The Universality of Strengths

We all know what the Suck Zone feels like: tiring, draining, wearing–sucking the life away!  When you’re in the Suck Zone, you are disengaged, procrastinating, and you find yourself plodding methodically, and sometimes mindlessly, through tasks that don’t interest you.  You don’t feel particularly eager to work with others, and your energy and creativity are about as good as if you had just come out of a high carbohydrate lunch at Pizza Hut.  Your brain is in a fog, and you know that you most definitely wish you could escape! No one wants to be there, yet it seems that many of us have simply resigned ourselves to living and working a majority of the time from this place. 

But what if we didn’t have to stay there?  What if there was a way out?

The good news is that there is—and the answers are surprisingly simple.   In order to move out of the Suck Zone, we have to pause and recognize what the Suck Zone is and what a better alternative might be.  When we consider our day-to-day activities, they are going to fall into one of four quadrants:  high performance/high energy (Strengths), high performance/low energy (Competence), low performance/low energy (Weakness), and high energy/low performance (Affinity).  Ironically, our Suck Zone typically includes the area that falls outside of the Strengths Zone, simply because there is frustration and negative experience/energy that is attached there.  Even when energy is high and performance is low, there can still be eventual Suck Zone-related emotions because the failure rate tends to be fairly high when performance continues to be low.

Once we recognize what the Suck Zone is, it is easier to contemplate a way out.  It implies moving the needle on two things:  first, performance, and second, the amount of energy that is found in an activity.

Moving the needle on performance and energy has most often been seen as simply adding knowledge and skill.  Companies have been doing this for years—sending low performers off to experience training and hope that it does the trick, believing that if individuals know more, they will perform better and be more excited about the activity.  Sometimes, there is incremental progress, but that alone, has not been sufficient to create the leap from Suck Zone to Strengths Zone.

But what if we tried something different?  What if we really understood the strengths of the individual and could help them make a connection between their natural and innate brilliance and the very activity that feels a little like a Suck Zone activity? 

One leader whom I coached for a while, was one of the most strategic and innovative systems thinkers in her entire organization, and had a reputation for driving results.  Yet she had an enormous aversion to one-on-one individual conversations with her direct reports.  She saw those conversations as belonging deep in her Suck Zone.  When she did talk with her direct reports, it was typically telling them what she wanted them to do next, rather than really engaging them, discovering them, and empowering them to perform from their brilliance.  It should be no surprise that her direct reports did not feel valued and were intimidated by her dominant and driven personality.

As she experienced Discovery and one-on-one coaching, she began to recognize the need for a shift.  She knew that connecting with others in a personal and meaningful way had to find its way out of her Suck Zone if she ever hoped to create a lasting leadership legacy.  Two things happened which helped her make the shift:  first, she began to get really clear on the kind of leader she wanted to be.  Seeing the impact she wanted to have helped her to find meaning in what was previously a low energy activity for her.  When she connected the activity of one-on-one individual conversations with the vision she had for herself as a leader, her aversion to those conversations began to shift.

The second thing that happened was transferring the success she had in using her strengths to create successful systems transformation to creating individual transformation.  She was exceptional at asking strategic questions, and getting intensely curious about how and why things worked the way they did.  When she brought those strengths to individual conversations, everything began to shift.

She saw her direct reports differently.  She began to empower them.  She listened more and made less demands.  She strategically asked questions and got curious about her people, and they began to feel seen and heard.  Within the first quarter, productivity rose by 25% on her team.  Why?  She had simply learned to move Suck Zone to Strength Zone by applying her natural strengths to an area which had previously been a detested activity for her. 

Applying strengths—such a simply (but powerful!) concept.

Have you ever considered how powerful your paradigms are–the way you SEE the world?  They are a significant predictor of great results!  What happens when you SEE this:  “I am not good enough, I don’t compare well with others”?  What do you then DO?  Your behavior is hesitant. You are reluctant to step into offering solutions, for fear of being seen as less-than.  Consider what you GET as a result.  You might feel unconfident, unsure of yourself.  Your communication is guarded, which impacts your ability to collaborate well with others.  The end result is frustration for you and a poor outcome for your team.  You SEE yourself as small.  You DO things that reflect your small thinking–and you GET small results.  In the Strengths Strategy world, we call this the Deficit Thinking Model.

What if you could turn that around?  Imagine you could SEE this:  “I have a valuable, unique contribution to make that is very different from others–as does each person on my team.” You recognize that differences do NOT make you, or others, less-than–in fact, they are what make each person so valuable!  What might you DO if this were your belief?  You would listen deeply to your team, as well as to yourself, and creatively offer solutions. You would hear others’ ideas, and hold them to be as equally valuable as yours. Consider, then, what you might GET, if you operated from this Strengths Perspective Model.  Can you imagine the difference in confidence, communication, teamwork, energy, and solutions here?  The results would be remarkable!

What you SEE (your beliefs/ideas), drive what you DO, which in turn, determines the results you GET. [1] What do you SEE?  You’ll know the degree to which you are living from the Strengths Perspective Model by how you answer this:  Do you get to do what you do best every single day?

What is your answer?  You need to know!  Your results depend on it.

The greatest evidence in the world of the value of living from strengths lies within your own experience.  You can read countless journal articles which report how strengths use positively impacts employee engagement, productivity, and performance, or decreases absenteeism or turnover, but in the end, it simply boils down to what has been true for you.

So, pause for a moment.  Think of a time when you were playing to your strengths and you could feel the sense of flow and energy that came for you as you did.  When was it?  What were you doing at the time? What results did you/others get?

I’ve asked those questions to hundreds of individuals over the past ten years, and every single time the same answers come up.  Individuals reported finding a heightened sense of confidence, energy, and enjoyment.  They felt more alive, and more connected to themselves and others.  Their performance was exceptional and seemed to come with less effort, even if they were working hard.  They reached their goals and felt affirmed, valued, and needed.  In addition, they found that communication with others seemed easier and clearer.  There was a deeper sense of camaraderie, belonging, and ownership of team goals.  In a word, they described that time as “success.”

Let’s consider for a moment:  can success—real success—come in the absence of strengths use?  Is it possible to effectively achieve individual or team goals by playing to weaknesses?  Will we get where we really want to be if the foundation is one of weakness, rather than strength?  It’s quite possible that the answer to all of those questions is a resounding “no.”

If you are a strengths skeptic, answer the questions for yourself:  When were you using your strengths? What were you doing? What results did you/others get during that time? Tell your story to someone and take note of what happened.  Pay very close attention to the results that came to you during that time and notice that it was not an accident.  You were doing something brilliant that got you great results.  Just notice that your brilliance was coming from your strength, not very likely from weakness.

If you were brilliant once, and got amazing results by accidentally stumbling into your strengths, imagine how much more brilliant you could be if you really understood your strengths and could bring them with intention?  You could be brilliant again, and again, and again, as you build your capacity to do something better than 10,000 other people, as Gallup suggests.  Just turn on your strengths, and look out!  Success—here you come!