Review: Career strength in Gallup's numbers

"Now, Discover Your Strengths"
By Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
Free Press, 260 pages, January

In this story: Big data on the hoof Polls and practice RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Porter Anderson
CNN.com/Career Editor

(CNN) -- It's the title, isn't it?

Well, of course it is.

Like bad Sunday School literature. "Now, Discover Your Strengths." Dreadful. You'd never know this book not only has some smart perspective to give you but also has a cool interactive component you'll enjoy and learn from on the Internet.

QUICK VOTE
	If more companies were better than they are at seeing and capitalizing on employee strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton wouldn't be calling for a "revolution" in business. How easily could your company make the move to deploy its people's strengths? Give my company about a century and it could be at the forefront of the whole thing. It might be doable where I work -- I've seen signs that management would like to be more reactive to what skills we bring to the table. My corporation can do this. We're ready now for a new way to go at maximizing what we've got. View Results

Gallup Organization researchers Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton clearly deserve a better break on this follow-up to Buckingham's (with Curt Coffman) 1999 "First, Break All the Rules." That title was unforgivably glib, too, really. Who's coming up with these things?

Mercifully, Buckingham and Clifton's style is no more like these titles than their substance is. Instead of the fluffy sweetness-and-light nonsense you might think you're in for when you hear someone tell you to focus on your good side, you get some nicely clipped, clean verbiage -- the text is consistent, concise, convincing.

Here you go: "Most organizations are built on two flawed assumptions about people: (1) Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything. (2) Each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness. ... Most organizations take their employees' strengths for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses. They become expert in those areas where their employees struggle, delicately rename these 'skill gaps' or 'areas of opportunity,' then pack them off to training classes so the weaknesses can be fixed."

Sound familiar? In fact, maybe the one thing a lot of us might want to tell Buckingham and Clifton is that many companies out here aren't even using training classes to try to fix weaknesses -- the sink-or-swim method of non-training still rules many enormous corporate settings.

But Buckingham and Clifton are paddling in the right direction. This is their basic point: A lot of companies, especially large ones, use people like Radio City uses the Rockettes -- as interchangeable body parts. If those companies would check in and find out who they have on stage and what those people's special capabilities are, the suits could then deploy their workers with far more intelligent kick and effectiveness (and profit, yes, you CFOs) than they're managing now.

Have you ever felt your company didn't know what you could do best and didn't care? You were probably right. This book would like to work on that problem.

Big data on the hoof

We here at CNN can tell you that where there's Gallup, there's info. As far as the eye can see. We have a partnership arrangement with Gallup for polling and analytical information. You may have seen Frank Newport, editor-in-chief at Gallup, doing some keen polling reports on-air with us from his in-house TV set in Princeton, New Jersey. And you've no doubt seen Gallup data represented in countless stories here on CNN.com.

What Buckingham and Clifton had access to in writing this book is the answers of more than 1.7 million workers in 101 companies and 63 countries. Gallup asked all those people if they have the chance at work to do what they do best. Twenty percent, that's all, just 20 percent said yes.

Marcus Buckingham

Gallup data shows 84 percent of Americans asked believe we all can do anything. The authors, seriously wise guys that they are, beg to differ with that near-mass hallucination. And they're here to give you a way to pick out -- in career terms -- what your strengths are.

In 30 years, Gallup has queried more than 2 million people about their strengths. In an exhaustive, rolling analysis of the data crashing in from all these interviews, the authors have identified what they say are 34 patterns or "themes," the most prevalent "themes," they say, in human talent.

Such as: The achiever -- "a constant need for achievement"; the activator -- "impatient for action"; adaptability -- "you see the future as a place that you can create out of the choices that you make right now"; individualization -- "you are impatient with generalizations or 'types' because you don't want to obscure what is special and distinct about each person"; significance -- "in the truest sense of the word, you want to be recognized, you want to be heard, you want to be known and appreciated for the unique strengths you bring."

Coolest of all: Gallup is waiting for you to get onto the Net and find out what your top five of these 34 strengths are. When you buy the book, don't toss the dust cover. Inside it is a code. You use that at the Strengths Finder site and, without additional charge, you find yourself taking a 40-minute, 180-question test. It's fun in the way the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is. Either-or questions with answers that don't quite jibe, 20 seconds to answer each one -- you can stop along the way and pick it up later, too.

You come out with five "strengths" or "signature themes." The analysis of answers when we test-drove this quiz was almost instantaneous. We'd barely hit the last answer when strengths -- signature themes -- were being spelled out in detail.

A thread that runs through the book -- some will find it more useful than others -- is a kind of "you born today" play. Some celebrated success people are briefly analyzed in terms of some signature themes. Sam Mendes, for example, the director of the Oscar-busting "American Beauty," talks about having to make the way he talks to his various actors "suit their brain."

Polls and practice

But how to use this information? Clearly, Clifton and Buckingham can't fix the real problem for us. What we have to look for is some courage among these co-authors' readers and their employees. If management will get to Chapter Six, it will find a tidy discussion on "how to manage" each of the 34 strengths.

For example, let's say you have an employee who scores high in "connectedness." The authors advise: "This person will likely have social issues that she will defend strongly. Listen closely to know what these issues are. Your acceptance of these issues will influence the depth of relationship you can build with her." This is sanity, is it not?

Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D.

Here's a neat one: How to manage a person who scores high in "woo." The authors tell you, "Try to position this person in a role where she has a chance to meet new people every day. Strangers energize her. Place her at your organization's initial point of contact with the outside world."

And in a small section very near the end of the book -- after you've done the test, found your five signature themes and become healthily engaged in thinking about them -- Buckingham and Clifton offer some real wisdom.

The reason people are so frequently promoted to the wrong jobs and positions is that it's assumed all people want the prestige of advancement and praise (that's pretty right), but companies also assume (wrongly) that the the way everybody will feel prestige and advancement is through the same jobs.

"Many different kinds of prestige should be made available to reflect the many different near-perfect performances the organization wants to encourage," write Buckingham and Clifton.

Let's hear it for such smart thinking. And look around for the company operating on so enlightened a level as to pull off this sort of talent recognition and encouragement. May we all live to see this happen somewhere, some time.

Meanwhile, to the folks involved in producing this good book with the bad title "Now, Discover Your Strengths," one word of advice: Now, kill your publisher.

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The Gallup Organization
Strengths Finder site

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