This short essay below is written by me after my reading of the book title “Go Put Your Strength To Work” by Marcus Buckingham. I’ve added some of the references from other journals that I’ve read to support my thoughts here. I recommended this book for reading as it have opened up my perspective of a few things that we might overlooked all this while. – Ridhzuan Harun
The degree and quality of the leadership provided by managers are key ingredients in the success of industry and commerce; management status and management salaries reflect this. Yet, in practice, the development of these crucial managerial and leadership skills is frequently left to chance as if they could be acquired in the course of ordinary office and work experience, or at school, or in the home. But these skills require training. A person who did not have experience to drive vehicle can’t be employed into position as a driver. Hence, too many organizations still refuse to accept the idea that managers should be trained to manage and that leaders should be trained to lead. In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising if the workforce lacks motivation. Of course, some people are born leaders and need little instruction. These people have well managed skills in self development and management development by going through life experiences or how they were raised by their parents. To support these fact, Buckingham (2007) explain 3 different myth & truth that stopping people to identify which thoughts that holding back every decision in life.
The 3 myths and truth are:
1. Myth – ‘As you grow, your personality changes.’ / Truth – ‘As you grow, you become more of who you already are.’
The first myth and truth are supported by personality test (Buckingham, 2006). The results of personality test of identical twins when raised apart even when they are not raised in the same family, cultures or countries. The shocking finding is that even these twins never meet each other; believe it or not, they both still have similar personalities. As time flies they will become more of who they really are. As Reissner (2010) mentioned how organisational change affects personal identities, these findings about 3 myths and truth from Buckingham (2006) may conclude that why certain self development and management development will fail if the organisational development is poorly planned and conducted by the organisation itself. Certain traits from the individuals may not match with changes from the organisation because not two people are the same although they are in the same team or department or division and it requires strong leadership to tackle matters. Instead, O’Regan et al., (2010) claimed that leadership is defined as getting the best out of people with moving people into situation that they will be most likely successful and ‘success then builds on itself as people feel proud of what the organisation does’. Leadership is not the process of accomplishing great things by the leaders, while gaining the respect of people. It is rather the process of accomplishing great things through employees, thereby raising their self-respect. Leadership also involves more than simply overseeing or directing others. It involves developing employees’ skills through delegation. Hence, an organisational development should take point of having leaders who excel in their own self development and management development first before move to organisational development plan.
2. Myth – ‘You will grow the most in your areas of greatest weakness.’ / Truth – ‘You will grow the most in your areas of greatest strength.’
A leader must identify an employee’s special abilities and make use of them. Hence, a leader must also identify the weak areas and limitations of employees and be willing to help strengthen them. Management development of emphasizing a priority on developing certain skills and abilities of the manager while ignoring the needs employees are not usually effective approaches. When leaders consider themselves superiors in respect to attitude, it will affect employees to manage their self development. Leaders should acknowledge the fact that if employees are not naturally a person who eager to learn or upgrade themselves, Buckingham (2006) explains that a person will be the most inquisitive in their areas of strength and the most optimistic, most courageous, and most ambitious when playing to an area of strength. Buckingham findings about biology creation of improving existing connection of the brain that already making progress rather than taking defence steps of plotting escape routes to mistakes that comes from weakness. In organisational development, this helps as to important part of an appraisal schemes in assessing the future potential of the people involved. Ideally, this should be done by linking the information obtained such as personality traits, experiences, knowledge or others to a succession plan. Knowledge of past and current performance can be used in an attempt to predict future performances. The accuracy of such forecast can never be certain to a large extent will be governed by the amount of evidence available concerning any particular individual but someone who has consistently achieved targets is obviously a better than someone who has not.
3. Myth – ‘A good team member does whatever it takes to help the team.’ / Truth – ‘A good team member deliberately volunteers his strengths to the team most of the time.’
Teamwork is defined as entity itself. A leader must ready to respond to the team by understand that a team as a whole, has its own needs. Problems like over identifying the team by the leaders to speak on behalf of the team with its voice occurred by lack of communication of among the team members. This is because team members doesn’t have a knowledge about each other’s strength and how to figure out to arrange their time and their role so that they play to these strengths most of the time (Buckingham 2006). A vital activity for the leaders is regularly to identify what will make satisfaction from personal achievement in the job that their employee is doing. Employees who have genuine control over aspects of job that they are responsible and feel that they are making a worthwhile contribution to the objectives of the team and organisation is considered a person who is making the best of their strength at work. In summary, this concludes that a good organisational development is composed of team members within organisation that plan and exercise self development and management development of their people who play to their individual strengths, and teams that are assembled from people with different strengths.
Ref:
Buckingham, M. 2007. Go put your strengths to work. New York: Free Press.
O’Regan, N. and Ghobadian, A. 2010. ‘A serial successful strategic transformer of businesses: An interview with Anthony Habgood, Chairman of Whitbread plc, Reed Elsevier plc and former CEO and Chairman, Bunzl plc’, Journal of Strategy and Management, Vol. 3, No 1, pp.72 – 78.
Reissner, S. 2010. ‘Change, meaning and identity at the workplace’, Journal of Organisational Change Management, Vol. 23, No 3, pp.287-299
