I totally agree with Marcus B’s views and have used and recommended his ‘works’ extensively.

I’ve had the privilege of seeing Marcus Buckingham in action. His presentation style is confident and captivating. He believes in three ‘truths’ that blow away the three ‘myths’ of Management and personal performance.

Myth 1 – Personality changes over time – Marcus says this is not true.

The truth is that as you grow you become more of who you are.

The lesson from this is that a business can’t change people’s character and shouldn’t attempt to do so. People are what they are.

Myth 2 – The best way to improve is to focus on your weaknesses.

Also not true according to Marcus. He says the truth is that you will
always grow most in your areas of strengths.

An interesting discovery for me about this, is that Marcus has found through research that in performance and behaviour, the opposite of BAD isn’t GOOD – it’s NOT BAD. But NOT BAD looks nothing like GOOD. So you don’t learn how to be good by studying what bad is and doing the opposite; you do it by studying what good is and doing more of it.
This means that most of us must have got it wrong many times. As individuals we spend far too much time worrying about what we do poorly and nowhere near enough time concentrating on what we do well and as leaders we focus too much on ‘where you need to improve’ and too little on ‘what you’re great at’. So why not try a change of focus, say for just six months and see if an intense focus on strengths, in you and your colleagues, will make the dramatic difference that Marcus is convinced it will?

Myth 3 – In a team you should suppress your personal strengths to focus on team strengths.

Marcus insists this also is not true. The truth is that you will contribute most to a team when you offer up your strengths.

We’ve all heard the saying ‘There is no I in TEAM’. That may be true but Marcus quoted Michael Jordan who responded to that statement with, ‘Yes, but there is an I in WIN!’.

The point is that individuals’ best serve a team, not by suppressing their strengths but by exaggerating them. The key therefore is to select team members that have different but complimentary strengths, so that synergy and high performance will result.

Andrew
http://www.acceleratedmanagementsystem.co.uk/

For the next 5 weeks on Mondays at http://www.davidzinger.com I am systematically going through the top 5 strengths from the StrenghtsFinder 2.0 inventory. I will help guide people through a 5 weeks strength training using my top 5 strengths as a sample to guide people through their own

I hope this was helpfu.

David