the same way we all are as human beings.

At Titan Talent, we have developed a strengths-focused coaching process, called the ©Strong Partnerships Model, which seeks to emphasise the centrality of strengths and successes in facilitating the client’s performance improvement and growth. Experience with a growing number of clients suggests that focusing on their strengths does indeed unlock and focus energy and effort. Individuals start seeing old problems and performance blockers in a new light – through a strengths ‘lens’. For example, in a recent assignment, we were asked to help a senior manager of a large Pharmaceuticals company overcome what was described as belligerent and overly critical behaviour in team meetings. He had undertaken several communication skills training courses without success. Upon closer analysis, it became clear that the manager’s clearest strength, and source of some of his greatest career milestones, was his critical reasoning ability. However, when the manager overplayed this strength or used it inappropriately, he was perceived as pouring cold water on co-workers’ opinions and of being obstinate in defending his points of view. We worked with the manager to help him develop positive action routines to use the strength more selectively, balancing critical reasoning with appreciative feedback, open inquiry and commitment-based influencing techniques. Toxic routines gradually dissipated and stakeholders noticed a significant change in the manager’s behaviour and results.

It is clear that personal and organisational transformation often occurs when beliefs and assumptions are brought into full awareness, constructively challenged and translated into new action repertoires. If the beliefs and assumptions are wrong, everything else that follows is flawed. I would suggest that many coaches are still straight-jacketed by a deficit-based mental frame and approach assignments with the aim of ‘fixing’ the client. They are essentially colluding with the dark side of their client’s identities and mental frames, exacerbating their fears and self-limiting beliefs. If they choose to replace this with a more strengths-focused, appreciative mindset and approach that builds upon the person’s natural strengths and talent, the client’s full potential and resourcefulness will almost certainly be unlocked.

I’m sure many human resources and training professionals were surprised and dissapointed to read this article in such a highly respected British newspaper. For those of you who didn’t read the article, the final paragraph will probably give you the gist of what the rest of the article contains. The journalist, Sathnam Sanghera, writes:

“Get rid of 90% of HR policies, 90% of HR people and then wash your hands of it”.
Continue Reading »