Was It Something I Said?
A Test of Strengths
By Vijay Mehrotra
Nearly 20 years ago, I had a summer job at a sales office for a large, multinational company. My assignment was to figure out how personal computers might be applied to make our sales team more productive. Indeed, several people in the office were skeptical about these new devices called PCs.
I spent much of my time befriending various sales reps and figuring out who might be successful Early Adopters, and I soon found a couple of willing guinea pigs. I knew these few people were key to the success of my project.
When the PCs arrived, I did not wait for the facilities people. I simply hauled the boxes to the appropriate desks and got the PCs up and running on the network. Along the way, I got a few weird looks from the people in white shirts and yellow ties.
Later, during a performance review, my manager mentioned "professionalism" as an area for improvement. When I asked for specifics, he immediately brought up this incident. "You're not a maintenance man," he scolded me, "and you're clearly going to be an executive one day. You might as well start acting like one."
Just recently removed from my illustrious days as a caddy and security guard, I figured he was right. I made a mental note ("Improve Professionalism!") and slumped on back to college.
In "First, Break All the Rules," Marcus Buckingham and his Gallup colleague Curt Coffman study great managers, analyzing a huge amount of data and complementing it with interviews and profiles. In particular, the book builds on an unconventional definition of "talent."
"For most of us, talent seems a rare and precious thing, bestowed on special, faraway people... Great managers disagree with this definition of talent...they define talent as 'a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied.'"
A colleague recently turned me on to FBAR. Like me, Sam is a recovering CEO who has since moved on, with a lifetime to contemplate his start-up experience: "A venture-backed CEO needs to be a lot of different things to different people: fundraiser, strategist, recruiter, salesman, cheerleader. My talent, and my passion, is for product strategy, and for matching customer needs to technology solutions. I loved that part, but what I hated was all the selling, whether it was to pull in the big deals or to try to inspire the employees when they were down. That's just not who I am."
Sam is bright and articulate, and his company landed on its feet in a relatively short time. Yet it is clear that these recollections are still raw and somewhat unhappy ones. Despite the successful outcome, there is an undertone of disappointment and even a faint hint of failure in his voice.
Indeed, I was unnerved by his tone and manner, for it forced me to recall my own painful struggles as an executive responsible for a group of more than 60 people, a most difficult time in my professional life.
Could it be that we were simply misplaced in these roles? And if so, how could we have avoided these traps? Or is our personal experience the only resource that we have available to us? Are we doomed for a lifetime at The School of Hard Knocks?
Buckingham would say "No!" In his most recent book, entitled "Now Discover Your Strengths," Buckingham presents a diagnostic test to enable you to discover your actual innate talents. There are many such tools out there — established ones like the Meyers-Briggs, as well as newer ones like Martin Seligman's Signature Strengths Survey at www.authentichappiness.org — but NDYS makes claims of statistical validity with an inordinate amount of data captured through decades of Gallup employee surveys.
As luck would have it, a friend of mine recently joined Gallup as a consultant. After listening to me moan about the trials and tribulations of my career, she urged me to take the Gallup StrengthsQuest. The results of the test provided a decidedly different way of interpreting my experiences.
On that long-ago summer internship, what was I doing crawling around on the floor to set up those ancient PCs? According to StrengthsQuest, I was demonstrating my greatest talent: "WOO," which stands for "winning others over." I had carefully nurtured my candidates and feared that a delay in deployment would have significantly dampened their enthusiasm for the project. I was just doing everything in my power to win them over by getting them enabled to make use of these new productivity devices as fast as possible.
Why did I struggle so much in the executive role that I was thrust into last year? StrengthsQuest suggests the clue to this lies in my overdeveloped sense of empathy, another top talent of mine. Note only were many of the things I needed to do (including layoffs, pay cuts and demotions) extraordinarily painful, but also the sheer number of people in the group made it difficult for me to deal with them personally in the way that I am naturally inclined.
If the great manager's ongoing challenge is putting the right people with the right talents into the right contexts, then the individual's responsibility is to find the right place for oneself. This personal career ownership is more acute than ever in the post-lifetime employment era where layoffs, mergers and insolvencies are far more common.
While StrengthsQuest and other forms of analysis can provide vital insights, the real challenge is to find the courage to honestly search, within and without, for what your talents truly are and to act on what you find, often in the face of both inertia and convention.
We'll close here for now. More to come on this.
Vijay Mehrotra (Vijay@BluePumpkin.com) is vice president of the Solutions Group at Blue Pumpkin Software.
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