BOOK REVIEW: Now Discover Your Strengths

A co-worker gave me the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton.  It is a business book rather than real estate, but I think it is relevant.

The book comes with a passcode to take a test to find your top 5 strengths. It presents you with a series of paired statements and you have to quickly choose the one that rings most true for you. I had already found and taken the Gallup test, and have found the information to not be very surprising, but to be helpful to articulate my strong points to others.

There are thirty four strength themes. The book explains each in detail, which is useful for understanding yourself and those around you better.

The book points out that most organizations are built on two flawed assumptions: that each person can learn to be competent at almost anything, and that each persons greatest room to grow is in their area of greatest weakness. Organizations don't spend enough energy on hiring the right people, and spend too much time trying to train people to overcome their gaps.

Success for an organization and an individual comes in discovering strengths and organizing around being able to apply those strengths. Let people do what they are good at. Don't strive to be well rounded. Learn to manage around the weaknesses to free up time and energy to focus on the strengths.

Strength is defined as consistent near perfect performance in an activity. Talent is defined as any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. Ability, or natural talent, can be a strength only if the person can envision themselves doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully. Talents are different from knowledge (facts and lessons learned) and skills (steps of an activity to help us perform). Skills determine if we can do something, talents reveal how well and how often we will do it. Without underlying talent, training won't create a strength.

We need to be self-aware enough to recognize and cultivate our natural talents into strengths. The book states that delusion plus denial is a lethal combination, which I find both hilarious and profound.

People seems a bit mysterious to us because we have different strengths. What comes completely natural to some is a huge struggle for others. If weaknesses interfere with strengths, we need to develop strategies to manager around them. This helps us prevent failure, but will not help us chase excellence. Nontalents can often be ignored, but they become weaknesses when we find ourselves in a role that requires us to play to one of our nontalents. Strategies include getting better at the weakness, designing a support system, using our strongest themes to overwhelm weaknesses, finding a partner, or just stop doing it. Build a life around the strengths, manage the weaknesses so they don't get in the way of that.

Everyone is confronted with thousands of small decisions each day, and how we react drives our performance. Our strengths drive our decisions.

Managers must take the time to identify the distinct talents of their staff. Individualizing your management style is more time-consuming than treating all employees the same, but it has much bigger benefits. The book devotes a chapter to how to manage the different strength themes. Help employees to grow their career, but be mindful about promoting them out of their strength area.  This section makes me think of recent hiring discussions on the BP podcasts, how useful this information might be in hiring the right person.

Interestingly, there is not a strong link between strength themes and field of work. But, as many as eight out of ten people could currently be in the wrong place.

What does this mean for real estate investing and landlording? Maybe some people get stuck and don't get started or advance because the next step they need to take is well outside their strength area. As we look to partner and bring on help, we should be mindful of getting the right strength set. Search out a good fit to play to our strengths and run with it.