Profit from Positivity - Part 1

People who have the chance to do what they do best – to be in their strength zone – are more likely to be engaged in their job then those who don’t.

When you’re NOT in the strength zone you’re 6 times LESS likely to be engaged in your job – you are more likely to dread going to work, you are more likely to have negative attitudes and interactions, you’re more likely to treat the customer poorly and have few, if any, creative moments.

That makes sense – when people have the chance to do what they do best – they FEEL good about where they are and what they are doing. Sadly – when asked the question “What percentage of a typical day do you get to play to your strengths?” the average answer is 14%.

Many managers, stuck in old deficit based thinking, are much better at noticing and focusing on what employees are doing wrong – then on where their strengths are and how to build them. In a study done by Marcus Buckingham – author of four books on the topic, the question was asked: When you talk to your manager about performance, what do you talk about? 36% said weaknesses, 24% said strengths and 40% said “we don’t talk about these things at all.” That says a lot about why we see the behaviors we see in some companies.

We all know we get more of what we focus on. Focus on weaknesses – they expand. Focus on strengths, they do too. When leaders emphasize weakness performance decreases 26.8%. When a leader supports, praises, acknowledges and develops strengths, performance increases by 36.4%. That’s a hefty point spread, I’m going to bet on the leaders that encourage strengths!

There are many good levers for engaging performance – by far the master lever for engaging employees and increasing performance is to help people discover and play to their strengths. Focusing on an employee’s strengths gives them confidence, self-assurance and increases their well-being. Positive psychologists have discovered – and verified scientifically – when people identify their strengths and focus on improving even one of them a week, over time their level of happiness goes up. It seems the more time people get to spend doing what they do well, the more likely they are to perform in ways that increase your profitability.

Ongoing surveys by Career Systems Int’l say that almost half (48.4%) of their respondents claim that “exciting work and challenge” top the list of reasons for staying on the job. Second on the list is “career growth, learning and development.”

People today are on the move, they don’t want a job they can have forever, they want a job that stretches them, a job that expands them and that helps them move to the next level. Strengths-based doesn’t mean ignoring weaknesses – it means identifying and using strengths to improve in all areas.

When our strengths meet our challenges at the far end of our comfort zones we go into a positive state called flow. When in that state, we’re highly productive. The “flow” state is where we lose track of time and get into the “zone.”
As we help employees make their comfort zones larger in this way, they become more and more capable, more and more competent and create more and more value for us in the marketplace.

Take time to help your employees’ career path, ask them about their dreams and aspirations. In companies where there are limited opportunities for advancement up the ladder, look for places for learning, places where people can use their skills and strengths on projects that have heart and meaning to them.

Everybody’s stressed – nobody has time – everybody’s inbox is full. We’re multitasking so much that we are becoming ineffective. Accuracy rates are going down and stress related illness going up.

We try managing our time but TIME is really not the issue. Energy is. Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. When we work from our strengths we create more energy, when we work from our weaknesses we deplete energy.

Every thought, feeling, activity, or behavior has an energy cost. All day long there are energy gains and energy drains. Becoming more aware of where our energy is going, and when it’s spent frivolously will help us manage it.
Tal Ben Shahar, who taught Happiness and Psychology of Leadership at Harvard, believes that while most of us are capable of some level of multitasking, today most people are required to go beyond their optimum limit.

Tal suggests that we need rituals – he calls them “restorative niches” – throughout the day where people can work on a single project for an hour. He recommends small bits of time where people can relax, renew, rejuvenate before taking on the next thing. He, and other experts say we need recovery time. It’s perfectly okay to have the stress on the system – as long as we build in the recovery time as well. Build rituals – a 15 minute walk at lunchtime, a place where people can go and meditate, nap times, a quiet cup of tea are all things we can do to restore energy.

Research shows that if you are working on a project that requires focus and you have your email client on in the background your IQ level drops by ten points – that’s the same amount it would drop if you had been up all night and hadn’t slept. For comparisons sake – Your IQ would only drop 4 points if you were smoking marijuana. Now there’s something to think about! We can’t actually live without stress, but it’s important to differentiate between good stress (eustress) and bad stress (distress). Often a leader has an opportunity to shift the teams focus by contexting the current stress into an exciting, worthwhile and meaningful situation. Positive Leaders are “Meaning-Makers”.

Well, that’s Part 1…