Improve your strengths to achieve success

Companies have to increase the performance and productivity taking advantage of the strengths of employees. To do that the senior management has to talk more with the employees, listen and devote more time to them. If we want to have innovation, productivity and the commitment of the employees, the leadership has to talk with the teams because if they are too busy to do it, they no longer can be considered leaders.

In my opinion we have to focus on the areas of strength and not in the weaknesses, as lot of companies do, because there are no opportunities. A proposal would be to do weekly performance reviews instead of the typical ones done on an annual basis using simple questions and on real time.

Before starting to know our natural strengths we have to bear in mind that the strength is not something we do better but something that strengthens us, in other words, it is an activity that gets you stronger.

Based on the above we should ask ourselves as follows:

·         What task or function makes me feel better?

·         What really attracts me, what I like to do the most?

·         Do you feel happy, full of strength after doing this performance?

With the above questions we could pull out our comparative advantages with regard to other persons and therefore we could strengthen them.

There are a lot of companies that base their policies in overcoming the weaknesses. However, in my opinion, the view should be a little bit different: a person will learn and grow more in those areas where he/she is already strong.

Nowadays is typical to ask the employee if he/she is focused on the customer, which actually has no sense. This question should be posed directly to the customer. Therefore this information is not useful.

The real change will be to convince the companies that all assessments have to be done at local level not at corporate level which is the most common approach. The new technologies will allow the companies to know individually every member of the team much better and quicker. This information will make possible to connect, develop, train and place every single employee in the role where he/she is stronger and this will also become in more productive and committed teams.

As a summary, if the companies want to achieve more success they should know deeper the talent of their employees to increase efficiency and productivity because it is commonly known that you grow more where you are stronger. The message, therefore, is the team leads have to know very well the members of their teams to place them in the role more suitable to their strengths.