Building on personal strengths to improve performance

IES has recently been working with one of our public sector clients to help improve performance across the organisation using a strengths-based approach. We have been supporting the development of strengths in organisations for some time now, building on research which suggests that developing the strengths of individuals leads to increased performance and improved productivity.¹

At IES, we work with the Strengths Partnership using their Strengthscope tool. Through use of this 360˚ profiling tool, individual awareness of strengths is built, along with greater understanding of how these strengths might be better employed and which performance risks to guard against.

Our recent work with this client has built on previous IES engagement with their management team, but this time repeating the exercise with front-line employees. We ran workshops offering participants the opportunity to explore the benefits of a strengths-based approach, co-coach one another on the results of the reports, and consider the strengths profile for the team. We also helped them to identify actions that would benefit both the organisation in terms of improved performance and team working and individuals in terms of their personal development and wellbeing.

The impact has been varied. On the positive side, staff are more aware of how they and colleagues can work at their best by playing to their strengths, and leave the workshops determined to look for opportunities to make this happen. They are also more aware of how they can work together to complement one another’s strengths and preferences; have a light touch way of challenging one another to keep on track with building on what’s going well; and put into practice the team and individual actions they identified at the workshops.

On the less positive side, workshops can get off to a sticky start if some individuals are suspicious of the motives for the initiative, unaware of previous work with managers, and unclear how this approach applies to them. Through unpicking what makes the difference in receptiveness, we have created some top tips for organisations in making strengths based interventions run smoothly:

• Be clear what the intervention is for. Understand why you are doing this and what you hope it will deliver.
• Get the basics right – make sure you brief external consultants on what is happening in the organisation that people could bring to the session. Decide who is going to do that – HR may not be best placed.
• Involve the consultants in promoting the sessions – make sure people understand why they are there and what the sessions are designed to do.
• In a climate of distrust, consider involving trade unions or employee representatives to help promote the sessions and dispel fears that this is part of redundancy selection or other negative processes.
• Think through how the event will contribute to your overall plan and how it will fit with other initiatives.
• Take an organisational approach, don’t just intervene in one work group without giving those around this group an introduction to the approach. Isolated interventions can suffer from a ‘managers don’t do that’ reaction.
• If you want to shift team behaviours, do the training/development in home teams.
• Think about involving managers in the workshop so they are not left out. If it is not an open culture, think about doing this as a next step.
• Think about follow-up – a great training day needs support to transfer to changed behaviour in the workplace.

Footnotes

¹ Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business unit- level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(2), 268-279; and Corporate Leadership Council (2005). Improving Talent Management Outcomes Research Paper