Workers in China focus on performance, which means they focus on their strengths not their weaknesses.  There, according to Marcus Buckingham’s research, 73 % of workers focus on their strengths, and 27% focus play to their weaknesses compared with the United States where only 14% spend most of their day focusing on their strengths.  We need to build our jobs to fit our strengths.

In the U.S. we believe our strengths are what we are good at, except we may be good at it and we hate it!  We CAN do it, but it drains us.  A weakness is an activity that weakens you.  A strength strengthens you. The assignment from Marcus for the audience was to take a pad of paper, draw a line down the middle, and over the course of the day note what you’re doing and also whether you loved doing it or loathed doing it.

Marcus points to 4 clear signs of strengths:

1.  Success – you feel effective
2.  Instinct – you look forward to it — you like doing it
3. Growth – your synapses are firing, you are in the flow, inquisitive and focused
4.  Needs how do I feel after I have done it?  Did it fill a need I have?

At end of the week, pick one activity that you loved and write a strengths statement that is specific and general at the same time.  In his funny way of sharing a story, Marcus told of when he was interviewing Rosa.  He picked the verb “interviewing.”  Drill down to the specifics of what you really liked about that.   Marcus got specific around interviewing.  “I only like to talk to you if you are really good at your job.  I want to explore why you excel.”  That is specificity around the verb “interviewing.”

End up with 3 strengths statements, and do it twice a year.  Do the same self-evaluation for what you loathe.

Now, as a manager, what about the people you manage? How will you discover your peoples’ strengths, and help them play to those strengths?

Furthermore, what is your strategy to manage drainers — activities that need to be done and you loathe doing it?  Here are some choices.
1. Stop doing it
2. Team up with others who are strengthened by it
3. Offer up your strengths until it is what you do all day
4. Perceive the need, then use a strength to neutralize your weakness
5.  Suck it up and do it

First be honest about what weakens you.  Move your job so the best of your job becomes most of your job.

Responsibility of  a Leader

The job of a leader is to lead people to a better future.  A leader needs optimism.  If you are not motivated that way, you are a pessimist.  How to get agreement from those you are leading is by providing CLARITY, so that people can taste the milk and smell the honey.  There is a vividness about the future, and it is painted in a way that we can see ourselves in that future.

A leader needs to know:

1.  Who do we serve?  Exactly who, not something vague.  Giuliani focused on reducing crime as his focus.   Make a choice, be vivid.
2. What is our core strength, edge, then paint it vividly. Not something vague like “our people are our core strength.”  It’s too vague.  IPhone’s core strength is not partnering!  They have other core strengths, that’s not one of them.

3. Tell me the one score we are going to use.   The Balanced Scorecard is good for management, lousy for leadership.  Marcus gave a prison example where the leader said, “We serve the prisoner.”  Whether right or wrong, he was clear.   What measure?  The recidivism rate is the measure of success — if successful in creating that future, they will keep prisoners from coming back.
4. What action can we take today??   Giuliani, as an example of a leader, cleaned up New York City and his measures were to remove graffiti and have cab drivers wear collared shirts.
In his keynote, Marcus kept coming back to fears, saying that real leaders create momentum when they measure specific actions because specific actions calm our fears.  That is brilliant.   What stops us from focusing on our strengths is our fear that our weaknesses will damage us.  If we are following a capable leader into the future that is vividly expressed with one or two clear measures of success, we can then move confidently forward.  If our managers are focusing on our strengths with us, we can then enjoy our work and make our greatest contribution.

The appeal — to the American audience, not the Chinese one — was to up the ante on our game.  Get clear about our strengths and use them in service of a clear and vivid future.

I had the pleasure of introducing Dave Logan as the opening keynote presenter for the Association for Strategic Planning annual conference in Pasadena yesterday.

Dave is a USC faculty member, best-selling author, and management consultant. At USC, he teaches in the Executive MBA, Master of Medical Management and Executive Education.  As co-founder and senior partner at CultureSync, a management consulting firm, Dave works with Fortune 500 companies, governments, and non-profit organizations.   He’s written four books, including Tribal Leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Communication from the Annenberg School at USC.

Although not an alumni of the Marshall School myself (I have a University of San Diego MBA), I first met Dave at a USC MBA Alumni gathering in San Diego several years ago, when his book Tribal Leadership was in pre-publication format.  Tribal Leadership is about leveraging natural groups to build a thriving organization.  Rather than TALK about the 5 stages of an organization’s culture, he DEMONSTRATED the five stages by assigning roles to 5 random individuals from the audience.

Dave was so effective at communicating the essence of Tribal Leadership that I immediately vetted him as a speaker for Vistage, where I was a chair at the time, and engaged him to speak to my CEO group about Tribal Leadership.  Again, Dave was interactive and inventive.  Using polling technology, he asked my CEO clients where they thought we were as a group within the five stages of Tribal Leadership.   The good news for me was, they gave the group very high marks.  Even more importantly, and to Dave’s credit, they were so committed to practicing Tribal Leadership distinctions in their organizations that they requested Dave return, which he did six months later.

I then garnered for myself a front row seat for the unveiling of Dave’s next book at the opening presentation of Landmark Education’s Conference on Global Leadership.   Called Three Laws of Performance, Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life, this book was an overnight best-seller.  I highly recommend that you pick it up if you want to read about deep, sustaining transformation in several highlighted organizations.  This book was co-authored with Steve Zaffron.

I could not think of a more dynamic way to begin our conference on strategic planning, with the theme of positioning for long-term success in a short-term world, than to hear Dave’s original thinking.  For me personally, he brings a focus to the BEING aspect of what we are DOING so that we can HAVE the results we seek. Dave embodies an extraordinary way of BEING engaging with content that is fresh, and rich, and delivering it so that the message sticks.

Dave left us with an immediate take-away, a model for devising an interim strategy, which I have pictured here, and which he invites you to use freely (open source)!  Best done as three separate questions in a group setting (for challenging your assumptions), it favors immediate results and in these trying times, who doesn’t want that?  If you have questions or if you want the PDF version please feel free to contact me.  If you find this useful, just please tell me how you used it, and what it did for you — I’ll tell Dave too!  He and I would like to know.

I recently had a fast-paced hour-long conversation with Robert Porter Lynch, author, teacher, speaker, champion of increasing the experience of trusting leaders.  He observed that if trust in our leaders isn’t repaired in the United States, we as a nation are threatened to our very core.   Here are the LynchPrinciples — please download the PDF file.

Robert is writing a book on trust and leadership — he is Building a System of Trust.  He spends his life on airplanes in academic and business contexts, talking about what causes trust, conversely what causes distrust, and the impacts on business and life.

I then attended a conference on social media where I learned a term, “crowd sourcing,” revolving around our need to go to our friends for advice, people, resources because authority as we have known it cannot be trusted.

Decisions are made based on assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions prove false.  Consider these recent, faulty assumptions.   Real estate values always go up.  Financial institutions hold your money safely while you don’t need it. Retirement funds are managed to out-maneuver real risks.

These  eight principles of collaborative trust from Robert’s book that is coming out in the fall of 2010 provides reminders of what is important.  We are all leaders of our own lives, and we could choose not only to embrace them, but speak about them, remind others about them — in other words, Share them!  Encourage them!

This is me April 09, talking about a poster that I created to represent my stand for the world that leaders (and we are ALL leaders in our lives) lead in such a way that trust is present.

Larry and I each presented a poster at the Conference for Global Transformation which is a part of the Power and Contribution capstone course in Landmark Education’s Wisdom division.  At the final of five weekends, graduates are invited back to share what they have generated in results for the world that makes a difference in areas where they are committed to making a difference.

Personally, I am committed to the conversation about leadership, learning more about what makes a leader tick, and particularly I am interested in where leaders get their guidance.  It is my business, coaching leaders, and I know how few are really interested in being open and vulnerable, in looking deeply, in being with the impact their decisions have on the satisfaction, the expression, the experience of others.

What questions should we be asking ourselves, what skills should we be developing, where are we hiding that we should come out of hiding?  I am busy, busy, busy too.  But what for???

If you want to engage in a dialog with me, please do!  I’m moving at the speed of sludge into the social media world, and I am moving.  I’ll engage with you there.  I am also creating a research project around this topic, if you have expertise or thoughts, let me know.