making the connection: engagement, evangelism and experience management
Over the years, I’ve regularly posted on three related topics:
All three distill down to a core element of mutually-beneficial relationships. Regardless of the nature of the relationship -- co-workers; employer-employee; leader-team member; or service provider-client – this mutuality derives from identifying, openly acknowledging and acting on our own, and one another’s, needs, interests and strengths.
Over at her excellent blog, Management Craft, Lisa Haneberg points us to her recent fireside chat (a/k/a podcast) with speaker and best-selling author Marcus Buckingham. As I’ve noted before, Buckingham is an authority on how people can play to their strengths in the workplace. In this podcast, he “shares several stories and suggestions that can help everyone enjoy their work more fully while benefiting the organization in a deeper way.”
As I listened to it, what stood out for me was Buckingham’s finding that, today, less than 2 out of 10 Americans believe they employ their strengths in the workplace most of the time. This is despite the popular company refrain that “our people are our greatest asset.”
Buckingham proposes a solution. He says that it all boils down to you and me (that is, the onus is not on the organization or its leaders). We are the experts on our own strengths and weaknesses. Strengths are activities that invigorate us and weaknesses are activities that deplete us. According to Buckingham -- and it makes total sense -- we can be really good at lots of different activities; but we need to be honest about how they make us feel before declaring them strengths.
So, if we want to work in strengths-based businesses, teams and relationships; each of us needs to discover our strengths and then see if and how we can engage them through our work. Buckingham has a new book coming out in March that will help us identify or strengths and put them to work.
