Years ago, I attended a week-long leadership program at The Gallup Leadership Institute at their HQ in Nebraska. At the time, I was fortunate to get the chance to hear the late Don Clifton speak. Clifton was the chairman of Gallup Inc. and an accomplished psychologist, educator, author and researcher. He wrote a book Soar With Your Strengths which is one of the all-time great reads if you love the topic of leadership.
Clifton’s focus as a leader and as an author was on the notion of winning with people’s strengths. He was a believer in studying what was right with people and felt too often leaders and organizations focus on what’s wrong with people. Clifton developed a world-renowned strengths assessment which was aptly called CliftonStrengths. I read online that over 37 million people have taken this assessment. Perhaps you are one of them?
Anyway, in the book he tells a story which captures the essence of his view on this topic of winning with people’s strengths. It goes something like this.
There was a period in the 1960s, 70s and 80s when the US Table Tennis team could not beat the Chinese. Year after year the Chinese table tennis teams were simply the best. They beat everybody. They won all the medals. It frustrated the US teams, and they decided to look into how the Chinese could be so successful.
Somehow the US managed to get an inside look at the practice sessions of the Chinese. And what they saw was an eye-opener.
The Chinese coaches would assess each player’s strengths. In table tennis, this pretty much comes down to a player having a mean forehand or a superior backhand. Once it was clear which was the dominant side of the player, the practice sessions would entail sending balls to that dominant side. That’s right; the guy that had a superior forehand was repeatedly served balls to that very same forehand. And vice versa. If the dominant side was the backhand, that player spent the practice session hitting endless amounts of backhand shots.
You see, what the Chinese figured out, was if you take a player’s core strength, and notch it up to its highest level, s/he will become so dominant that they become unbeatable. As soon as the ball comes to the Chinese player’s dominant side, it was ‘lights out’ for the opponent. Even if the opponent attempted to take advantage of the ‘weaker side’, chances are s/he will never get the chance. It’s hard to attempt to return a ball to the Chinese player’s weaker side when you have all you can do to even hit it!
Contrast this with the American method of practice sessions. Typically, the majority of the time spent under the US coaches was in attempting to shore up the player’s weak side. In doing so, a lot of time was basically wasted because the increment of improvement was modest. The Chinese figured out that it’s a crap shoot to invest in developing a player’s weak side. Maybe the improvement is material, but most often it’s not. Far better to lock in on the strength, kick it up to the next level, and then let the overall dominance of that strength win the match. In short, win with your strengths.
Are you with me here? Can you see the application this story has to how we go about developing our people at work?
For starters, assign people to tasks they can be good at. Take that one step further and assign people to jobs they can be good at. Put people in situations where they can win with their strengths. Find out what your individual team members are good at and exploit that strength. Resist the temptation to drill down on the weakness. Move away from spending considerable amounts of time talking about an employee’s weakness, or writing detailed development plans for that weakness. Reallocate that time to conversations – and assignments – related to the worker’s strengths, and then turn them loose. Good things will come of it.
Game on.
#leadership #leadership speaker