“Oh but my darling, what if you
fly…”
A friend of mine sent me this
quote, admitted it is a bit of a fluffy one. On Facebook, I get bombarded with
similar quotes that are all designed to lighten up my day. This one however
stuck to my mind.
We
all know the story about Icarus. He made wings to make him fly. When he came
too close to the sun, his wings burned. From childhood on, we learn not to be
overly ambitious, not to set goals that seem impossible to reach. We continue
this way of thinking in our professional lives. Feedback during performance
reviews is often focusing on areas of improvement rather than on achievements
where you used your strengths to excel.
Focusing on strengths is becoming
more and more an acceptable leadership style. Rath & Conchie wrote a book, Strengths
Based Leadership, where academic research shows that to
the extent we can use our
strengths, people are six times more likely to be “engaged” in their jobs and
more than three times more likely to declare they have an excellent quality of
life in general.
Applying this strengths based
leadership style requires a different way of thinking, a different way of
hiring, coaching and assigning people to positions.
It all starts by knowing and
acknowledging what your own strengths are. Strengths define who you are, they
make unique. Often we are not aware of the innate talents that we have that can
be developed into strengths.
Once you know your own strengths,
you need to have the courage to surround you with people who complete these
strengths. Rath & Conchie identified 4 domains of leadership strengths:
executing, relationship building, strategic thinking and influencing. Any
effective team should consist at least one person of each domain.
When it comes down to people
management, you need to understand the strengths of people reporting into you
and place them in the appropriate roles. This takes listening to people and
empowering them to invest in their strengths. But it also requires thorough
understanding of the business and the markets to know how to match employee’s strengths
with specific projects and goals.
These three guidelines should allow
you to make people fly without having their wings burnt. I’ll start by giving
the good example, I promise never to ask you during interviews what your
weakness are J.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Isabel
Through a personalized and
tailor-made approach, Ingenium Executive Search aspires to assist you in
attracting the right talent that matches the DNA of your company
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