In an obscure old spaghetti western, a poker game (Five-Card Draw), is under way. Outside, dust and tumbleweeds blow by. Inside, tough, determined cowboys and outlaws are playing for far more than the money in the pot: they’re vying for bragging rights. Five cards are dealt facedown to each player, and each player, in turn, requests replacement cards. Except Luke. Maintaining a straight, unflinching poker face, Luke is satisfied with his hand. He calls every bet. One at a time, certain of holding the winning hand, each player flips over his cards. Luke, the last player to reveal, slowly turns over his cards to expose the winning hand—a full house, kings over 10s. He gathers the pile of money from the table and walks away triumphant, ever the hero.

Similar to Luke in this old movie, each of us already holds a pat hand. Your pat hand—your complete hand—is your own unique combination of strengths. You may hold four eights, while my pat hand is a full house, and our colleague holds a flush. Each hand is different, and each hand is sound. It’s perfect as it is; you need no other cards. Play to your strengths and you’ll walk away triumphant, ever the hero.

Now replaced by spectacular Wild West mega-movies, the old westerns have come a long way. So, too, has leadership. In the old, dusty days of leadership thinking, an aspiring leader would:

By contrast, in our enlightened contemporary times, the new Play-to-Your-Strengths way to build leadership is to:

It is our strengths that offer us our deepest satisfaction and sustainable successes. Our strengths drive our skills, knowledge, and behaviors. You may succeed as a leader because of your inherent talent for orchestrating action, and your colleague may succeed as a leader because of his gift for building relationships. It is vital that we understand our foundational strengths so we can choreograph our lives to manifest and actualize our strengths.

We define strengths as the innate talents and gifts that underpin skills and passions. The strengths are the base, and the skills are built on top of them. When we operate from our true strengths, our work is easy—and magnificent!

When you claim your strengths and teach your followers to do likewise, you’ll do more than just put those strengths to use; you’ll discover additional gifts, passions, knowledge, talents, and skills. Engaging personal strengths and the strengths of others is how successful leaders emerge. Maximizing strengths is how these same leaders reach the pinnacle of their careers.

Even though a few people excel through massive efforts to overcome weaknesses, the majority of us find that the pathway to success lies in leveraging our strengths. Typically, we only achieve mediocre or adequate performance in an area of true weakness, even with the best training.

Do you really want to spend your precious resources of time, money, and energy trying to fix your weaknesses, and achieve only mediocrity? Do you want to spend your department’s or organization’s entire training budget striving for mediocre performance? We sincerely hope not. Unfortunately, many leaders and organizations still try to develop talent through the old paradigm of fixing weaknesses. Now, there’s a better way. Play to Your Strengths turns this old, inefficient, misguided paradigm topsy-turvy.

We experience our greatest joys and successes when we use our strengths in our work, and in the rest of our lives, too. It’s a no-brainer, really. To some extent, you’ve already designed your life to play to your innate strengths, through the courses you selected in school, the jobs you took, and the career you chose. It seems the natural, intuitive way to make these decisions.

Yet, research conducted by the Gallup Organization, surveying literally millions of employees, reveals that less than one in five employees uses his strengths at work every day.² That’s less than 20 percent! It’s a sad testimony, isn’t it? What is the other 80 percent doing? Are they using their strengths once in a while? Occasionally? Not at all? Do they even know what their strengths are?

Are you one of the five people who plays to her strengths every day? What about the people you lead? Are only 20 percent of them bringing their strengths to work? There is a huge up-side opportunity for leaders and organizations to increase this number to 30, 50, or even 100 percent!

Our strengths “have a yearning quality to them.”³ They want to be used. We feel good, we feel strong, we are good when we use our strengths. We are sustained, renewed, invigorated, and fulfilled. Time flies when we’re in the flow of using our strengths. We contribute the best of who we are when we’re challenged and inspired to use our strengths. How can we justify 80 percent of our employees not having this experience every day? How can we rationalize this waste of human resources? How can we tolerate neglecting our own performance potential and ultimate job—and life—fulfillment?

Once upon a time, the animals came together and founded a school with six subjects: swimming, crawling, running, jumping, climbing, and flying. At first the duck was the best swimmer, but she wore out the webs of her feet in running class, and then couldn’t swim as well. The dog was the best runner, but he crashed in flying class and injured a leg. The rabbit started out as the best jumper, but he fell in climbing class and hurt his back. At the end of the school year, the class valedictorian was the eel, who could do a little bit of everything, but nothing very well.

In our society, we learn that being well-rounded is the path to success. In school we read, write, add, subtract, create scientific experiments, shoot baskets, and perhaps play a ukulele, on a quest to expand our skills and knowledge. In childhood, this is an important developmental task. We expose children to many opportunities so they can explore their inherent talents, interests, and strengths. As we grow older we narrow our focus. We declare a major in college. We apply for specific jobs with specific characteristics. By our 20s, we find ourselves faced with a decision concerning the imperative question: Will I be a carpenter, a software developer, or a veterinarian?

Some who follow the path of strengths naturally expand into management and leadership roles. When we leave our role as successful individual contributors and enter management, once again, the pesky “myth of well-roundedness” comes into play. Suddenly we must also be good at managing people, allocating resources, creating a big picture, and setting a strategic direction while simultaneously designing and implementing specific tactics to accomplish that vision. We learn to manage budgets, work effectively with customers and clients, create solutions, influence up and across the organization, market our team products and services, track expenditures, lead teams, lead individuals, negotiate…you get the idea! Eventually we ask: “Can I possibly have all of these skills as my strengths?” Not likely!

We find true success when we clearly identify our strengths and leverage them. One of Andrea’s long-time executive coaching clients is John Inglish, general manager and CEO of the Utah Transit Authority. John is a well-known and highly respected player in his profession. His picture often appears on the cover of transit journals, and he excels at creating a vision of what is possible. Through his ability to see and communicate that vision, he engages others in his quest—in Utah, across the nation, and throughout the world. He lights a fire under his staff, his board, his industry, and his customers. He is a leader, naturally and appropriately positioned at the top of his organization.

But John doesn’t implement. He is bored if he has to design the steps to create his vision. He knows it’s not his strength, and he hires others for their strengths as implementers—the “doers” who put substance around his vision. Without people who excel at making things happen, his vision will not come to fruition. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he’ll waste his time, and the organization’s money, if he tries to become a doer; it’s simply not his strength. His insightful and clear awareness of his weakness, and the actions he takes to compensate for it, free his time, passion, and energy to communicate his organization’s vision to those who can affect it—stakeholders, legislators, customers, staff, and funding sources.

John is an outstanding example of a leader who truly plays to his strengths because he knows and articulates them. He creates opportunities to use his strong pat hand to forward his vision. What he sees is reliable and enjoyable transportation that makes the best use of technology, interfaces seamlessly with the population, and is environmentally responsible. All who are touched by his legacy benefit from his awareness of his strengths. He is not well-rounded, but his team is! It is this combined team strength that allows him to effectively apply his strengths, and only his strengths, to the cutting-edge opportunities he creates.

If strengths are a source of great success, accomplishment, and fulfillment, what could be better than doing a job in which we excel? Nothing...except doing it all the time! Our strengths move us toward excellence and bring us an emotional benefit: deep and lasting joy.

Playing to our strengths also builds self-confidence, self-esteem, and honest self-assessment. Know and use what you do well and you’ll taste real fulfillment. Apply your strengths broadly and you’ll do work you love. Leverage your strengths and you will be more successful. Contribute your strengths to the organization and you will lead with ease and power.

One of Andrea’s strengths is recognizing potential in others and knowing clearly how to challenge them to maximize their potential. In her first job at GE, she had a mentor, Chuck Phillips, who taught her to recognize and exploit her strengths so others could benefit. She refined her strengths and used them to develop others in her first management job. Then, she expanded her strengths by deepening her knowledge in adult development. She consciously created a road map to get better at using her strengths. Not only did she achieve personal and organizational success, but she also had lots of fun becoming a leader!

Imagine training Fred Astaire to become an engineer, making him “well-rounded,” while ignoring his legendary strength in dance. Who, then, would dance with Ginger?! The message is clear: recognize, develop, and play to your strengths—not to your weaknesses. When you do play to your strengths, you may not be well-rounded, but you will be extraordinarily successful.

The work of the Gallup Organization—and the leadership of authors Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton, Tom Rath, Martin Seligman, and others—has accomplished a monumental task: to spark a “Strengths Revolution.” Based on our own work with hundreds of leaders in Fortune-500 organizations, nonprofits, and entrepreneurial start-up companies throughout the last few years, we are thrilled to help lead the revolution by encouraging you to bring strengths to your leadership. The time is right for us to acknowledge that, similar to Luke in the old spaghetti western, everyone already has a pat hand—their perfect and unique array of strengths.

In Play to Your Strengths, we will show you how to gain a solid understanding of your strengths and your weaknesses. We offer you a strategy for addressing your weaknesses once and for all, while freeing up energy to develop your strengths. We explore how to guide the people you lead to identify and use their strengths, how to build a team that plays to its strengths, and how to design an entire strengths-based organization that supports and sustains these engaging efforts. The strengths movement is growing as more and more leaders recognize the power of focusing on strengths. We invite you to join the revolution!

Dr. Jim Harter of the Gallup Organization and Dr. Frank Schmidt of the University of Iowa, asked 12 questions of 198,000 employees in 7,989 teams in 36 organizations, including, “Do you know what is expected of you at work?” and, “Do you feel your opinion counts?” They sought to discover which employee attitudes and opinions differentiated high-performing teams from low-performing teams, so they also collected data on team and business performance—productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction, employee turnover, and safety.

The question with the strongest correlation to business outcomes was, “At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” Teams of employees who said they played to their strengths outperformed teams who said they did not—even when the work was identical.⁴

Engagement is a popular concept and tool in organizations these days, because engagement is the most important measure of employee productivity. Organizations small and large are seeking ways to engage workers, often using surveys to measure engagement. One item rated on most of these surveys—“having the opportunity to use my strengths every day at work”—is highly correlates with employee engagement. Recent research findings by Krueger and Killham in the Gallup Management Journal strongly suggest that when companies emphasize strengths development, both innovation and creativity increase. Further, the research reveals “a significant relationship among worker engagement, manager focus on strengths, and creativity between colleagues.” Workers become more engaged when their manager focuses on strengths and strength development. They are also much more likely to share ideas with colleagues at work, essential to improving innovation in organizations.

Businesses have long known the value of identifying and maximizing the organization’s strengths, commonly called “core competencies.” Remember when Jack Welch took over General Electric in the early 1980s and told each division they must be number-1 or number-2 in their market or he would shut them down? GE narrowed its focus to its enormously successful core competencies. Other successful organizations develop their core competencies—their strengths—by refining and improving core products and outsourcing the rest. For a long time we’ve known we need to develop and market our strong points—rather than waste effort on the things we perform with mere mediocrity. This works for organizations and, not surprisingly, it works for individuals, too.

Many organizations (Wells Fargo, Ann Taylor, Intel, FedEx, Best Buy, and Accenture, to name a few) are implementing strengths-based initiatives. All new managers at Toyota attend a three-day “Great Manager training program” to learn how to identify the strengths of their employees. New managers at Yahoo take an online survey to pinpoint their strengths. If you’re a soccer coach, Major League Soccer will gladly sign you up for its strengths-based coaching course where they teach you to hand out “green cards” to your young athletes, drawing attention to a particularly good pass or tackle, rather than the traditional punitive yellow and red cards that point out what the child didn’t do well.⁵

In their book Positive Organizational Scholarship, in the chapter “Investing in Strengths,” Donald Clifton and James Harter summarize the research on strengths-based organizations in this way: “Workplaces with a higher proportion of employees indicating they ‘have the opportunity to do what they do best every day’ are more productive, have higher customer loyalty, and have lower turnover. Businesses studied that adopted a strengths-based approach to individual development have seen the greatest gains in employee engagement, and hence productivity.”

While strengths awareness is growing in business, there is a simultaneous strengths revolution occurring in psychology, known as “positive psychology.” Traditionally, psychology embraced a disease model of human nature, with a strong emphasis on what needs to be healed in the client. “Positive psychology proposes that it is time to correct this imbalance and to challenge the assumptions of the disease model. Positive psychology calls for as much focus on strength as on weakness, as much interest in building the best things in life as in repairing the worst, as much attention to fulfilling the lives of healthy people as healing the wounds of the distressed.”⁶

Universities, where great thinking (often) takes place, are leading the way. At the University of Michigan Business School, faculty researchers are pioneering business processes that build upon each person’s unique talents and capabilities rather than trying to fix performance shortfalls. Students engage in a process called the “Reflective Best Self Exercise” in which each discovers his or her own “best self ” and determine ways to contribute value to others. The faculty goal is to enable students to become “active architects” of their jobs, developing and using their talents and building relationships with others .⁷

Notables such as Martin Seligman, Ph.D.—often called the “Father of Positive Psychology,” and past president of the American Psychological Association—as well as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D., Christopher Peterson, Ph.D., and others have learned a great deal about strengths through recent research. Identifying and applying strengths leads to satisfaction, productivity, fulfillment, and, yes, that elusive commodity—happiness. The character strengths of gratitude, hope, zest, curiosity, and love are “robustly associated” with life and work satisfaction. The strength of zest—enthusiasm and energy—is particularly associated with high engagement among workers who regard their work as a calling, instead of simply a way to make money.⁸

If we want to engage our workforce (a really great idea whose time has come) let’s offer them opportunities to play to their strengths every day!

When we focus on identifying, using, and developing our strengths, we become even more competent at what we do well, which produces a formidable set of benefits. When working from your strong hand, you:

It’s not only individuals who benefit. The organization realizes these advantages:

We know some of you may be thinking, “But I have weaknesses. I can’t simply ignore them,” and you’re right. As much as we wish it were so, weaknesses do not just fall off the radar screen because we want them to. Sometimes (though not as often as we might think) a weakness can be a career derailer, and we must improve from poor to adequate performance in that area to continue in a particular job or career. While strengths are inherent, innate gifts, weaknesses at work are often simple gaps in skill or bit of knowledge. The vast majority of the time, we need only to add a missing skill or knowledge to our repertoire. To learn this new skill easily and effectively, we determine which of our strengths will assist us.

We can also choose to work on a weakness or a skill gap for fun, interest, or intrigue. We may simply want to speak French or play lacrosse even though it doesn’t maximize our strengths, but so what? We do it because we choose to! Unfortunately, many people enrolled in training courses and seminars at work are sent to the class to correct a weakness. All too often the expensive class, self-help book, or time with a coach—designed to “correct” a weakness—serves only to frustrate the participant even more, so they learn just enough to get by.

That limited success often has a short shelf life because, if it is a weakness and we are not inspired by it, we likely won’t sustain it through practice.

We all have a weakness or two that may never be corrected. Are we suggesting that you simply ignore them? Well, yes and no. We propose that you learn about your weaknesses and put a plan in place to manage them. Then you’ll be able to concentrate on using your strengths, allowing your weaknesses to become negligible.

We used to work in the “weakness” arena (we moan, “mea culpa!”). Now, older and wiser, we know that weakness development has serious limitations. Individual reliance on strengths produces incredible personal and organizational success. Manage, mitigate, and reduce a weakness when you must—when it is getting in the way of fully applying your strengths—but otherwise, play the hand you’re dealt—build and expand your strengths.

A 360-degree feedback process (soliciting insight from peers, direct reports, and the boss) is a popular organizational tool for developing leaders. While it provides helpful data on what the leader does well and what needs improvement, the 360-degree focuses on competencies—behaviors and skills—not on inherent gifts and strengths. When we use a 360-degree tool to coach clients, it’s difficult to convince them to look (for more than 10 seconds) at the positive capabilities others see in them. Instead, client after client zeroes in on weaknesses. Like a compass spinning around to point north, these leaders desperately want to know what others think are their weaknesses. They ask, “How am I not living up to what I and others expect of me? What can I do about that?”

They often design detailed development plans, targeted at overcoming weaknesses: “By the end of the year, I will be a highly effective budget manager.” Or, “In three months, I will excel at time management.” But three months never comes, much less a year! Similar to New Year’s resolutions, the gild falls off the lily in six or eight weeks because working on a weakness can be draining and not much fun. With their plates overflowing with work priorities, challenging management issues, rising performance expectations, and problems to resolve, these leaders and managers may find it hard to become inspired or motivated to overcome weaknesses. And frankly, in most situations, the payoff is minor. If adequate performance is as good as it gets, is it worth allocating limited resources to develop a leader’s weaknesses?

Powerful, effective leadership development requires the right tools and processes, along with the right mindset. We must focus on strengths, first by identifying them and then applying them to address those weaknesses that must be corrected. We will have much greater leverage when we bolster our strengths, so they can compensate for and manage our weaknesses.

We know this may be heretical to some, but we believe leaders secretly yearn to know their strengths.

They want to discover and shout from the rooftop, “I am great at this! Bring it on!” When leaders find their strengths and create plans for expanding them, the sky is the limit! These leaders begin to ask: “If communicating with large groups is a strength of mine, how can I do it more? Can I change my job and do more of what I excel at and love? Can I present at trade conferences, to customers, or to employees in other divisions or locations? Can I teach what I know? Who is the up-and-coming presenter in my organization? Does he need a mentor? How much more will I contribute to the organization if I fully utilize my strengths? How can I underscore this strength to achieve higher levels of success?” Identifying our individual strengths is a win-win for the individual and the organization! You can’t beat that!

We can churn out a decent budget when we have to, or lead a project if we must, but these roles are tiring if they do not play to our strengths. We leave work exhausted, our energy consumed. Our work is much more powerful and effective when built on a foundation of strength. When we work from our strong suit, our energy is high. We are thrilled, motivated, excited, and compelled to do more!

Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, in their book, Now, Discover Your Strengths (The Free Press, 2001), define strength as “consistent near-perfect performance in an activity.” That’s a high bar, but when you really think about it, isn’t it true? Consistent near-perfect performance! When I am that good, how can I not shine? How can I not contribute my talents to the world?

Buckingham and Clifton also assert that most organizations have two flawed assumptions about the people who work with them: first, that every human being can be competent in almost anything; and, second, that our greatest room for growth is in the area of our greatest weakness. In truth, knowing our weaknesses will help us prevent failure, but not achieve excellence; we achieve excellence when we build on our strengths. Most organizations hire for skill and experience, and take for granted an employee’s strengths.

When the honeymoon is over and we notice blemishes and deficiencies, we attempt to close the skills gap and “fix” the weaknesses. We do damage control, not development. We waste our precious resources on training to a weakness, and neither we nor the organization have much to show for it. Imagine what might happen if we hired for strengths and then encouraged each person to use them to his full capacity. How successful would our organizations be? How successful would we be?

In their book Soar With Your Strengths, Donald Clifton and Paula Nelson discuss a three-year study conducted by the University of Nebraska to determine the most effective techniques for teaching speed-reading. The results of this study are interesting and revealing. The poor readers in the study began with an average reading speed of 90 words per minute. As a result of the techniques, these students increased their reading speed and comprehension to 150 words per minute—a 67-percent improvement. The excellent readers, who entered the study reading 350 words per minute, raised their reading speed and comprehension to 2,900 words per minutes—an 800 percent improvement! Dramatic results can be achieved from building on strengths!

Strength-based development is a new topic, and yet seems as old as the sea. Plato said, “Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following pursuits with all their strengths.” The concept of strengths has been around a long time.

And there is much work yet to do. We look forward to academicians and practitioners studying the affect of strengths on individual and organizational success. Because we are in the embryonic stage of the new Strengths Revolution, we need a better strengths lexicon and better tools to help people clearly and easily identify their strengths. Our society has created a giant industry built around fixing weaknesses. However, we already see training and development providers thinking about strengths and developing strengths-related tools for organizations. We believe this trend will continue to build—because it works.

When talking about the Strengths Revolution on The Today Show, Marcus Buckingham said, “If you want a movement, you need zealots.”⁹ While we never considered ourselves zealots for anything (well, maybe the red rock area of southern Utah!), we’re ready and willing to take a stand as zealots for strengths. We know the power of strengths—personally, professionally, and viscerally. We know not only for ourselves, but we also know from the hundreds of leaders we’ve coached and the organizations signing on to the Strengths Revolution.

We know that using strengths builds self-confidence and enables us to become strong and authentic leaders. To play to your strengths is the greatest contribution you can make to your organization and your career.

For our part, we will continue to encourage leaders to implement strengths discovery and strengths-based development. We urge you to do the same. You already hold a pat hand. Get in the game to play and win!

You’ve read about the Strengths Revolution and the cutting-edge actions that organizations and individuals are taking to play to their strengths. You’ve gained a sense of why this work is so very important. In Chapter 2♠, we’ll show you how to assess and articulate your strengths, so you, too, can play your pat hand—your own perfect and unique array of strengths.