The thesis of this report, that looking at strengths can help managers develop, is something my colleagues and I have discovered in our work with senior managers. Over the past several years I have joined forces first with a team at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then with a team in my own consulting firm to find ways to help executives develop their capabilities and increase their effectiveness.
Our work with individual executives takes the form of an intense, longitudinal development program, which affords significant opportunities for executives to grow and for us to learn how better to help them do that. We collect large quantities of data of different types about each executive we work with. We go to a lot of trouble to figure out, systematically, what these data say about the individual. We focus hard on his or her behavior, as well as what drives this behavior. Then, in collaboration with the executive, we get to the bottom of performance deficiencies.
Following the assessment we stay involved over time, as the individual attempts to put insights into practice. An ongoing relationship enables us not only to assist each executive but to understand what is useful.
In the last three years of doing this work, we have discovered that assessment should involve more than delivering the bad news and finding ways to address it. A problem-centered intervention isn’t the entire answer to a successful developmental experience. We have come to see that encouraging executives to recognize and internalize their strengths has as much to do with the success of the experience as presenting them with their deficits. This counterintuitive strategy of having managers come to grips with their strengths has proven to be extremely useful since we have explicitly and deliberately employed it.
This report documents our ideas about this technique and some of the ways we have used it.