Lead Through Strengths

In this episode, Lisa tackles the topic of managing employee burnout. She uses the example of an overwatered plant: if you see the leaves turning yellow, your first thought is to add more water. But sometimes yellow leaves are a sign that the plant is overwatered—by adding more, you're just drowning it. In the same way, many actions managers take to help their employees actually make things worse. In this episode, Lisa shows you how to discern the true causes of burnout and teaches you how to help in the right ways.

Strengths Tools

One of the best ways leaders can build a strengths-based culture is to offer an appreciation of strengths in action. If you'll notice what works, you'll get more of what works because people can replicate what they've already done well. On our homepage, you can download this awesome tool that offers you 127 easy ideas for recognizing your team. Scroll down and look for the box that says "Great Managers Notice What Works".

Can Working In Your Weakness Zone Lead To Burnout?

I made a comment in a team StrengthsFinder session the other day. It was that when you find yourself procrastinating on the same task over and over again, it might be a sign that it's in your weakness zone.

A few faces in the crowd made the lightbulb look. A few had this look of, "Whoa, I never even considered that." Pretty quickly, they started asking about what signs and symptoms to look out for.

There are three important symptoms that are clues you're frequently working in your weakness zone:

1. You're frustrated.
2. You feel soul-sucked.
3. You're burned out.

As a regular listener, you hear me say all the time that using your strengths at work will strengthen your performance. So wouldn't it also hold true that using your weaknesses at work would weaken your performance?

When you think about yourself, it's easy to notice these symptoms: You know when you're personally in a state of burnout or frustration. You know when work is feeling like soul-sucking drudgery, even if you're trying to not show it on the outside. Sometimes these symptoms can sneak up on you over time, yet once they hit you hard, you know they're there. Now you simply have to figure out what's causing it and do something about it.

If you're a people manager or a talent management professional, this gets tougher. That's because often the same symptoms show up in people who are disengaged out of boredom or lack of care are the symptoms that show up when someone is giving every ounce of energy to the job … only it's in a weak area, so it sucks the life out of them.

People are kind of like plants in this way. You know how the leaves turn yellow if your plant needs water and is unhealthy? They show the same symptom when they're overwatered. So you might have a plant that is drowning and you think, "This plant is yellow. It must need water." So you water it. And it drowns more. It gets worse.

People are the same. They might be soul-sucked from working in their weakness zone. Rather than turning yellow, they turn disengaged. They appear bored or detached. They have less fire and zeal in their attitude. So you try to find them more work to offer them a challenge. And oops … you were over-watering their weakness zone already. Things only get worse.

My mother in law helped me fix this with my plants — she gave me a moisture meter. If a leaf is yellow, I can stick a probe in the ground and see if it's too wet or too dry. Yessss! I stopped killing plants. An easy fix. But what about humans? They're not that easy. There's no strengths-zone probe. You have to have conversations to dig deeper.

Let's look at an example for each of the three symptoms so you can explore the kind of conversations you might have as a team to uncover these draining weakness-zone responsibilities.

1. Frustration

What to do about it: If you have a team member who is mature and highly accountable, they're not going to complain and kvetch. So be on the lookout for the tiniest comments about a project that's eating them up. For example, they may make light of banging their head against the wall.

Even if you can't assign them fast-moving projects without red tape because you're in a culture with a lot of bureaucracy, think about things like assigning them to the front end of a project and then handing it off to a partner who thinks it's fun to get to the finish line and use persistence to solve problems. Or, you can keep an eye out for projects that create something new versus maintaining or changing long-standing traditions.

2. Feeling soul-sucked

What to do about it: If you have someone calling on talents that run counter to their values, it is going to suck their soul. You can often see this one on people's faces. When people are performing regular job duties that insult their personal values, they will procrastinate. They will resist. They will roll their eyes. Even if they're mature and they wouldn't literally roll their eyes, you can usually see subtle signs show up in offhand comments or in how they act.

Be on watch so you can open up a conversation that helps them reframe it by approaching the situation through another talent. Or, help them address the conflict constructively so that they can have a productive conversation with the person or team who hold the conflicting value.

3. Burnout

What to do about it: This one is easy to spot in yourself, yet tougher to spot in high performers. When top performers are burned out, they try to keep going. They often use brute force to keep performing. They'll stay up later. They'll skip workouts. They'll push through. There will often be few signs of trouble, at least for a while. For other employees, burnout is easier to spot because they appear and act disengaged. That's easy to see and address — it's your top performers that you need to check in with more deliberately because they often won't say anything for months.

Unfortunately, I've heard way too many stories where burnout led top performers to start a job search in the background because they don't want to ask for help or appear like a weak performer by bringing up their burnout.

Now you have three symptoms to look for in yourself or on your team, four if you count procrastination as a bonus symptom. Of course, there are many actions you can take to get out of your weakness zone.

Action steps to take after you see symptoms

• Swap tasks around on the team.
• Partner up with someone who loves doing that thing you loathe.
• Use one of your Top 5 StrengthsFinder talent themes to get the same outcome in a new way.
• Name the situation, because simply knowing that it's driving you crazy will often diffuse a lot of the stress from it.
• Make a Stop Doing list — ask stakeholders, managers, peers, and customers more questions about how they use the results of the work that you're doing (the work that's sucking the life out of you). Often, participants from my training events tell me that the task isn't even required any longer.
• Reframe the situation. For example, a recent virtual training attendee told me that he was late on his expense reports 100% of the time. He got scolded for it every month and didn't care. That is, until his colleague in the accounting department told him that he was killing her — she was staying late and missing her deadlines for closing out the books every month. He quickly mended his ways by tapping into his Relator talent, which made him care about the outcome because he cared about her.

Questions To Ponder

What's going on with you at work? What makes you feel frustrated regularly? What happens in the weeks and months when you feel burned out? What responsibilities feel soul-sucking?

Then apply this to people around you. If you supervise people, this is important to watch for. Open up the conversation. Talk to your direct reports in one-on-ones about what responsibilities and projects make them feel alive and excited and which ones make them feel consistent dread and stress?

Since your team members will have stronger performance by working in their strengths, what can you do to align their work and their thinking with their natural talents?

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In this episode Lisa answers the question, "If every person has unique gifts, shouldn't they be easier to spot?" She uses the example of her trip to Bratislava, Slovakia, to explain that it's hard to see what's going on in our own heads every day. To help us learn what our strengths are, and the strengths of others, Lisa provides individual and team exercises that are easy to follow. She points out that it's extremely important that you bring out the talents on the team. You can do it by noticing what's working so that you can get more of what's already working for you. This notice-and-say-something approach allows you to leverage areas of team potential that bring out your top performance in life and in work.

You'll find lots of StrengthsFinder, leadership, and team tools on our Strengths Resources page.

Here's the video of Lisa telling the Bratislava story as an example of not being able to see things in yourself that stand out to others.

One of the best ways leaders can build a strengths based culture is to offer appreciation of strengths in action. If you'll notice what works, you'll get more of what works because people can replicate what they've already done well. On our home page, you can download this awesome tool that offers you 127 easy ideas for recognizing your team. Scroll down and look for the box that says "Great Managers Notice What Works".

You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings, and today I'm here to help you answer this episode's question, "Hey, if everyone has unique gifts, wouldn't they be easy to see?"

This is such an important question. It came from someone at a recent StrengthsFinder training event. She felt totally competent on the job, but she didn't feel "gifted" in any way. Now, if you're listening as a people leader or a Strengths champion this is doubly important to tune in to, because it makes your role in strengths-spotting that much more important.

People often can't see their own strengths. One of the most important roles you have as a manager, or as a leader of a strengths movement, is to develop the talent on your team. There's so much power in you seeing and unleashing their talents. You can change the course of your team and whether it meets its goals. You can even change the course of your team members' entire careers - just by being able to tap into their potential.

So let's back up and get to the why of the original question.

The essence of the original question is, "Why are talents so tough to spot?" I experienced an example on a business trip that explains it really well. I went to Bratislava, Slovakia to deliver a training event, and on the way, I needed to pick something up from the store, and I'm noticing, as I'm driving through the city, that cars were double parked and they were blocking each other in. This was something I noticed at first and didn't think a whole lot of. I just thought, "Oh, maybe someone blocked someone in."

Then I noticed it was everywhere around the city, or at least everywhere to me. Everywhere I looked, I saw cars blocking each other in. They were stacked two deep all over the place. Pretty quickly I thought, "There's no way this is an accident, because this is not one rude person blocking another person in. There's something going on here."

So, the next morning I go to the event and I asked my host, "Hey, tell me about this thing. I noticed these cars parked this way. How does this work? What if you go into the store to do something fast, like buy a loaf of bread, and then someone blocks you in, but they wanted to shop for one hour? Are you stuck waiting for them for that hour?"

He laughed, because he knew where I was going with that, and he said, "No, no, we have a parking shortage here in Bratislava (and we all drive cars that are standards) so you can leave it in neutral, so that it can roll." Luckily it's a very flat there so cars won't roll down a hill. If you were the person who bought the loaf of bread and you came out and you wanted to leave, you would literally go to the car that's blocking you in...and you would push it with your hands.

Okay, guys, if you're listening to this, you're imagining, "Cars are really heavy." Most of the cars there are pretty small, so you can literally push it with your hands. And, in fact, if you're being courteous, you might even turn your wheel so that, as it pushes out, the car rolls out nicely into the aisle-way behind it. Isn't it crazy or what? I love this so much.

This is how they fixed the parking shortage. After you get your car out, you take the car that you pushed out, and you push back into the front slot. Now, as a side note, some of my clients who live in Bratislava, Slovakia today (we have fast-forwarded a few years later) - they said they're having fewer problems with parking, so you don't see much of that any longer.

What was so great about that moment is that he said, "Huh, this is funny that you asked me this question because the first time I visited Austin, Texas, where you live, I went to Target. I parked in the parking lot, and I was stunned at how far apart, side to side, the cars would park from each other." He thought, at first, that it looked rude, because if only they would squish in tighter to each other they could fit so many more cars in the parking lot.

Of course, you know where it's going here. In Austin, Texas, with this giant expanse of land, we can park far apart. The lines in the parking lot are even designed way further apart than the would be in Bratislava, Slovakia, because we're trying to be polite and not door-ding each other, because we don't have the same shortage in parking.

If you're listening and you've been to any other country in the world, you've experienced some thing like this where you go somewhere else, and you realize, "Oh, wow, this is really different here. I wonder what's behind it." Then you can really see the contrast. You can really see the differences, because it's something you're not used to.

Well, likewise, this all gets back to the original question of why talents are so tough to spot. It's because you live in your brain every day. You have to get out, as though you're in another talent country, to see how different your talents are from theirs. I hear every single day examples of people saying, "Well, yeah, I'm pretty good at that but it's not anything special. Yeah, that's just kind-of naturally how I think."

Catch yourself, and catch people on your team, when they're making comments like this so that you can make notes that, you know what, that probably is something very special that you have. In fact, it likely doesn't come easily to other people.

Just like in those moments when I was in Bratislava and I was noticing, "Oh, wow, this is so different here," and then he was able to show me how Austin, Texas, looked so different, I thought, "Oh, yeah, I can totally see that now but I wouldn't have noticed it without the contrast." This is how you, as a team, can get really good at spotting what your greatest talents are, and application on the job if you start spotting them as a team, and you start talking about them with each other. You can really bring out those contrasts that you couldn't see if you hadn't been doing it together.

What do you do with all this information? Show this Bratislava video to your team as an example, and then talk about what talents you can see in each other that they can't see in themselves.

In the "Self" part of the exercise, go on a personal scavenger hunt and you look for five things this week. Each one is described in more detail below.

Five questions to answer this week:

1. I've always nerded out on these topics and types of activities:

2. This comes easily to me, yet not to others (things you do or the way you think):

3. I get a jolt of energy when I'm:

4. I lost track of time last time I was:

5. Someone told me I'm good at:

1) Something you've always been into. When you're noticing these things at work this week, you start to see, "Oh, yeah, this is something that I've always had a penchant for." This item description is a bit informal compared with the rest (in the way that I ask the question). So as an example, I notice that I've always been into doing something physical. My first couple of jobs were 100% physical and active. I was a lifeguard and an aerobics instructor in my late teen years. Both were active jobs where I was moving a lot. It's no surprise that I got into the training field. It's up, it's active, and it's moving around. It's no surprise that inside of that I like to do a lot of StrengthsFinder activities that get people up and moving around and experiencing something physically. It's no surprise that when I work, I'm often at a standup desk, or that I'm a drummer in my spare time. So for this first scavenger hunt item, watch yourself in action and go, "Yeah, this is something that I've always been into. No wonder it's showing up like this today."

2) Something that's easy for you, but not to others. This is the time when someone goes, "Oh, yeah, you're so good at that." Someone makes the comment. Or you notice it in yourself. Even if you notice it in a negative way, give yourself some forgiveness. Even if you notice something really obvious and think, "Okay, what is up with these dum-dums? They can't think of this thing that was so easy." Well, that's something that was probably really easy for you, yet not for others so take note of that. And, of course, don't tell them that you thought they were dum-dums.

3) Something that energizes you at work. If you get a jolt of, "Oh, yeah, that was a cool moment," note that. If you feel good after completing a task, or something makes you feel alive and alert, write it down. That's one of the items in your scavenger hunt.

4) A moment this week when you lose track of time. You're in the middle of a project and you have no idea what time it is, or you could get lost in that for eight more hours if you didn't have a meeting coming up.

5) When someone notices you're good at something. Now, this one can be really hard because you think, "Well, gosh. What if I work from home, and I don't have a lot of feedback like that? And I don't have in-person moments for someone to say that I'm great at something?" Make this as easy as possible, so it can be the slightest comment. Don't wait for a trophy or an award or something really formal and big.

This can be a tiny moment where someone sends you an email to thank you for a spot-on response to a customer. Or you're having a phone conversation and someone goes, "Oh, duh, that was so obvious after you brought it to light." Take that as a clue to your greatness. Someone noticed you're good at something. They noticed that you had an easy way of thinking about something that they couldn't see, so take that as a sign that someone noticed something that you're good at.

These five things align with Gallup's work on the Five Major Clues to Talent. In the "5 Clues To Talent" image, you're seeing Gallup's version of them. I offered ours in the same order so that each number 1-5 corresponds with theirs.

The other part of this exercise is getting "Others" focused input. It's hard to spot talents because they're right under your nose. It's exactly like the Bratislava example, where you have trouble seeing what's in the "easy-everyday-obvious" category to you. This exercise will help you see things that stand out to others. It's called the Three Things Exercise. This is something that was originally inspired by Dorie Clark. Check out this Dorie Clark episode to get a deeper look at your personal brand. The Three Things Exercise is to get a group of trusted advisors.

This can be something that you do in person with a group of people. Or you can do a few quick phone interviews. Or you can literally post the question in social media. Ask people:

"When you think of me, what are the three words you think of?"

That's it. "What are the first three words you think of, when you think of me?" You're going to get adjectives that tell you whether your personal brand and your experience with your talents is the same as how they show up in the world. Now don't be scared of this exercise. A lot of times I mention it and people say, "Oh, my gosh, I don't know if I want to hear what people have to say." So far, to the person, I have had zero people tell me that anyone has ever come back and said anything but positive things. So expect positive words to come back. These are people who care about you and they're going to share three words that are virtues.

What's interesting is the trends, so make sure you ask enough people that you can see patterns in their answers. Ten is a great number. If you do it on social media, who knows...you might get 50 answers. But you start to see words that reemerge, and you think, "Aha! You know, this is really part of how I show up in the world, and this might be one of my gifts. I haven't been giving it any credit, because I don't even notice it's a thing."

The bottom line is, it is difficult to see something that comes so naturally and so easily to you. Yet it's extremely important that you bring these out, that you notice what's working so that you can get more of what's working for you. Do this so that you can leverage those areas of your greatest potential. They bring out your top strengths, and your best performance, in life and in work.

If you're a leader, I encourage you to do a version of the scavenger hunt or Three Things Exercise with your team. Spotting talents (and telling each other) can be one of the most meaningful, memorable experiences that people have together.

Step 1: Pass out one sheet of printer paper per person. Have each person write his or her name on it (really big in the center with a marker) so that it'll stand out. After that, you'll be passing them around, and everyone will use a pen on everyone else's sheet. So be sure to have paper, markers, and pens on hand. This works most easily if you're in a big circle around a conference table.

Alternate method: If you don't have tables, you can attach a string and wear your sign on your back. That sounds a little strange to people because wearing a sign on their back often has them associating bad memories from 3rd grade when someone wrote "kick me" on their back, so you'll have to do a strong reframe of what it means to have a sign on your back. As you can guess, if you use that variation, you rotate by walking to the next person rather than passing the paper around.

The rest of the description assumes you're doing this with the standard set up at a conference table.

Step 2: Pass the sheet to the right one time. Have each person write 1-3 words about the person whose name they have in front of them. Write adjectives that describe what you appreciate about that person. Then (this is important), all together...at the same time...all synchronized at once, you pass the paper to the right. Tell them up front that you will do the passing at the same time. Using a timer with a dinging sound can be effective.

Make sure you give people enough time to think of a few words. If you're asking them to do three words and not just one, you might even tell them in advance so that they can begin thinking of words that describe people that they work with. I mentioned how important it is to pass at the same time, and to set this expectation up front. If you don't, you will have a pile up. A few people will be really fast at this, and they will process people's papers by writing their words and sending them to the next person like it's a speed competition. Then it stresses out the slower people, who stop being thoughtful about what they write because the person beside them is giving them a pile of work.

I've seen teams do this activity and then keep the sheets so proudly. In fact, it's an exercise that I did with a team over 10 years ago, and I still have a piece of paper. The example you see in this post was from about 15 years ago. It still means a lot to me to see the words that people wrote, and they really were great clues to my talents. Also it becomes a memoir for the team and helps you understand what is valued about you as an individual. As a leader, it's a really great gift you can offer the team.

With that, I hope you'll take this inspiration and will do some level of this exercise personally or with your team, so that you can help them claim their talents and share them with the world.

To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can also stream any episode right from this website. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode. Let the app notify you each week when the latest episode gets published.

In this episode Lisa answers the question, "Is StrengthsFinder a personality test?" She uses proof from both research data and real-life examples. She shows that StrengthsFinder is actually not a personality test, but instead a performance-based tool.

You'll find lots of StrengthsFinder, leadership, and team tools on our Strengths Resources page.

To find proof points and stats that can help you make the case for focusing on Strengths at your organization, check out LeadThroughStrengths.com/stats.

One of the best ways leaders can build a strengths based culture is to offer appreciation of strengths in action. If you'll notice what works, you'll get more of what works because people can replicate what they've already done well. On our home page, you can download this awesome tool that offers you 127 easy ideas for recognizing your team. Scroll down and look for the box that says "Great Managers Notice What Works".

You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings, and I've gotta tell ya: using your strengths at work is one of the most energizing things you can do for your workplace.

Today, the question is whether StrengthsFinder is a personality test. I get this question often. It comes in many forms. Usually, it comes from managers or strengths champions who are asking me a question because they were trying to get strengths to be implemented in a bigger way in their organization, and they got stymied.

It sounds something like this, "Oh, no, not another personality test," or they take it to get approved and they hear, "Oh, we already had a personality test last year." Or, somebody says something like, "I'm not sure I'm into these personality tests."

It surprises many people to learn that StrengthsFinder is actually not a personality test at all. So, if you're making a case for rolling out StrengthsFinder or Strengths-focused culture tools, it is nice to know that it is something totally different. It's actually a performance-based tool.

I'll give you an explanation of how it's different from the typical personality test. Then I'll give you a proof point or two you can use in your workplace. I'll also offer you a way of thinking about this topic to explain the difference between what people do on the job, and how they get it done on the job.

I think this is an important thing to explore when you're rolling out StrengthsFinder because some workplaces are really focused on the knowledge and skills someone needs to do the job – that's the what part – but they don't spend very much time focusing on how people can show up at their very best.

Let's start with a proof point. If you're going to do an initiative like StrengthsFinder in your organization, you want proof points like Gallup's research that shows teams that focus on Strengths every day have 12.5% greater productivity than those who don't. And, at the end of the show, I'll give you a bunch more of those, a place where you can find the proof points that are most relevant to your organization and to your situation.

On the personality test question, the thing I think is most important for you to understand is that most of these personality assessments that exist are actually based on the five-factor model that you can learn about when you study psychology. If you have industrial organizational psychologists in your organization, they'll know all about the five-factor model. Even if you're not an I/O psychologist, you probably know about these because you've heard of DiSC, or Myers Briggs (MBTI), Insights, or Hogan. These are different assessments that are based on the five-factor model. Those 5 factors are things like Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. Most of those, although not all, throw out the Neuroticism category.

How is this different from StrengthsFinder? The answer is in the study of performance excellence. StrengthsFinder researchers at Gallup studied performance for decades. They discovered Themes that people use to deliver their best performance.

In Gallup's words, Talent Themes "are the areas in which an individual has the greatest potential for building strength."

There are 34 of these Talent Themes. When you get your Clifton StrengthsFinder results, you'll actually see that they're actually called Talent Themes. To put it in layman's terms, think of them like easy buttons...easy buttons that people use to approach their goals.

For example, say you lead a marketing department. There's what you do and then there's how you do it. In the "what" category, you have things like knowledge and skills and past experiences. Inside of a greater marketing department you have high-level knowledge and skill areas: things like marketing communication, product marketing, demand generation, pricing, etc. Of course, each area can go really deep into sub-level skills.

If you take something like a creative team inside of marketing, they're going to have really specific knowledge and skill areas: graphic design, color, Adobe InDesign, buyer psychology, all sorts of layers like that.

In those "what" categories (like the ones mentioned above), people are pretty good at understanding what they need to know. Those are easy enough to identify. You can tell when they are present or when they're not. And you can figure out how to go get those knowledge and skill areas.

The trickier part is "how" every unique human being approaches that job at their very best. This is why, of course, we're humans and not robots, so we're a little more complicated. Each person can't just approach the job in the exact same way and get the same results. As a manager, StrengthsFinder can help you tap into each person's best performance because it tells you what their easy buttons are, or "how" they can uniquely get that job done at their best.

If you manage that same team of creative pros, you'll see they're reaching their best output when you can get it done through their talents. For example, someone who leads through the Futuristic Talent Theme will want to know where that specific marketing campaign is going to take the company and the customer so that they can align to that.

If you contrast that with somebody who has the Maximizer Talent, they're on the same creative team and they have to get the same job done, but you may find that they're totally focused on something else. They're over there trying to reuse some video footage so that you can get more out of something that already exists. Or they're off creating actions in your Adobe InDesign software to save time on repetitive tasks - to free them up to get more time in their creative headspace.

You can see that within this same job, you can have two people who are off in their own worlds doing very different things, but those very different things are the things that put them at their best. This is how your StrengthsFinder Talent Themes, once you know them, can really help you unleash their easy buttons to perform at your best. Of course, as a people manager, this is like magic once you learn each of these things about your team members, because you can understand how to put them in that environment to get them at their very best.

To bring this episode all together, StrengthsFinder, in fact, is not a personality test. It is an assessment that was built on the study of performance and potential. If you want to look up, specifically for you and your organization, proof points that will be most supportive of the objectives you have in your organization, check out LeadThroughStrengths.com/stats. You'll see a page that has dozens of proof points and stats that can help you make the case for this in your organization.

A final note, if you're listening as a people manager or a strengths champion, one of the reasons I think it's important to answer this question about personality test is that I also see, when people take personality tests or surveys or assessments, (whatever you choose to call them), on the receiving end of them, your employees are often guarded about the conversations that follow.

They are nervous that you're going to come up with labels for them. They might have had some experiences in the past where they've been put into a box about how they are, or who they are as people.

Depending on who you have on your team, you might have to do some work in explaining how StrengthsFinder is framed: that it is focused on those areas of their greatest potential. Usually they see it very quickly and they're super psyched because you're talking about what makes them great.

When I do StrengthsFinder training programs, I don't find many resistors to the process (like I did when I facilitated programs based on personality assessments). It's one reason why I love StrengthsFinder so much. But coming into it, many people don't know this, and they don't know how it is all going to be framed up or applied on the job.

Depending on how they've been used in your organization in the past, or if you sense that somebody is a little hesitant about all of this kind of stuff, it's helpful to share how the point of going through the process with StrengthsFinder is to find their greatest area of potential so that you can unleash their strengths at work.

If you do this in a way that shows you, as a leader, are being supportive of them, and putting them at their best and that, in fact, when you're using your strengths at work you feel more ease and energy and enjoyment on the job, most people pretty quickly go, "Okay. I'll give this thing a chance."

Luckily, in my experience, the hesitant people have been a very small slice of the population. I would say, anecdotally, more than 95% of people in any given room or organization come in pretty excited about the future when we do StrengthsFinder or Strengths-based process.

In fact, one guy recently said,

"Oh, my gosh, that StrengthsFinder report was full of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me."

I thought he summed up really well - people's reaction to it when they first get exposed to StrengthsFinder, and how it can explain what puts you at your very best.

With that, I hope this helps you as you make the case to bring a Strengths-focused culture to your organization. From here, I hope you'll take this information and use it to help people in your company claim their talents and share them with the world.

To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can also stream any episode right from this website. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode. Let the app notify you each week when the latest episode gets published.

Austin, TX StrengthsFinder Training for Leaders

In this episode Lisa answers the question, "Should you stop using natural talents that cause you trouble at work?" The short answer is no. The talent, or combination of talents, that's causing you trouble is your natural talent. No matter what you do to squash it, it will pop out somehow and scare people. It's much better to work to find other ways to utilize that troublesome talent. Lisa provides two different exercises for you: one for you as an individual, and one for your team.

You'll find lots of StrengthsFinder, leadership, and team tools on our Strengths Resources page.

If you or your team hasn't completed the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment, you will find the list of adjectives on our website useful for the exercises in this episode.

One of the best ways leaders can build a strengths based culture is to offer appreciation of strengths in action. If you'll notice what works, you'll get more of what works because people can replicate what they've already done well. On our home page, you can download this awesome tool that offers you 127 easy ideas for recognizing your team. Scroll down and look for the box that says "Great Managers Notice What Works".

You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings, and I gotta tell ya, using your strengths is one of the most energizing things you can do on the job. Today's question and topic is about what to do when your strengths are making trouble for you. I know it sounds completely backwards, but there's this concept I call troublemaker talents. What happens is that sometimes your greatest strengths, your talent themes, if you will, (if you're doing this from a strengths finder lens), they can sometimes be overused, underused, misapplied. They can be unrefined if you've been ignoring them, or squashing them down. Let me give you an example. You have someone with the Includer talent and he says, "You know, I don't like my Includer. When I saw that on the list, I wanted to give it back because it makes me too slow."

It makes me miss deadlines because I'm always getting everyone's opinion and I put the word out. I ask the question, I go one on one. People ask me for more time, and by the time I get everyone's input on something, I'm already behind schedule. Another one I've heard recently in a big corporate training was a woman with the Communication talent who said, "you know, I don't see this one as a strength at all. I get told I talk too much." I can also give you my personal example. It's my Maximizer and Strategic. They come in together like a one-two troublemaking punch, and it's me always tweaking things. I'm always trying to make them better, but this concept of me never being done, also sometimes means me never sleeping. On the surface, all of those things I just mentioned, yes, they are real troubles.

The thing is though, you can't just get the effect you're having on the surface and decide to squash it down, and stamp it out and say, "Oh, that one's not serving me. I don't want it anymore," because remember, your natural talents are patterns in you. They're how you think, feel, behave at your natural default so they're gonna come out. It's like the jack in the box. Do you remember that toy that you might have had when you were a little kid, and you push this toy down into the box, close the lid, and you start turning the crank and you hear that "Du, De, Du, Du, Du, Du, Du, Du, Du, Du Du Du Du Du Du to BAM! Then that thing jumps out and scares you when you least expect it. Your talents are really just like that. If you squash them down because you think, "ah, my boss doesn't seem to like that one."

"Ooh, I got bad feedback on that one once, so I don't want that one. I'll just put that one away." Or you stamp it down, because you don't perceive that the culture you work in is appreciative of that talent, so you decide, "I'll just use that one at home. I'll use that one at work." These are all things I hear in training constantly, but the thing is it's kinda like the jack in the box. If you try to squash out those talents, they are going to jump out and scare people, because they're your natural default ways of thinking and feeling and acting, so they're going to come out. Since they're going to come out, what you want to do is spend more time refining it, nurturing it, putting it to work, send it to the gym, get others aware. Think about how that talent shows up on other people.

It really will help you invest in it, in a targeted way. For example, you take that person who mentioned that about the Communication talent. Imagine how refined it would be, if she knows who is willing to talk it out loud. She likes to talk it out. She knows the audience of people who love to talk it out with her. She can do that. But she also needs to be aware of those peers who perceive it like a waste of time because they don't like ideas that aren't well thought out. So part of it is knowing your audience. Another thing she could do is really think about different modes where she could practice her Communications talent - email, spoken word, written word. Maybe she's getting this feedback because she was taking over in meetings, and not letting anyone else have a voice. So we're taking one situation (meetings) and one mode of communication (the spoken word) and she just decided, oh, I don't want this talent at all. It's not serving me.

Actually, she has all these other ways of applying it and refining it. You take the other example that I brought up with a guy who has the Includer talent. It was making him slow; it was making him miss deadlines,because in his way of applying it naturally, he was asking people for their opinion, but he wasn't giving them any time binding around his question. He would throw something out there in person or in an email and tell them he wanted to hear their voice, but he didn't give them a deadline. Something really specific here when he asks, now that he's refining it, he's still noticing people. He's still getting the unheard voices to be heard. He's still making people feel seen and heard and appreciated, but now he gives them deadlines, so he can also meet his commitments.

The other thing that he's been doing is running experiments for in-the-moment Includer. When he's in a meeting and he notices, everyone's spoken up except these two people, now he can say, "you know, John, we haven't heard from you, what do you think?" He started to give himself some script items that we haven't heard from you. What do you think? It's a great way to be able to feed the talent, without discarding it altogether. Don't squash them; refine them. Action item for you to apply. Now you're listening. You of course have your own personal set of talent themes, or natural strengths, that you bring to this world.

StrengthsFinder Activity: Experiment With New Ways To Use Your Talents

What's your troublemaker talent, or what is your combination of talents that kind of team up to create trouble, like I mentioned, my Maximizer and Strategic? Then, once you think of your personal answer, what experiments can you run to try them on in new ways? Remember, it's not an either/or. It's not that your strengths, or your talents, need to be turned on or off. Keep giving them new environments to play in, because the more you nurture them and experiment with them, and try them on and aim them to specific performance, the more refined they're going to be.

StrengthsFinder Activity: Work As A Team To Use Talents

Now, if you want to apply this at a team level because you're a strengths champion or you're a people manager who is awesome, here's an activity that you can do with the team.

Give everyone around the table a blank sheet of paper and then write down their troublemaker talent on that piece of paper at the top, like a title. If you've done StrengthsFinder, that would be one of your StrengthsFinder talent themes. If you haven't done StrengthsFinder then one resource on our website, you could use LeadThroughStrengths.com/adjectives, and that page gives you a bunch of words that might describe you as a person, and you can have people go through an additional exercise before you come to the meeting, where they get two or three words that define them most strongly, and usually each of those words, even though there are positively framed, they're going to have the great side of them, and they also might bring a shadow side with them.

It'll take a little extra work if you haven't done StrengthsFinder, but you can get there by reframing it into the troublemaker, out of that adjective list. Back to the sheet of paper, where you have your thing written at the top. For example, it might say Responsibility is the troublemaker talent for this person on your team. Then, they write one sentence about the trouble it's causing them; what is the pain? For example, if you had the responsibility talent, it might say, "I can't say no." If you're leading this exercise, be sure you've thought of your own in advance so that you can model for them what yours sounds like. You can use the example I just used, and then you give your own as well, and then they'll see how to make a nice crisp problem statement.

Then what you do, just pass it to the right one time. Of course they know who it came from, because it came from the person sitting right next to them, and as it gets passed you asked for the person who receives it to come up with one way you could address the situation while still honoring the talent That part, while still honoring the talent, is important because if you pass the Responsibility paper over and the person writes, "just say the word NO," that's not going to work for someone with the Responsibility talent, but maybe the person next to them writes something like "next time you feel yourself needing to set a boundary and having a tough time with it, imagine the other commitments this will put at risk if you say YES."

That's more of a thinking exercise. The next person might give a different tip, but it still honors the Responsibility talent and they give them a script, some words that they might use, that would feel comfortable for someone with the Responsibility talent. So they might say something like, "next time you feel like you want to say no, but you can't find the words. Tell them, 'Ooh, that project sounds really valuable. Let me look at my calendar and review all of my commitments and I'll get back to you by tomorrow.'" Essentially they're offering a stalling tactic, so that they can get their head together and find the right words and the right approach instead of just saying yes in the moment, so you get where I'm going here. The idea is to give the person ideas that can solve this challenge while still honoring the talent.

If you know all of your talent themes, what can be really cool with StrengthsFinder, to make this even more layered and get people learning the StrengthsFinder talent themes and get them to really honor the person, is to write all five of their talent themes in a corner and then do the same thing I already mentioned, so that when you see the person with Responsibility also has Command, also has Includer, also has Connectedness, also has Individualization. Then, you can give an answer that is, Ooh, look, this person has Individualization, so in this way the person with Responsibility would probably find it important to give a custom answer to every person who asks for something from them, so you could give them something like a formula for finding the words we're saying no, but that also allows it to be customized to the person who's receiving it, so that's the exercise. I like passing it to the right three times because you get three different layers of answers and then you send it back to the original person, and it just gives them a way of thinking about the world that isn't in their typical mind-frame. It's a nice way to help them brainstorm some potential solutions and see how other people view the same situation at work.

A final thought on troublemaker talents is to remember there's not an on and off switch as the right answer here because something's not serving you today. Don't shut it off, squash it down, stamp it out. The idea is to refine what you have. It's gonna come out anyway, like a jack in the box. It will jump out and scare people if you choose to not invest in it. So with that, I'll see you next time and I can't wait to hear how you've claimed that talent invested in it and shared it with the world.

To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can also stream any episode right from this website. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode. Let the app notify you each week when the latest episode gets published.

In this episode Lisa clearly answers the question, "Is there proof that strengths focused development works?" First, she presents a case study. It's research from the University of Nebraska that proves focusing on strengths yields better ROI than training yourself in your weakness zone. Second, she offers the metaphor of a fish and a cat to bring the point alive.

You'll find lots of StrengthsFinder, leadership, and team tools on our Strengths Resources page.

Lisa also mentions this classic book by Donald O. Clifton and Paula Nelson, Soar with Your Strengths: A Simple Yet Revolutionary Philosophy of Business and Management

One of the best ways leaders can build a strengths based culture is to offer appreciation of strengths in action. If you'll notice what works, you'll get more of what works because people can replicate what they've already done well. On our home page, you can download this awesome tool that offers you 127 easy ideas for recognizing your team. Scroll down and look for the box that says "Great Managers Notice What Works".

You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings, and today we cover the question, "Is there proof that strengths-based development works?" If you're considering StrengthsFinder or strengths-based development, strengths based culture in your organization. This comes up pretty often. People say, "Hey, if I'm going to move away from this thing that you call a lopsided obsession with weakness fixing, I want to know is it actually going to work?" What I have for you today is 1) a proof point through a case study...some actual research...and then 2) the other is a metaphor because it's a really clear way of thinking and making it obvious that strengths-based development is the way to amplify performance on the job. First, for your proof point, some researchers at the University of Nebraska did a study to quantify the effects of what it is like when you invest in your strengths, versus when you invest in something that you're just average in.

They did this test with the topic of speed-reading. They brought people in off the streets and subjected them to this speed-reading test, and at the end of the speed-reading test, they divided the subjects into two groups. Group 1: they were naturally talented at it. Group 2: they were average at the skill. The average people read 90 words per minute and the naturally talented people read 350 words per minute in this is the first round with no training. Just imagine bringing you in off the street and testing you on how fast you can read. Next, after that first round: they offered the same training to all subject. What they were going to look for, of course, is the answer to the question: "Can the naturally talented people use the same training to amplify their performance at a better pace than those who didn't have the natural talent?"

Well imagine this is very much like work. You see people come in to the same job, but they have different background, skills, talents, knowledge, experience. You see that one person really takes to the job easily. And another person - they don't ramp up as fast, and the work is not intuitive to them. They're slower at it and it never feels quite right for them.

Now, back to the study. All the subjects were given the same training and in the second round, after this training, those average participants, who started out only being able to read 90 words per minute, made some improvements. They went up to a 150 words per minute. This is very much like what you see on the job. You bring in people from off the street. You say, "Hey, you're going to go through the phone rep training and everybody's going to go through the same thing, and everybody who tries hard is going to improve."

So, as expected, these subjects got better. They made a 66% improvement in their performance. That's great. It did something, yet the first piece of insight here is if you remember back to a minute ago...I said the naturally talented group already read 350 words per minute in their first round. So they already beat the trained (average) people right there. That's an interesting insight because you see how your natural talents can help you perform, even when you've never been trained in something. Now, the real magic in this story, in this case study is what happened to the people who were naturally talented. That group improved 828%. So if you ever hear me talk about your triple-digit-performance-improvement-shortcut being strengths, this is what I'm talking about. They went from 350 words per minute to 2900 words per minute with the same training as the other people.

One group of people improved to get to 150. The other group of people improved to get to 2900. You've seen this in the workplace, if you've looked around. You have the same people with the same training exposure, and you see very different performance levels. With those performance levels, you can see high performers who try really hard, but you can also see low performers who try really hard and they're just not getting it because it's not in their zone of genius, so there's the proof point for you: 828% performance improvement for that group of people who focused on what they were already naturally talented in. Now I mentioned that I would give you a proof point and then I would also offer you a metaphor that demonstrates it I think had a real guttural kind of level like, yes, this is how we should be thinking.

So there is a book put out by Donald Clifton and the Gallup organization called Soar With Your Strengths. Now this is an older book and it's actually a fable. It has a really good metaphor in there about taking an animal and sending it to training in something that it's not good at. I'm going to extend the metaphor and do the Lisa version of it. It's a little bit silly, but this way if you read the book, you can still get something out of it, so imagine this. Imagine you're going to work and at work you have a fish, and at work you have a cat, and it's been a year into their experience at work and you say,

"Fish, it's time for the performance review and I've gotta tell ya, we've had you on that responsibility of mouse catching and you've been doing a really cruddy job at catching mice. We're going to really focus in, we're behind you, we want you to be successful, so we're going to spend the next year putting you through a training program so you can be really good at mouse catching. Fish, you're going to go to mouse-catching school."

"Now, Cat, time for your performance review. Gotta tell ya, you did great at mouse catching, but you've also had that responsibility of swimming and you know every time we put you near the pool...you scream...you scratch. You've got people in the HR office because their faces are all cut up when they're trying to throw you in the pool. It's been a real nightmare. We want you to be successful though. We're going to send you through a year long training program to make you a great swimmer."

Ok, so got my weird HR conversation here and you can imagine how ridiculous it would be to spend a year trying to teach a fish to catch a mouse and how ridiculous it would be to get a cat to swim. But if you flip that around and send that fish to swimming school and make it the best fish on the planet, you can see what would happen. Oh yeah! That's its natural tendency and that's what it was made to do. Same thing with a cat. It's made to catch a mouse.

This is something that of course it's not as easy and clear with human beings what they were born to do and we're a lot more complicated because we've probably been squashing a lot of those things out of ourselves and hiding them and it's more difficult to make them apparent. But even the notion that you as yourself or that you as a people manager are looking for the genius in that other person that is exactly the path that's going to unleash performance in the organization. So get your fish in fish school. That's the big lesson.

StrengthsFinder Activity: Conversation With Your Team

Now let's talk application. As you listen to this audio and think about yourself personally, think of a time when you learned something new and it came really easily to you...more easily than that same thing would come to most people. If you make yourself think of 5 or 10 of these types of things, you're going to see some trends. You can extend those trends into your current role and think, "all right, if this stuff comes naturally to me, then how can I extend that into my current job?" If you want to apply the same question at a team level because you're a people manager or you're a strength champion (and awesomely) you are bringing this to a bigger conversation, then you can answer the question by going around the table and having a chat about it.

For example, somebody says, "OK, you know, every time we have to learn new software, it is just so easy for me. I don't even know why user manuals exist. I don't know why help screens exists. I can't believe they have to be built out in such detail, because it's just obvious to me how it's going to work."

Maybe another person in a sales role says, "you know, you're doing a new initiative on storytelling," and when that gets launched, the person is like, "Yeah! That seems easy and fun. This is how you want me to sell. Okay, no problem. Forget those other models we've been talking about. This is what I've been wishing for all along."

Or, maybe you have someone in a project management role and they say, "you know, I can really spot the dependent tasks, I mean like nobody's business...even when the rest of the team can't see the connections. They're oblivious to some of these things that are really connected to each other and are going to make the critical path, and others have to experience the whole thing to realize that some of those steps were connected and that they matter.

That's the start of the question as a team, and then of course the magic isn't just knowing that something in the past happened. Then, the next part of the question is:

"How do we amplify this talent? If this is something you're naturally gifted in, how do we get you more of that? How can we get more of your genius on display at work?"

That makes a great team conversation. Based on the size of your team, you can spend however much or little time you have for this. I'd recommend allocating about 5 minutes a person, so it might be a 30 minute conversation, but if you only have 5 total minutes to spare at the beginning of a team meeting, ask people to submit the answer to you in advance. Put it in a spreadsheet. Collect it before you show up in the meeting so that you've done the first-level work in advance.

Then when you get in the room, it's 5 minutes of, "Here we go. Rapid fire. How can we amplify this stuff?" And then you can take it further in the time that you're actually in person together.

Okay, with that, you have a new question. Hopefully you have a newfound appreciation for how strengths based development really does work - how it does amplify your performance more than an obsession with weakness-fixing would. Now you have some questions to discuss as a team, and some things to think about on your own so you can amplify your own performance at work, and the performance of those around you.

So with that, I'll leave you until next time. Thanks for listening to Lead Through Strengths. To find more strengths-focused tools, go out to our website at LeadThroughStrengths.com/resources. There's a whole host of documents and videos and things that you can do to apply this on your team. I'll see you next time.

To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can also stream any episode right from this website. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode. Let the app notify you each week when the latest episode gets published.

Thanks for listening to Lead Through Strengths! Remember, using your strengths makes you a stronger performer at work. If you're putting a lopsided focus on fixing your weaknesses, you're choosing the path of most resistance. So claim your talents. And share them with the world. If you want some strengths-focused tools to use with your team at work, also check out leadthroughstrengths.com/resources - there are a bunch of tools related to StrengthsFinder, strengths-focused leadership, and on noticing what works so you can get more of what works.

This week Lisa chats with Cheikh Tall, Maya Tremelling, and a Project Director at FHI 360. Their amazing company is working in 70 countries to find cures for many of the world's deadliest diseases, provide water for villages in Africa, and promote the health and well-being of all people.

In this special episode, you'll hear how FHI 360 has built a strengths-based team, while nurturing a strong company culture. You'll learn about these 10 ideas:

1. Charity Cube
2. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
3. Focus On The People
4. Offer Awesome Grants
5. Randomized Coffee Trials
6. Thank You Cards
7. Now Awards
8. Annual Awards
9. Leaders Set The Tone
10. Creative Work Schedules

[caption id="attachment_3508" align="alignleft" width="400"] FHI 360's Awesome Mission[/caption]

Cheikh's Top 5 Clifton StrengthsFinder Talent Themes: Maximizer, Adaptability, Achiever, Responsibility, Deliberative (such a great fit for getting a financial analyst in the zone!)

Maya's Top 5 Clifton StrengthsFinder Talent Themes: Positivity, Includer, Woo, Developer, Harmony (what a beautiful set of relationship talents to bring to a records management role!)

Lisa's Top 5 Clifton StrengthsFinder Talent Themes: Strategic, Maximizer, Positivity, Individualization, Woo

You can connect with the FHI 360 team through their website, Twitter, and their interesting and informative blog.

You'll also find lots of StrengthsFinder, leadership, and team tools on our ="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://leadthroughstrengths.com/resources&source=gmail&ust=1487264698482000&usg=AFQjCNHUtPcayNXycHfGq_r2Crj5sPIU7w">Strengths Resources page.

To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can also stream any episode right from this website. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode. Let the app notify you each week when the latest episode gets published.

Lisa: You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where YOU'LL learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. [music break]

I'm your host, Lisa Cummings—and I gotta tell ya, whether you're leading a team or leading yourself…it's hard to find something more **ENERGIZING** and productive than using your natural talents every day at work.

Today, you'll hear a special episode, where I'm onsite in the Raleigh Durham area of North Carolina. I'm with an organization called FHI 360. They do work in 70 countries, and wow...talk about bringing out the best in humanity…

I was onsite, delivering a StrengthsFinder program to their Global Leadership Team. They came from all over the world and, man, we got to apply the concept of strengths to [00:01:00] suuuuch a wide range of job responsibilities.

We had research scientists, we had country directors, we had clinical operations leaders, and we had people whose career mission is to cure malaria. We had leaders who devoted their entire lives to getting clean drinking water to villages in Africa.

It was amazing, and their organizational culture really stuck me.

It feels different (in a special way) when you walk in their building. So [00:01:30] I couldn't pass up the opportunity to chat with some of their team members about what makes this organization so special.

Now, bear with us. The audio on this episode is not as good as our usual standard. We're on site, in a common space, with four of us on one centralized microphone. The setup was not ideal for your ear buds, yet we made it work on the fly. And, even with the extra fuzz and distance in your ears, you'll absolutely benefit by listening to their creative tips and culture-building ideas.

In just a sec, they'll start giving you 10 specific ideas you can borrow for YOUR work culture. If you find it tough to follow who is talking (because there are 4 of us), take a glance over at leadthroughstrengths.com/listen. When you see the podcast episode art with three faces, you'll know you found them. We added photos of each person throughout the show notes - so I think you'll love checking out those visuals (we even have some that show the 10 tips in action). That page also includes each person's StrengthsFinder talent themes, so it might be fun for you to spot their natural talents as you hear how they describe their ideas.

We kick it off with . She jumps right in with their [00:03:00] Charity Cube idea. Here she is, giving you a cool use for the empty cubicle in your office!

Project Director: Hi, I'm a project director. My favorite thing about working here or one cool thing I look forward to is an initiative we have called the Charity Cube. It's an empty cube that we use as a mini-thrift store to raise funds [00:03:30] for charities that are nominated by our staff.

Sometimes it will be a charity that our staff cares about, local or national, or sometimes it'll be something thathas personal significance to someone, right? Now for example, this month, the funds raised through the Charity Cube are going to the Leukemia Society because one of our colleagues lost her husband recently to leukemia, so it's raising money in honor of him.

Lisa: I can already tell it's something of meaning here. Tell me a little bit [00:04:00] about what that cube looks like. If you walk up to that cube, what do you see? Because I imagine almost everybody listening has an empty cube somewhere around the office and they want to do this. What does that look like?

Project Director: Sure. We invested in a portable clothing rack. I think a company called Neatfreak makes it. We have clothes hanging there. We ask people to only bring in really nice stuff. We usually have some shoes and purses. There are books, CDs and DVDs [00:04:30]. Knickknacks. People bring in all kinds of things. Some things we wish they didn't, but usually what happens is the good stuff is gone in a second. What's left over is the stuff that nobody wants, so once a month, we get volunteers to come clean it out and to purge it, then we start over. We've raised $5,000 in the Charity Cube.

We've been doing it two years and each month, it's a different charity and [00:05:00] staff nominates it. It's fun. It needs to be placed somewhere strategic. Our Charity Cube is placed right next to the canteen, so everyone who's going to warm up their lunch stops by. It's an honor system. There's a moneybox. People put in the cash and once a month, we add up all the money and send it to a charity.

Lisa: It's like a little retail store in a cube. I wasn't even imagining it at first.

Project Director: Yeah. It manages itself, for the most part.

Lisa: And anybody listening to this could implement something like that. They don't have to be a people [00:05:30] manager to do that. That can be anyone who wants to demonstrate leadership and do something meaningful. Ooh. Maya, this is a lot to live up to. What kind of cool thing do you love here?

Maya: My name is Maya Tremelling [00:05:43]. I'm responsible for record management and I've worked for FHI for almost nine years. What I like most about working in this company are the people.

Lisa: Let's talk about relationships for a second and what happens when you're so far away. I talk to more and more people at companies, organizations everywhere that have remote employees all over the place. Your tightest knit team might not be anywhere near you, so how do you ... This answer could be for anyone even though, Cheikh, you haven't been able to introduce yourself yet. How do you stay connected like that relationship-wise when you're not physically seeing each other?

Cheikh: The ERG.

Maya: Yeah, ERG. I don't know if you heard of them [00:06:29].

Lisa: Employee Resource Groups?

Cheikh: Employee [00:06:30] Resource Group. Yes.

Lisa: Yes. Talk about them.

Cheikh: And then people that share…

Project Director: Common interests.

Maya: We have so many groups. Maybe I can talk for "Tapioca" [00:06:38], which is Asian people, but people who care about Asia also can join. You don't need to be Asian to join. We have really good causes too, like fundraising. We celebrate New Year's for all the countries in Asia. We have potlucks. Being away from our countries can feel lonely, but it feels like we are family here. It's just nice.

Lisa: Yeah, so you mentioned Tapioca. You mentioned Young Professionals. Is that an Employee Resource Group?

Maya: Yes.

Lisa: What are some other ones?

Maya: Africa.

Project Director: Working parents.

Cheikh: I think a bicycle group.

Lisa: Bicycle?

Cheikh: They have a bunch of bicycles. Yeah.

Project Director: Yeah. We have a bicycle one, working parents. Oh, Toastmasters, public speaking, Africa, Asia. Military veterans? [00:07:25] Oh, a fitness one that does yoga and meditation.

Lisa: It's as if you find a special connection point, you could make one of these.

Project Director: Sure. You can propose it.

Cheikh: The last one is a women's group.

Project Director: Oh, yeah. The women's group? Yeah.

Cheikh: I attended that one [smiles].

Project Director: That's awesome. Good for you [cheerful crosstalk].

Lisa: Okay, so now people have sort of met you.

Cheikh: Yes.

Lisa: Tell them who you are and one of the cool things you love about working here.

Cheikh: My name is Cheikh Tall [00:07:52]. I've been with FHI for about a year. The purpose for me to join FHI was the work that FHI was doing. I was just sitting at my old job - just working and I guess it wasn't meaningful to me. It wasn't about the money, it's about what I want to do personally. I think working here - and the work that FHI is doing, that's one of the main things that I like about working here.

Lisa: Yeah. I think people listening to this will almost feel like you [00:08:30] have an advantage because when you're in a company like this, that is so mission driven and so out for humanity and what the world could become, you certainly (on the purpose and meaning part) have something special.

Let's just say you're a manager listening to this and they work in a manufacturing company. They're making widgets and you're trying to figure out - how do you tap into meaning? You've obviously had this experience when you didn't feel that connection. [00:09:00] Do you think that connection can be made when it's a hardware product or something like that?

Cheikh: Yes. I think it's good to take time to understand what somebody's motivation is. It's important to tap into that motivation and keep that person going.

Lisa: If you just asked one question to try to get at somebody's motivation, what would that thing be?

Project Director: Whenever I work with someone that I don't know, I make sure that the very first meeting has nothing to do with work. That it's [00:09:30] just about getting to know each other and understanding. You don't want to make people say things that they're not comfortable sharing, but just opening a dialogue for people to share what they're comfortable with about their life and their family and where they went to school or what books they love, what music they love, what their hobbies are, so that you can build trust. I think in order to be able to be on a team and have healthy conflict about ideas, you have to trust each other. In order to build trust, you have to know something about the person [00:10:00] beyond their name and their title.

Lisa: It doesn't cost any money, either. That's a great one, Project Director, for that.

Project Director: Exactly. You do it over lunch. You go out, "Hey, I'm so glad we're working together. Can we go and grab lunch?" You just talk about life and each other. Also in keeping that feeling going and building that relationship too, a lot of times, we work with people that are overseas.

I had a team that was all in Kenya. We did so much better, we were so much more engaged when we were on video, rather than when we were on the phone. As much as we could, we did Skype and video calls more than just being on the phone. When you're on the phone and someone could be doing something else and it's too passive. When you're on video, you have to really focus.

So yeah, using video and just keeping a personal relationship just when you start meeting like, "How's everything going with you guys? How's your family?" You know what their kids are doing. "How's soccer going?" or something. "How's your garden going? You grow tomatoes. Do you have any tomatoes yet?" Just to have ahuman connection and not be so boring about work, because things can get boring sometimes.

Lisa: [00:11:00] It's big. People say, "Oh, you're not focusing on work", but you're focusing on work by focusing on the people that do the work, so you have to have that piece.

Cheikh: Adding to that, I might be an introvert sometimes. I don't like to talk. I just sometimes just keep it business as usual.

Lisa: Perfect for having someone on a video right now, right? [sarcasm] "Let's do an in public interview with someone to make him feel really uncomfortable."

Cheikh: I've been working with my manager for a while. She can tell by how I react if I'm excited about something or not. She knows that I like to be challenged. If a new challenge comes up, she can see the excitement in me. I think paying attention to the non-verbal action of people pays a lot. They can't help unless they are 100% sure what motivates that person.

Lisa: I like how practical your ideas are. You were talking about the fact that someone can read you [00:12:00] and know. The same thing applies with anybody that you're working with whether they're your direct report or a colleague who's a peer. If you get to know each other at those informal lunches and they know, "Oh, you want a little more time to think about things" or "Don't put me under pressure to speak in the moment" or "Now I can see that eye twitch means that's a good thing". All those little signs.

Project Director: One of the things that I love about FHI is HR has set aside funds and resources for employees to come up with [00:12:30] ideas. We have the Awesome grant: give us an idea that's awesome that you can do for $1,000 and we'll consider it. Everyone can submit his or her ideas. One of the Awesome grants was to get some bicycles that employees can check out and go for lunch, go ride into downtown and grab a coffee or a lunch.

HR, it's not tons of money, but it's very encouraging to feel like your ideas are valued and for HR to say, "We want to know what ..." [00:13:00] The Awesome grants are about the culture. $1,000 projects to make our culture better. I love that HR is thinking that way because that's creative and it's not expensive. It's pretty easy. The staff is doing all the work. They're coming up with an idea they're implementing.

Lisa: And executing. I hear that and I think if someone said, "Oh, we don't have that. We have $100", you could do an Awesome grant with $100. That's cool.

Paige Winn (cameo appearance): Do you guys know about the randomized coffee trials?

Maya: Yeah. Every [00:13:30] month, people who register to be part of it will get an invite. They match us with other people and we can have talking and it's just having a coffee or tea or even lunch if you want. I meet most of the time with someone new that I never met before. It's really good because we are such a big company. So many new people - we benefit.

Lisa: Yeah. Say more about how this actually works. You're an employee and I'm imagining [00:14:00] it could be something like networking and I just want to meet someone in whatever department?

Maya: Yes.

Lisa: Networking, mostly? Does it happen through software or how does this happen?

Maya: It's just an email.

Project Director: It's part of the Awesome thing. Someone manages it. They get all the names of people and then they use random matching and send out emails.

Cheikh: Usually the people that they match are in the same department.

Project Director: Yeah.

Cheikh: We end up being matched to somebody who is doing something totally different than your area of work, so you can talk about projects you're working on.

Project Director: The ones that I've been in, we talk about work some and what kind of projects you're doing and what excites you about what's coming down the pike.

Maya: Most of the time. Yeah.

Project Director: "Where did you come from? Who are you?" It's all the employees who schedule it and reschedule it if you need to cancel. That's your gig. They just tell you whom you're matched to and then you can take it and run.

Lisa: You're hitting [00:15:00] on an enormously important concept. I talk a lot with managers about individualizing to each person and what makes them tick.

Project Director: One thing I really appreciate is that we get handed out stationary that is a thank you note. It has a logo and it says 'We are FHI'. You get those and when someone does something that you appreciate or helps you out, you can send them a handwritten thank you note. I have handwritten thank you [00:15:30] notes from people in leadership that mean so much. The power of that is just so real and wonderful. We can do that to each other. We also have an ability to nominate people for awards.

Cheikh: Yeah. The Now Award.

Project Director: On an ongoing basis, we have a Now Award, which is just someone helped you out. It can be a $10 gift card or $20, whatever. Once a year, then we have the big award. They take nominations from around, many, many offices around [00:16:00] the world. It's nice. There's a ceremony and people get to tell their story. You hear why people got this award and they give it to teams. It's not about individual accomplishments, it's about team accomplishment and project accomplishment. That's awesome because then you're really creating a culture that values teamwork.

Cheikh: Also, what I like especially about the Now Award is that it is something that you get from peers. You're working next to each other.

Maya: Right. In the same department.

Cheikh: It doesn't come from the top leader. [00:16:30] My direct manager or my direct coworkers are the ones that can nominate me. Just getting an award from them means a lot because they are the people that you interact with all the time, and they see you putting in the work. The direct manager knows what I'm doing every day. Getting recognition from them sometime means a lot.

Lisa: As I was listening to your answers, I was thinking about how that gave people a [00:17:00] big, bigger, biggest option where thank you cards, recognition cards can be big, Now Awards can be bigger, the team impact thing, the biggest. But that something as simple as a peer recognition getting a handwritten note whether it's from a peer, even an email, that it's big.

It's a big meaning to you even though it's a small easy action to take. Anybody can keep a stack full of blank cards at their desk to recognize peers, even if their company doesn't [00:17:30] provide something. Okay. Closing thought. It's a simple question, yet a deep question. What do you know about team dynamics today that you didn't know five years ago?

Project Director: I don't know if I didn't know it five years ago, but I certainly know now that the leader sets the tone. I'm on a team now where the leader will send out a message [00:18:00] and it's completely heartfelt. "This morning I woke up and there was a beautiful sunrise and I was on my run. I was just thinking about how much we've accomplished in the last month, and how hard you guys have worked, and how much I appreciate it. I'm just thankful that you all are my team."

He's setting the tone. He's setting the tone and then that becomes the tone of the team. I think it goes all the way up to our CEO. We have a CEO suggestion box. You can say anything you want in the suggestion box. Anything. [00:18:30] He will respond publicly unless it's private, if it's an HR issue that is private.

He sets the tone for communication. That would be my nugget: the leader sets the tone. It's your responsibility to set the tone for your team. If there's gnarly-ness going on in your team, you have to not just want to blame it on them but look inward and accept some responsibility. How do I turn this around? What can I do? Instead of just saying, "All those people are hopeless." I [00:19:00] believe it comes from the top.

Lisa: It takes a lot of small interactions to make that openness happen, so that's a really good lesson.

Project Director: You know one thing we didn't talk about, but I think is really great, is that I only work 60% of the time. That's a choice that I made, so that I cannot make my kids eat TV dinner every day, right?

Lisa: Ooh, it is a big one.

Project Director: I work less and I make less money, but I still know, and I think most people here know, that you don't get all this [00:19:30] stuff. Culture is not going to just ... someone else is going to create it. You have to put the time in even though I'm only working 60%, but I put the time in for the Charity Cube. We put the time in for the ERGs. We do it because we know that it's our responsibility. We get to own whether this place is awesome to work at or not. It's everybody's responsibility and we all chip in, don't we?

Maya: Yeah. [00:19:53].

Project Director: People chip in. We're not getting compensated for these things that we're doing. We shouldn't be. We're doing them because we want to work at an awesome place [00:20:00] and that's what it takes to work somewhere awesome. If you're not willing to give a couple of hours a month or one hour a month to make this place awesome, then it's not going to be awesome. That's why it's awesome. If you think everyone else is going to create the culture and then you get to benefit from it? No. That's not how it works.

Lisa: It's so uncommon to see any fractional work schedule.

Project Director: Yeah. It has to be that your project, it meshes with your project needs, but yeah. If you can justify in how it will work and it works [00:20:30] for your group, then you can do it.

Lisa: The Project Director ended it so perfectly, didn't she? You know what, if you want your workplace to be great, it's built from the inside out. A culture's not an HR initiative, it's not a vision from one single leader. It's actually a reflection of the past and the present and all of those actions, habits, preferences, commitments and trusts that are going on in your organization.

Building a strengths-based culture takes [00:21:00] some time, effort, and ongoing communication. They did such a great job of showing how yes, it does take an effort by many people over a long period of time to shape a culture yet at the same time, they demonstrate really beautifully that these 10 ideas can be executed by anyone at any level and really with any budget level.

To do a quick recap, here are the 10 ideas. I hope you will take some inspiration [00:21:30] and implement a spark that you got from this episode in your company.

1. Turn an empty cube into a Charity Cube.Use it to give to causes that employees select and care about.
2. Form Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), and don't limit them to ethnic diversity groups. Allow team members to find connection points and create groups, like their cyclist group or veterans group.
3. Focus on the work by focusing on the people doing the work. Build human connections by being willing to chat about non-work topics. Get on video for remote team members. Going deeper builds trust that translates into results.
4. Offer Awesome Grants. Give people the opportunity to apply for grants that build a great workplace. They implemented everything from a sharable bike program to buying StrengthsFinder assessments - all from their Awesome Grants.
5. Create a program like their Randomized Coffee Trials.They literally get matched up with a random person from another department to have coffee and try on a conversation. It has been awesome for cross-functional networking and collaboration.
6. Provide an inventory of Thank You cards. They provide stationery to each employee so that offering appreciation is convenient. This removes cost barriers and convenience barriers that would otherwise keep people from doing it. I know, that sounds like a lame excuse to not say thank you…yet I don't see fat stacks of thank you cards on people's desks, so this idea rocks. Make it easy.
7. Now Awards.Start a peer-nomination system. Get rid of the bureaucracy and approvals. Allow people to give something simple, like a $10 gift card to a peer.
8. Annual Awards.This is their big team award, so it's different from peer awards. This one recognizes project level success. They go all out with stories that describe the team's experience together. And they pump up the pomp and circumstance to really make a celebration out of it.
9. Set the tone.As a leader, FHI leaders are comfortable with a heartfelt tone. They are willing to listen and help each person feel important. They see from their results and loyalty that it's a big deal. Whether it's a meaningful team message or their CEO suggestion box, they're out to show people that they matter.
10. Get creative with work schedules.FHI offers what they call "Reduced LOE" where any professional on their team can work fractional hours and get prorated benefits. What a creative way to keep your best employees through different seasons of their lives. It makes team members feel accountable to keeping the amazing culture train going - what a brilliant way to build a feeling of ownership all the way through. At its simplest level, consider offering a job sharing program or part time roles. The important differentiator here is that it's not just for entry-level jobs. When you show people they have a career path with flexibility, you can keep your top talent rather than having them opt out of the workforce entirely.

It makes the team members feel accountable to keeping the amazing culture train going, you heard that from Project Director, and what a brilliant way to build a feeling of ownership all the way through the organization. If you offered this at its simplest level, just consider doing a job-sharing program where two employees can share a job 50/50 or maybe you offer part-time roles.

The important differentiator is that it's not just for entry-level jobs. I do see people experimenting with part-time offerings, yet they stop at the entry-level jobs. The magic here is that when you show people they have a career path with flexibility, you can keep your top talent rather than having them opt out of the workforce entirely. All right. With that, I'd love to hear what this episode inspires you to put into practice.

If you've done the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment with your team, it's a great [00:27:00] spark. I say this often. It's a great start, it's a great spark, but it needs the continued conversation and execution to have the deep impact on an organization. First, I'm virtually high fiving you if you've gotten the conversation started already and the examples in this episode are a great way to support talents and put them into action.

Just think about this for a second. If someone on your team leads through the Discipline or Focus talent themes, maybe they create the calendaring process for something like those randomized coffee trials because they really dig the organizational skills and the follow through part. If someone leads through restorative, maybe they institute their own ERG.

They create an employee resource group called the Fix It Amigos, I don't know, to tinker on electronics or solve business issues that people submit. If someone leads through the developer talent, maybe they propose a mentoring program or they offer to be someone's mentor so they can take them through those small steps of development and have someone who they can celebrate the success of.

If someone leads through Includer, they might offer to become the onboarding welcome wagon and offer tour guides to ensure that new hires feel totally comfortable and grounded in their first week on the job. You get the idea here. I'm just spit balling. The idea though is take your talents and the talents of people on your team and aim them at culture building conversations. Aim them at specific company programs.

Get people involved in ways [00:28:30] that light them up. Encourage people to contribute in ways that bring them ease and energy and enjoyment about the workplace and about their culture and about their roles. After all, if they're obsessed with fixing their weaknesses, you know what I'm about to say here. They are performing on the road of most resistance. So help them claim their talents and share them with your culture.

This Episode's QuestionIngrid says she's pretty close to knowing what she wants to do with her career. And she even has a list of potential employers collected. These are companies where she could put these new ideas to use. Yet she's just not sure of the timing. She's afraid once she actually gets into the career change...will she still be happy? Will she have picked the right thing?

She asked, "Is it okay to go after what I think (at least right now) my dream job is...simply because I need to have the experience of it to know what it is all about? Or do I need to know exactly what my dream job is before I go after it."

What You'll Learn In The Audio - Whether to take the risk of the grass not being greener in a new job. Sometimes you worry that you might be romanticizing the role or the company. Or you worry that the interview process is not what the "real" day-in-a-life will be like.

- How you can Happen To Your Career rather than slugging through your work days by letting career "happenings" get imposed upon you. Note: you'll get some super special Scott Anthony Barlow wisdom in this department. And you'll leave wanting to subscribe to his podcast or sign up for his One Stop career shop for getting you where you want to go. This guy rocks.

- Examples of times when a dream job didn't turn out as planned. Yup, even your hosts have experienced these "wrong" turns and came out on a great note. And why you should go for it...even if it turns out to be one of your "not it" roles you're bound to experience in your career.

- Why it's good to go through some career conflict and get outside of your comfort zone. You'll become more self-aware, you'll know better what your strengths are, and you'll get clearer on what you want.

- If you don't try it, you'll miss the chance of knowing whether this is "it" for you. And why not? Because what you want and need today won't be what you want and need in the future. You'll keep changing, growing, and evolving as a person. So go for what feels right today because it will change tomorrow.

- Humans are wired with a survival instinct. You'll tackle pain head on. It's your fight or flight response. You'll take risks to avoid pain. Yet when it comes to gain, humans take far less risk. That's why Ingrid's feelings and question are 100% normal. To get massive career happiness, sometimes you have to take risk on the gain side. And it's a lot tougher to muster up the courage on that end.

Resource of the EpisodeAt Happen To Your Career, you can find a 14 day course on how to figure out what you want to do with your career. There's no charge. What a super resource to get you started.

Subscribe to the Career Q&A Podcast To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher radio. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode - let the app notify you each week when the latest question gets published.

Ask Your Career QuestionSend your question on Twitter @careerpodcast or on the Career Q&A Facebook page.

Even better, leave your question through the audio hotline so we can hear your voice.

Related Episodes to Go Deeper on The Topic- People who are in a similar career space are often debating about money and happiness...trying to find out if it's possible to have both.

- They also wonder if their current team is the right set of peers and colleagues to keep their game moving upward.

This week Lisa chats with Murray Guest. They focus on embedding strengths into your company culture after StrengthsFinder training. Instead of just participating in a training, then putting your results and notes away, find ways to sustain the use of strengths at work and home.

Using your strengths will improve your company culture, inspire your team to learn and grow, and increase your bottom line (and it will improve your family life too)!

Murray is a consultant who works with companies and leaders to weave StrengthsFinder into their businesses. He shares this list of four things he addresses when helping people build strengths-based cultures: 1. Systems 2. Physical Environment 3. Leadership 4. Attitudes. He and Lisa also give a ton of easy-to-implement ideas to infuse strengths into your everyday life, most of which are free, so listen in.

Murray's Top 5 Clifton StrengthsFinder Talent Themes: Relator, Futuristic, Individualization, Communication, Responsibility

Lisa's Top 5 Clifton StrengthsFinder Talent Themes: Strategic, Maximizer, Positivity, Individualization, Woo

You can connect with Murray through LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and his website. Murray also created the Strengths Culture Toolkit to help teams use the Clifton StrengthsFinder beyond their initial team building event.

You'll also find lots of StrengthsFinder, leadership, and team tools on our ="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://leadthroughstrengths.com/resources&source=gmail&ust=1487264698482000&usg=AFQjCNHUtPcayNXycHfGq_r2Crj5sPIU7w">Strengths Resources page.

To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can also stream any episode right from this website. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode. Let the app notify you each week when the latest episode gets published.

Lisa Cummings: [00:00:10] You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest Strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings, and I gotta tell you, whether you're leading a team or leading yourself, it's hard to find something more energizing and productive than using your natural talents every day at work.

[00:00:27] Today your guest is a Strengths expert who I wanted to bring on the show because of a conversation we originally had about sustaining Strengths on your team over the long haul. So both of us had too many experience where we sparked an interest in Strengths in organization with a speech, or the training, or some coaching, but the company didn't have the infrastructure or resources behind it to make it part of the everyday culture. And we're both making it part of our personal mission and our business models to support leaders in a way that helps them embed Strengths into the fabric of the company and to the everyday culture at work.

[00:01:04] A fun fact about your guest's uniqueness, we shared a crush on Lita Ford in the 1980s and we're both drummers. How fun is that? So, Murray Guest, let's rock this show. Welcome!

Murray Guest: [00:01:17] Woo-hoo. Lisa, so good to be with you today. I'm excited to talk about Strengths, but also, yeah, we've got a bit of a love of rock drumming. I'm learning. I'm behind you in my skills. I know it's all about practice, and I'm loving when we connect and you just encourage me to keep going and keep practicing.

[00:01:34] And, yeah, I've a crush on Lita Ford and I got to see her recently play live. And to see someone that was so excited and so happy on stage doing what she loves, and I'm sure she was tapping to her Strengths while she was doing it too.

Lisa Cummings: [00:01:46] Such a good metaphor for what Strengths do for you when you're in flow and you're just totally in your groove at work or on stage, because you love it and it shines through and it makes people want to work with you. It's a good reason to embed Strengths into your culture, because you get to experience people like that at work.

Murray Guest: [00:02:01] Yeah, I'm so passionate about the idea of people being in the state of flow. Unfortunately, not everyone's in that place, and I think Strengths is such a perfect vehicle for people to get in that state where it's energizing and it's not, "Thank God it's Friday," it's, "Thank God it's Monday."

Lisa Cummings: [00:02:18:] I saw that in your Instagram, TGIM, and I thought, "Yes, that is the kind of movement I want." So, okay, let's talk about that from the perspective of loading up listeners with ideas for vetting Strengths into their culture because they take the StrengthsFinder assessment, maybe they do it as a team, and then they don't mean to go back to work and put it in a file and forget about it, but it does happen. We know it does, and it's sad because we see the spark and they know they're going to find their flow with it, and then sometimes it can wane.

[00:02:47] So I want to get into a whole bunch of actionable tips and viewpoints about how people can use this, but I do want to start everyone off by being able to hear your Strengths, so kick us off with your top five first.

Murray Guest: [00:03:00] My top five: Relator, Futuristic, Individualization, Communication and Responsibility. I completed my Strengths assessment back in 2012 so it's been five years that I've really known my Strengths and everyday thinking about how they sharpen and how they apply. But actually, Lisa, so like a bit of a path or a bit of a structure in my top five I just want to quickly explain that. So, for me, Relator is all about building these relationships. Number two, Futuristic, where you want to go as a team or as an organization or a leader and how can we get there.

[00:03:32] Individualization, how can we connect and specifically what it is for you? Communication then is about how we communicate that out for you as a leader or within your business, or if it's someone running their business, how they market themselves. And the Responsibility, that's me and it's a foundation of how I can continue to serve you as a coach. And it's a process, I think, that's showing up and working for me really well as a coach.

Lisa Cummings: [00:03:56] Just last week, I did a training session and we had cards where they were representing each person's talent, and this people manager called me over and he said, "I think my Strengths in this order are like a process that I use for how I handle situations or how I think about things." So as you were saying that I was having a flashback to this guy, and I thought, "Wow, that would be really interesting to ask people to see, 'Does this represent like a thought flow or almost like how you operationalize how you work through challenges or situations or something new?'" Because I bet your talents do reflect an order, not necessarily the order of the Talent Themes number one through five, but an order in how they work in your brain. You might be onto something cool there.

Murray Guest: [00:04:37] Yeah. Well, I love that he identified that in your course last week because I think that's such a great awareness and a claiming of his dominant Themes. If there's a way that we can think about a lot of what you're saying about the thought process, or the way we might problem solve, or the way we might organize ourselves, any way that we can connect and really claim those Strengths that we have is part of the process.

[00:05:02] In my previous life, I worked for an organization where what we did was psychology-based safety training. So it's all about building a culture where people go home safe every day. So when we talk about embedding Strengths, I'm transferring a lot from what I learned from embedding what we call a safe culture where people go home safe, where leaders think about the way they communicate and they lead, and the way that people have an environment where it's safe to speak up.

[00:05:35] In that organization, I worked with a whole range of companies and about 10,000 people across some very large high-risk organizations, and one of them was a mining organization which employed about 2,000 people. This company had bought from us a couple of million dollars' worth of training, of programs and coaching and different sorts of initiatives to develop their culture.

[00:05:58] There was a maintenance team, and you would go into that maintenance team and you would swear that we'd been there only yesterday with our programs. The language, the posters, the way that they would discuss things in their meetings and look after each other, and you would actually see the results of their safety and their performance and their attitudes was actually indicative of that because of how well they were going.

[00:06:23] There was another part, which is the main part of this mining operation, where you would think that we had never been there, we had never run a program, never had a coaching session with the leader, never introduced these models and tools and concepts.

Lisa Cummings: [00:06:37] Same company.

Murray Guest: [00:06:38] Same company. Same site. Quite a large mining operation but same company, same site. Here's the thing. The maintenance team, we hadn't actually done any work with them for nearly seven years. The mining operation, we'd actually been there only in the weeks before, and it was critical to how much the leaders were actually living and breathing and embedding and, I would say, just adopting the language in their everyday conversations which kept this concept or these concepts alive.

[00:07:10] In the maintenance team, you had frontline leaders that are there managing these teams, day in and day out, and they had embraced it, and they didn't need us as coaches and facilitators to come back, and you could see then that was keeping alive, day in, day out. And, like I said, we haven't been there for seven years in that part of the business.

[00:07:27] In this other main operation, being there in the weeks before, yet it wasn't being embedded and sustained because the leaders didn't believe in it, and they weren't bringing into their language, they were sending people to the training courses, saying, "You have to go," but they weren't having, where I would say, the critical conversations before and after the programs.

[00:07:49] So if there was a key insight out of all that that I really want to share is to get the value from, say, building a Strengths culture and thinking about how we actually just make it part of the way we work. We really need to engage our leaders and support them in how they just bring it into part of their everyday language and the conversations they're having with their teams.

Lisa Cummings: [00:08:11] And we've all seen the difference between the compliance training, where the person in the session is rolling their eyes, and saying, "Yeah, yeah." We're talking safety, but in reality they just want it faster and cheaper, and out in the field it's not really going to go down like this. How do you do this with Strengths?

[00:08:08:27] If you translate that, and you're a manager who is just experiencing StrengthsFinder for the first time yourself, and you don't know the jargon, and you don't know the language, can you help simplify that and just give people an idea of a few things, "Hey, you're an everyday people manager, you're used to being an ops guy, or a finance person, or a marketing person, or something like that"? How do you start embedding this in your daily talk and conversation when you don't know the language yet?

Murray Guest: [00:08:55] I break up the culture into four areas, the culture within organizations: systems, environment, the leadership and their attitudes. To help us have those conversations and make it easy, I think one of the little things we can start to bring into those four areas so it's really easy to have those conversations. For example, if I've got a diary and I'm going to meetings with my people, what are the Strengths references I can put in there?

[00:09:20] If I've got a notice board or a whiteboard in my office or somewhere in that team area, what can we stick up there to remind us of Strengths and the Strengths language? As a leader, how am I investing my time when I'm not talking to my people to learn about Strengths? So this podcast, you've got a fantastic podcast, and also things like the Called to Coach that Gallup put out. They are resources that, as leaders, tapping into those when I'm not in front of my people, traveling to and from work, they're great to actually start to learn and get some deep insights around Strengths.

[00:09:52] I also think asking people questions is one of the most powerful tools in a leader's toolkit. Asking people about their Strengths, how they're showing up, what do they want to get out of knowing about their Strengths? And then once people are starting to experience Strengths, whether it's through workshops or coaching, ask them how actually it's helped them, what's come up for them, how have their Strengths shown up for them in the past?

[00:10:16] I'm a big believer, Lisa, that the 10-minute conversation a manager has before a coaching or a workshop event and the 10 minutes after, might be a cup of coffee, it's those little informal conversations which show that, as a leader, "I care about you, and I want to know what you got out of that training, or that coaching session. How can I help you apply that

more?"

Lisa Cummings: [00:10:36] And you're breaking down those four categories and talking about things like systems. Instantly I thought of things like the HR systems where I've seen some people in their HRIS where they do performance reviews and where they have their talent information or talent management system, where they actually put in top five talents or they put in some of the career aspirations related to Strengths, or they link the Strengths conversation into the development plans, and they're building it into stuff that already happens in the organization.

[00:11:06] You know, when you said the diary, my ears perked up. And I know some Americans who are listening their ears perked up because they were thinking of a journal kind of diary, so you're talking calendar kind of diary, right?

Murray Guest: [00:11:17] Yes, that's right. [laughs] I'm still a writer in, let's call it, my day-to-day diary or planner, yeah. Not my deep, deep diary, "Today my Strengths showed up like this."

Lisa Cummings: [00:11:28] [laughs] I had to call that out because I know it's fun language barrier we have.

Murray Guest: [00:11:31] If you're doing that and write in your journal that's fantastic.

Lisa Cummings: [00:11:33] Could be. A lot of "Dear, Diary," good stuff about Strengths for sure. But even in the calendar, making that part of the system where if you can't remember this stuff as a manager and it seems like it's just such a heavy load because you're busy, just having a quarterly meeting that you put on a recurring cycle that is a Strengths one-on-one, and you just had the language showing up on someone's calendar that's a Strengths one-on-one, that alone holds you accountable to think of a couple of questions, I'm going to ask them about their Strengths in this meeting.

Murray Guest: [00:12:00] Yeah, and your link to the HRIS, I totally agree. I was with a client earlier this week and we're talking about their annual performance reviews. I said to him, "How about we put a question in there which says, 'How have you used your Strengths to achieve your goals?' or, 'How have you applied your Strengths to develop this year? How will you apply your Strengths in the coming year to achieve our strategic plan?'" Those little prompts in that performance review and those planning guides are just keeping Strengths alive and will get people thinking about it, and not just in that discussion but the preparation and the follow-on as well.

Lisa Cummings: [00:12:35] And maybe help people not dread the performance review season and just think of an outgoing conversation.

Murray Guest: [00:12:40] I bet that's a whole lot of conversation.

Lisa Cummings: [00:12:43] I know. That could really derail us into a whole separate interview. We'll do that one next time. So give me a couple more for managers, because I think, as you mentioned, they are a linchpin in all of this to keep it going. So you mentioned environment, say a little about what you can do to have Strengths around your environment and keep the thought of Strengths alive in people's minds.

Murray Guest: [00:13:08] One of the best things I've seen, and I love this as an initiative, is building a Strengths wall in your team environment. What I've seen, Lisa, is the very simple one where it's just pieces of paper. And I've seen some very elaborate ones where people are getting photos taken, they've got a board that goes into a frame, and on that board next to their photo they've written their top five Strengths and how they're applying their Strengths to achieve their goals, or how they're using their Strengths to be more successful in their roles or to serve the team.

[00:13:39] And so these Strengths walls have been led by leaders who've said, "Right, let's just keep this alive in our area." And so whenever anyone new joins the team, they get put up on the wall. If anyone thinks, "How am I going to work on a project, or who am I going to collaborate with and draw on their strengths?" Here's this great wall, the pictures of our team members and their top five and how they can really use them to be successful.

[00:14:06] In the environment, when I say that I mean it's the physical environment, things you can touch. We can do certificates on the wall, and we can do top five on our desks and things like that, but I think this next level with the Strengths wall provides that deeper understanding about the individuals that make up the team.

Lisa Cummings: [00:14:24] Mm-hmm. I like that a lot. And the deeper understanding point, I've seen some of my clients go deeper in a way that was really cool. Like I'll provide in a training these four-by-six frames that have people's talents so that, beyond the training event, they're on their desk and they look nice and they can filter their thinking through them. But then they take it further, and one of my clients, I think it's really cool, they have started to essentially hashtag their talents when they see it in action.

[00:14:54] For example, this woman had Positivity talent. She needs to put her headphones on and go into her kind of crank it out mode and not be disrupted, but she hates making people feel like she's shutting them down, and so she's really interruptible because she has Positivity, and it's fun to have fun at work. And so she made this really clever sign that goes on the back of her chair about how she has her headphones on.

[00:15:17] And then at the bottom of this note about how she's in her cave working, it was #Positivity. And then people can remember back to the conversation they had as a team, and that keeps deepening it as well. So it's kind of like a mix of your ongoing conversations in support of leadership and the physical environment, seeing them around you and going, "Oh, yeah, that's that one."

Murray Guest: [00:15:39] I love the #Talent so I think that's great. I'm going to borrow that one. There's assumptions that we make as humans, and here's an assumption that I might make that, "Oh, because one of my team members had their headphones in that it means X, Y or Z." But with this little message, and the #Positivity, it's taking me back to Strengths, but it's also removing these assumptions. I love it. And I love these little things that we can do in organizations which actually don't costs a lot of money, or it don't costs anything, and they can have such value and such impact in developing the Strengths culture.

[00:16:12] Speaking of leaders, Lisa, one that I really want to share, too, is what I called a Strengths leadership commitment. Leaders taking that time to write down what's their commitment to keep Strengths alive, to acknowledge and embrace the Strengths in their team members, and actually signing that and then putting on display.

[00:16:30] But not just putting on display but also communicating that to their team and talking about it, and saying, "How am I going to live and breathe this and asking the team to hold them accountable for it?" Because when we sign something we make that commitment. That's real. That's like signing a check or signing a contract. So here's this contract that I'm signing now that, "Hey, I'm making my Strengths leadership commitment to you as a team."

Lisa Cummings: [00:16:53] I love how it speaks to the accountability that you're putting out there. I've never seen anyone do that, and I haven't suggested that one yet, so cool. Thanks. We're borrowing all sorts of good ideas from each other. Because, once you put that onto them, of course, then they're going to hold you to it, and that's why you're telling them, and putting it out there.

[00:17:09] I have had situations where managers are starting in a way different place, and I would say a lesser way of showing support, where they almost didn't, has come up recently several times, where a company will bring me in and they want a leadership session and they want a session for all. And they'll say, "Okay, we think all of the people who manage people are going to go to leadership session, and then everyone else will go to this other event."

[00:17:38] And they're not doing it to be unsupportive, they just kind of think, "Oh, there's this version and that version." And really talking through the message that sends to someone who is an individual contributor on the team, thinking, "My manager doesn't even care to hear what I have to say about my Strengths in here. They don't even want to understand what we do when we're at our best when we're in the session." All those assumptions and things that are going on in their head.

[00:18:01] So that's been a really useful conversation about embedding them with the message that you're sending about the interest you're showing in it. This had no mal intent in the times that it's come up recently but it does keep coming up and it's just as a practical "we're busy" kind of thought. And they really miss that key point which somebody would think, "Oh, gosh, well, they don't even care."

Murray Guest: [00:18:22] Yeah, and I'd like to think, Lisa, everyone has good intent. So, as a leader, "I have good intent. I'm busy. I want my team to do this. I think it's great. I believe in it. But, hey, I'm too busy. I want to do other things or I've got somebody else, and we'll go to a different program." So there's good intent. However, the way it's communicated, or the assumptions team members might make might be, like you're saying, "We're not part of the greater team, or they don't really care." And so breaking down those assumptions is so important.

[00:18:49] Something that I've actually found that's really helped is when we do need to do that because the leader might have lots of teams, is having a leader open the sessions, so come in and explain, "These are my top five Strengths. This is what I got out of knowing my Strengths. This is what I hope you get out of it, and I look forward to hearing about it, please come tell me." And having that sort of 10-minute opening has also been really powerful.

Lisa Cummings: [00:19:13] And it's so practical. It's easy for them to take the time. I've had a few sessions like that where that company leader, or department leader, or that manager, they kick off and say, "I went through this process. That's why we're doing it because I believe it's that powerful. I want to know this about you. Here's what I got out of it, and I can't wait to see what you'll get out of it too."

[00:19:32] Wow! Then people come in with a really open mind and excitement about it, they've said it in their company's language, and then they take down all those barriers about, "Oh, what's this? What's this outsider going to tell us about our careers or about our Strengths?"

Murray Guest: [00:19:45] Yes, yes, totally. The other one that, I think, leaders can do is how they're integrating Strengths into their meetings. Meetings are such an interesting topic. I think, Lisa, so many people I talk to say, "Oh, we have so many meetings, and we have meetings about meetings, and we don't make decisions but we have more meetings, and all of that sort of stuff going on."

[00:20:06] Yet organizations are going to continue have meetings, it's just we need to get more effective at them, and I fundamentally believe we need to meet more regularly, for less time, more effectively. But what it would like if every time a team met they started their meeting with a Strengths share, "How have I seen the Strengths show up in one of my team members? How have I used them on the weekend with my friends or family? How am I using my Strengths currently to solve a problem? Or how are we using them currently to collaborate on a project?"

[00:20:38] And it's only a very short discussion, but it sets these habits, and once we form these habits that's just going to be part of the way we work. So what if that was a standing agenda or item at the start 1of every team meeting?

Lisa Cummings: [00:20:52] Beautiful. And it could five minutes or three minutes, it could even be one person's one Strengths share and that's it.

Murray Guest: [00:20:57] Yeah, that's right.

Lisa Cummings: [00:20:59] Oh. I've had a client recently do this where they were passing around the responsibility of the opener. They were doing something very similar to a Strengths share but it was more like a, "What is the question related to Strengths we're going to open the meeting with?" And it's something that would take like 30 seconds to report out each person so that it only took up a few minutes at the beginning.

[00:21:19] And they assigned a new person who would come up with that question each time. So it wasn't just on the manager, and it got everybody really involved in it, and it made each person think about Strengths in a deeper way. I thought that was a clever way to do it, and involve everyone and really embed it further.

Murray Guest: [00:21:36] Again it's another great example and I love that. It's just simple, it's short, it's effective, it's building habits, and it's setting the tone, I think, also for the rest of the meeting. Then, as we talk about other topics or things that we may need to discuss, it sets this tone that Strengths is going to be part of the way we do that as well.

[00:21:55] A team I worked with, Lisa, the culture prior to the team and the leader knowing Strengths, was, well, this person, let's call her Jane, is always seeing the bad, always seeing the wrong. And then the assumption of, "Hey, guess what? Jane is not on board." So then, after Strengths workshops and some coaching with the leader, it's actually Jane's number one Strengths is, guess what, Restorative. She just wanted to fix problems and she had this, "Straight away what could go wrong? And I want to make sure this doesn't happen."

[00:22:25] So what that turned around in their meetings was, "Actually, here's the next initiative we're doing. Hey, Jane, can you tell us what you think could be some of our possible pitfalls and how we can address them?" It just changed the whole dynamics of the meeting and actually how engaged she was in the conversations.

Lisa Cummings: [00:22:43] See Jane run after that. [laughs]

Murray Guest: [00:22:45] I love it. Yes.

Lisa Cummings: [00:22:47] Hey, I think it would be fun if we could do the last two minutes of this episode trying to kind of lighting round out some cheap or free things that we've seen people use to keep Strengths alive in an ongoing way. What do you think?

Murray Guest: [00:23:01] Yeah, great. Let's go.

Lisa Cummings: [00:23:02] How about you do one, I do one. You do one, I do one. We'll just go as fast as we can.

Murray Guest: [00:23:06] Fast as we can. Okay, let's do this. So I actually think one of the key things is Strengths report swapping. Here's just going, "Okay, here's mine, here's yours. And then catch up at the end of the week for a coffee. What did you think? What did you get to know about me? And let's chat."

Lisa Cummings: [00:23:21] Hmm, neat idea. How about virtual meet-ups for remote teams who don't get to see each other in person, once a quarter, totally dedicated to a Strengths chat for one hour, Brady Bunch style show in your camera?

Murray Guest: [00:23:33] Love it. And there are so many remote teams these days. It's a great one. Strengths stories in company newsletters. So it's powerful internally, but it's also powerful externally about how we're a Strengths-based culture, how we're embracing Strengths, and it doesn't just need to be about work. It can be about how I've seen this done around other cultural initiatives where people go, "Wow! That's absolutely something we're really living and breathing."

Lisa Cummings: [00:23:56] And then they start using metaphors like you do about mountain biking, how it's related to Strengths, yes.

Murray Guest: [00:24:00] Yes!

Lisa Cummings: [00:24:01] Let's say on-boarding someone new. Assign someone, a Strengths champion or a success coach, so somebody else who's already in the company feels accountable to help that person unleash their Strengths at the company.

Murray Guest: [00:24:16] Nice. Love it. Here's one that one of my clients did recently where they actually asked everyone in their team to send to a neutral person a song that they love and how it reflects one of their Strengths. Then, at their monthly team meeting, they had a playlist and they played the songs, and people had to guess whose song it was and what Strength it was related to. And they all had a dance in the meeting and then they just went through them quite quickly and had this huge energy.

Lisa Cummings: [00:24:45] Wow! This is going to be good. So now you're going to challenge me to end on something really fun like that because that would be awesome. Okay. A costume party, so this could be if the Halloween time is near, or a kickoff meeting, or something where people might have an occasion to dress up. So it would have to be an event, and you dress up representing one of your talents.

Murray Guest: [00:25:09] Love it. So what would you be dressed up as, Lisa?

Lisa Cummings: [00:25:12] Hmm, I think what just immediately comes to mind is probably like a big old giant full-body costume sunshine that would represent positivity talent. That's kind of the give-me obvious one. So I might get a little more cerebral and think of something more clever. How about you?

Murray Guest: [00:25:29] Responsibility comes to mind, it's like a foundation talent of who I am. How I dress up as Responsibility, I'm not too sure. Maybe goody-two-shoes school student or something doing the right thing, maybe something like that.

Lisa Cummings: [00:25:44] Goody-two-shoes. [laughs] So that would be so fun and you'd be trying to look at the other person and go, "Okay, I'm sort of getting this vibe. I don't know." Yeah, that would be a lot of fun if you had to mix and mingle where you could talk about that.

[00:25:58] Well, this is pretty cool. Man, there are so many more ideas, and I know that you have a Strengths toolkit that actually takes people through way more than just these tools and tactics but the whole process for working at a company level, how you would walk someone through embedding Strengths into your culture. Tell them where they can find your Strengths toolkit and where they can connect with you when they want to see more of your content.

Murray Guest: [00:26:24] Thanks, Lisa, and I loved chatting with you today. So, yeah, I've created a toolkit because I, like you, am passionate about people getting the most from any training or intervention and definitely about Strengths. That's been such a powerful thing in my life the last five years and continues to be every day. So if you go to StrengthsCultureToolkit.com there's a toolkit of resources you can get there which includes guidelines, templates, facilitator guides, activities, there's a conversation template, posters. And the idea is to have that toolkit of resources to help keep Strengths alive in those areas of culture we discussed earlier.

[00:27:03] If people want to connect with me, my business is InspireMyBusiness.com, and you can send me an email there or check me out on LinkedIn, and definitely I think that if we can all live an inspired life through our Strengths every day it's a very good place we live in.

Lisa Cummings: [00:27:18] Thanks, Murray. Man, you guys, Murray is the real deal. He's born to be a guest on the show because his last name is Guest. I mean, how perfect is that? So check out his toolkit. He really knows this stuff inside and out, and is so great on the consultancy side, and has done it. Now, I even get the deeper layer, seeing that you did it for the safety consultancy as well, so wow. Yeah, with that, you guys, go check out the Strengths toolkit.

[00:27:43] Also, if you want some Strengths-focused tools to use with your team at work in addition, check out LeadThroughStrengths.com/Resources. There are some other tools there to sustain Strengths – this is the freebie version – to help you with some easy conversation starters, because you're busy, and the big barriers are often like that, "I just don't know what to say. I don't know these one-on-one conversation starters."

[00:28:05] So with that, thanks everyone for listening to Lead Through Strengths. Remember, using your Strengths makes you a stronger performer at work. And if you're putting a lopsided focus on fixing your weaknesses, and fixing your team members' weaknesses, you're choosing the path of most resistance. So claim your talents and share them with the world