Now, Discover Your Strengths
by Donald O. Clifton, Marcus Buckingham
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Book Reviews of Now, Discover Your Strengths
Book Review: Strong Insights, Weak Management Tool
Summary: 4 Stars
Trying to overcome your weaknesses is a waste of time, according to Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., of the Gallup Organization, and authors of the book NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS (Free Press, 2001). "Casting a critical eye on our weaknesses . . . will only help us prevent failure. It will not help us reach excellence," they write in their thought-provoking book, the follow-up to the outstanding and best-selling Gallup work, FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
Most organizations fail to achieve excellence, the authors contend, because they also fall into the "overcome your weaknesses" trap. Companies do a poor job of tapping the potential already present on their payroll because they try to make employees into something they're not-at the expense of exploiting individuals' innate talents.
Furthermore, Gallup researchers conclude that most of the energy, time, and money that organizations place on trying to hire, train, and develop well-rounded employees is wasted. "When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well-rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp," the authors quip.
Internet Connection. To actually discover your strengths, you cannot rely on the book's pages. You must go online to complete an innovative web-based assessment that identifies your top five individual talent-strengths (and provides you with a brief custom report that you can print or email to someone, like your spouse or boss).
Oddly, if you like the assessment, you cannot purchase additional assessments for your staff, spouse, kids, or anyone else. For them to access the assessment, they must each buy another book.
Other Weaknesses. The book encourages managers to review and become familiar with their direct reports' strength analyses (so as to manage to each individual uniquely). But the authors provide neither a mechanism nor a process to do this.
You are told to consult the book for suggestions on managing your employees who each embody unique mixes of some 34 different strengths. Dauntingly, the authors tell us there are "over thirty-three million possible combinations of the top five strengths." A well-intending manager apparently has a lot of customizing to do. The book provides scant help for that.
Putting the Strengths concept to work more broadly in the organization is even more complex and overwhelming. Selecting and promoting people, as suggested in the book's "Practical Guide," requires profiling at least 100 employees who are all working in the same job (50 top achievers and 50 clunkers). Then you build a database of statistically significant trait patterns. Then you buy every candidate a book, give them a web connection... Then you try to do pattern matching...
The so-called Practical Guide quickly appears all but practical to all but the largest operations.
Target: HR Folk. The authors also take a swing at their firm's consulting customers-HR departments. They assail broad competency training efforts and write: "Many human resources departments have an inferiority complex. With the best of intentions they do everything they can to highlight the importance of people, but when sitting around the boardroom table, they suspect that they don't get the same respect as finance, marketing, or operations. In many instances they are right, but, unfortunately, in many instances they don't deserve to. Why? Because they don't have any data."
Unfortunately, this book does NOT provide them with meaningful solutions for closing that gap (other than, presumably, hiring Gallup consultants for large scale projects).
My Motivation. Gallup's StrengthFinder report tells me that my top personal strengths include the Maximizer tendency-which compels me to "transform something strong into something superb." And the Command strength--characterized as feeling "compelled to present the facts or the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be."
The truth is this: One can't help but think that the well-constructed concept advanced in this enlightening and occasionally entertaining book might have gone from strong to superb. But instead, it seems to have been rushed to market to quickly capitalize on the success of FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES. And that's too bad. Because this worthwhile book, as is true of many of the people it intends to help, has considerable strengths undermined by what are otherwise correctable weaknesses.
Book Review: Good, but not quiet great
Summary: 4 Stars
Now, Discover Your Strengths is a book based on the premise that the traditional model of becoming better by fixing your weaknesses is incorrect. Instead you would be better off finding out your greatest strengths and developing those to improve your performance. And lucky you, the authors provide an online quiz meant to help you discover your personal strengths.
The book begins discussing successful individuals and what they have in common. Generally people who make it to the top enjoy what they do, and they work in roles that emphasis their strengths rather than their weaknesses. One example is Warren Buffet, who thrives on investing in simple, boring companies. When tech companies were the top performers, he chose not to join in, since the complex products and aggressive accounting techniques were not his forte.
The authors introduce three requirements to develop strengths, which are covered through the book:
* Distinguishing natural talent from knowledge and skills. Knowledge comes in two flavors, factual and experimental, which can both be learned. Skill is what organizes experimental knowledge, allowing you to make use of it. Natural talent is what drives performance, but cannot be learned. The main focus of the book is to discover and define your talents.
* Identify your dominant talents. What activities do you pick up quickly? What do you enjoy doing, and do you excel at? The book continuously promotes the strengths finder profile, an online test that narrows down your five dominant talents.
* Find the proper language to describe your talents. Language is focused on the negatives, rather than positives. The book provides some excellent examples of how language leans to the negative. People who are meticulous and orderly are called anal; people who can't wait to act are impatient or impulsive. The strength finder profile turns this around by naming each strength, defining it, and giving an example of someone that exhibits it.
Later chapters go on to discuss how to use the results of the strength finder, covering both individuals who would like to develop themselves, and managers who would like to use the results to build a better team. Techniques for creating a strengths-based organization include finding ways to reward employees while keeping them in the roles that they excel in, as well as focusing on the results of a goal rather than the means used to get there. Employees should be encouraged to use their talents to achieve goals, rather than forcing them to follow rigid routines.
While I enjoyed the book and felt that the premise was interesting, there is one problem that I feel overcomes the positives. The only way to access the profile test is to use a code present in the book. I borrowed the book from a friend, so the code had already been used. Without taking the strengths finder profile online, I was unable to accurately narrow down what my strengths are, making the later parts of the book less interesting. If I really wanted to take the test I would have to purchase my own copy of the book. I don't know if this was an oversight by the authors, or a scheme to sell more books.
Furthermore, there is an entire chapter covering strengths based management, which assumes every employee takes the strengths finder profile. This of course would require every single one of them to buy the book.
Recommendation:
If you don't know your strengths, and would like to find out more about yourself, this is an excellent place to start. This would also be a good book for managers. Even without requiring employees to take the profile test, there are enough suggestions for improving effectiveness and increasing morale that it could be a useful tool for some, although some of the topics are broad and very generalized.
For non-managers who are already familiar with their strengths it may be less useful. I feel like there is something missing, like examples on how to actually build on your strengths. It might be that this information is covered in other books in the series, and eventually I would like to look into those too.
Book Review: Pretty Good Psych -- Some Insights on People Management
Summary: 4 Stars
This book presents an interesting description of personality that describes 34 different types of strengths that a person may have. Based on measurement of these strengths (discussed below), it is possible to identify dominant strengths that help to determine personality. The focus of the book is on describing these strengths and then arguing that it is best for individuals and managers can best develop and build upon individuals' strengths. The book makes the interesting point that it is most effective trying to build on these strengths rather trying to identify and improve upon weaknesses.A key to this book is an internet-based test that allows an individual to obtain a measurement of their top five strengths. To take this test, you log onto a specific website and type in the unique password that is printed in thte inside cover of the book. (This means you only take the test once -- your friends will need to buy the book to take the test!). The test is based on work that the Gallup Organization has done and has (according to the book) been been administered to 2 million people in a large number of different type of organizations.
Once on the site, you answer 180 questions in which you are asked to make a two-way choice as to what word better describes you, which action you would rather take, and so forth. It takes about 20-30 minutes in total to get through these, but once you do, a report is generated on screen (along with an with the same information) that lists your top five strengths and provides a description of what they are. Many of the strengths involve how you deal with people, how you process information, and how you see yourself in the world.
The book gives short descriptions of each strength and gives short (one-paragraph)write-ups from people who have the particular strength describing themselves. The book is meant to be a management tool, in that it talks about how to manage people with each of the strength in the book and make best use of these strengths.
I feel that the book is a better popular psychology book rather than a management book. Although the descriptions of strength seemed fairly clear, the discussion could have been better when it described how to manage people. It tended to be a list of "do this" without much discussion of why a manager might want to encourage an employee to do certain things or take on certain types of assignments. What the book really lacked was a description of the downside that certain strengths might bring (e.g., a person who is deliberative may seem to take a long time to do something). A better discussion of what the strengths really mean would have been helpful.
The book is well-written and taking the test is fun. Learning about one own attributes as measured by the test is helpful, both in personal and business life. It will make you think about yourself in a constructive and stimulating way. This in itself makes the book worth buying.
The book provides some good insight into how to manage individual types of people and help them develop on the job. I found it a bit weak on management from the standpoint of what an organization should do, in that it just seemed too general beyond saying figure out what everybody can do well and encourage them to do it. It may be, however, that some of this material is discussed in the book's (earlier) companion book ("First, Break All the Rules").
Book Review: Capitalize on your strengths
Summary: 4 Stars
When evaluating ourselves and others, we tend to focus more on weaknesses than on strengths. Likewise, when confronted with problems, we tend to look at defects instead of looking at what makes something work well. A strong assumption underlying this tendency is that in order to solve a problem or to develop ourselves we need to focus on what is wrong. Because we think that fixing what is wrong múst lead to healthy functioning, to problem-solving and to growth.
Based on a large study from the Gallup organization, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton say this kind of thinking is misguided. They say that to excell in you chose field and to find lasting satisfaction in doing so, you need to know and understand your strengths. The authors envision an organization that is built around the strengths of each person. This is in accordance with Peter Drucker, who once said that in the organization of the future, people's strengths will be so well-aligned that weaknesses won't matter.
The reality now is quite different: most managers seem to take their employees' strengths for granted and focus on minimising their weaknesses. They euphemistically talk about 'skill gaps' and 'areas of improvement', and then send their people off to training to get these defects fixed. The authors call this 'damage control' instead of 'people development'.
The authors say that the best managers are guided by the following beliefs:
1) each person's talents are lasting and unique, and
2) for anyone, the greatest opportunities for development lie in the area of their greatest strength.
They argue that you have to capitalize on your strengths and to manage around your weaknesses. The authors define a strength as a talent completed with skills and knowledge. Talents are more important that skills and knowledge. The authors explain that skills and knowledge can be learned relatively easily but a talent can't be. Discovering your talents is therefore of great importance. But hard, because "talents are so interwoven in the fabric of your life, that the pattern of each one is hard to discern. Hiding in plain sight, they defy description. But they do leave traces."
The authors provide the following suggestions to read these traces:
1) monitor spontaneous reactions,
2) monitor yearnings,
3) talent involves fast learning and
4) talent often leads to satisfaction
Next, the book describes an assessment tool, StrengthFinder, which is based on a framework of strengths. The book does not provide the tool itself though.
The theme of this book is an important one: looking at what makes people excell and function well instead of what is wrong with them. In its view on people development this book reminded me of:
1) Appreciative Inquiry: managing at the speed of change by Watkins and Mohr (see my review),
2) the Solutions Focus by Jackson and McKergow (great book! see my review) and
3) Positive psychology (read my review of Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman), a new school in psychology which aims to understand healthy functioning of people (instead of their dysfunctioning).
If you're responsible for, or involved in, employee development in your organization, this book will be very useful for you.
Coert Visser, www.m-cc.nl
Book Review: Nice try but falls short
Summary: 1 Stars
Well I 'm glad I read the book and took the survey. But the book left me very frustrated and is a very disappointing book.
Yeah it's nice to know my strengths but the entire summary is one paragraph of less then two dozen sentences; and three short (as very few sentences) anecdotes for that attribute.
This book should be sold to target individuals. The manager's chapter on how to deal with their direct reports is very shallow and it sets the reader up to realize you have to buy a book per person since there are no license purchase abilities to use this book and it's tools as a useful corporate tool. The fact that a manager would have to buy boxes of books is sad. So one has to resort to "creative" marketing to drum up business?
Discovery of strengths is just the first step. We, at work, have gone through several stages of a similar process and it took months and the individual sessions and the supervisors and team sessions took hours. So my critique is based on extensive experience of going through several of these type of personality analysis. This is not a do it yourself project for a manager.
The authors would serve the public better if they told the reader up front that this is an introduction to this deep topic and that for further comprehension they can be reached for corporate level consultations.
Once I entered the web site that was my assessment of this book. That this is nothing more then a shallow carrot to gain more corporate consultation business.
I finished reading the book and was very frustrated and angry at how shallow the entire topic is and am frankly surprised at how many fawned over this book. The marketing ploy of having a unique access ID printed on the back of the book is deceptive and very disingenuous at best. I'm sure the author is aware of the "used book" market. So forcing the buyer to buy another one is wrong on so many levels. If this book is as good as you critics rave and the authors claim then one would think that the purchaser should be able to share the new discovery with spouse or friend and spread the new found source of knowledge thus generating greater interest and possibly more business for consultation.
Based on the business model, I now see, I regret telling my friends to go out and purchase this book. I will now tell them to not purchase this book and rather to seek other sources to achieve the same goal.
This book rates a one star only because of the little new found information gleaned from a verbosely written book that could have been summed up in a pamphlet.
Oh yes the reports we got at work from our industrial psychologists were about 15 pages of in-depth analysis of our strengths and weakness. I was expecting deeper insight to each of the attributes and instead discovered a one short paragraph summary of which the computer generated report also regurgitated the same summary as the book and did not provide any in-depth insight at all.
I just paid $32 to learn that there is one born every minute and I was another one of those!