Leading With Strengths

“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong…And yet, a person can only perform from their strength.” 

– Business guru Peter Drucker 

The most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people. The right people have the right mix of skills, experience, and strengths to make the team better. 

Most of the time leaders are promoted because of their skills in the job they are doing right now. The best salesperson becomes the chief sales manager. The brightest IT person becomes the CIO and the top financial person becomes the CFO. 

This often results in something commonly referred to as “The Peter Principle.” The Peter Principles refers to the tendency for employees to rise through the hierarchy until they reach a level of incompetence in their current role. 

Take for example our star salesperson. They are amazing at sales and they can sell to anyone, but they are terrible at managing people. They don’t have a natural talent for managing people. They try really hard to get better at managing people but get frustrated because it is not a gifting. Our star salesperson fails or quits out of frustration because success in their roles requires getting the most out of the entire sales team. The organization loses a very talented salesperson and the process starts over again. 

What if instead of only raising up stars in the respective areas, leaders were chosen based on a combination of their technical skills and strengths? 

Gallup has found that the highest performing teams have a representation of strengths in each of the four leadership domains. Those domains are Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. Rember our equation that started this whole thing. 

TALENT x INVESTMENT = STRENGTH

Our star salesperson can become competent at managing, but they will never be as good as they could be if they focused more of their investments on their natural strength of selling. 

When senior leadership knows and openly discusses the strengths of their people, they can create teams with representatives from each of the four domains. These teams will perform better because the team can lift each other up with their mix of talents.

Let’s look at my strengths as an example. Six of my top ten strengths fall in the Strategic Thinking domain, three in Executing, one in Relationship Building and zero in Influencing. 

I was offended! Zero in influencing? Anyways, if you want to build a successful team with me in it, we’ll need to bring on some team members with strengths in influencing and relationship building. If you add those skills to mine, our team will have much higher odds of success because our team will have capabilities in all four of the necessary domains of leadership. 

Here are the strengths by domain:

Executing

Achiever, Arranger, Belief, Consistency, Deliberative, Discipline, Focus, Responsibility, and Restorative. 

Influencing

Activator, Command, Communication, Competition, Maximizer, Self-Assurance, Significance, and Woo. 

Relationship Building

Adaptability, Connectedness, Developer, Empathy, Harmony, Includer, Individualization, Positivity, and Relator. 

Strategic Thinking

Analytical, Context, Futuristic, Ideation, Input, Intellection, Learner, and Strategic. 

We can always achieve more with a great team than we can on our own. Knowing and fully understanding your strengths is the first step. Once you know your strengths, you know the strengths you need to add to your team to accelerate your impact.  The second step is to understand the strengths of those you work with. Then you can build great teams that will drive outstanding outcomes for your organization.

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