Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance
In today’s world, the key to achieving success and fulfillment lies in leveraging your strengths rather than focusing on fixing your weaknesses. Marcus Buckingham’s book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, provides a comprehensive guide on what it truly means to “play to your strengths.” This blog post will explore the six essential steps outlined in the book, helping you to identify, maximize, and apply your strengths for outstanding performance in both your personal and professional life.
Go Put Your Strengths to Work: An Overview
When we engage our strengths, we operate at our peak—feeling productive, creative, and resilient. We experience a flow where time seems to fly by. Yet, despite this, research conducted on over 2 million people shows that only 17% of individuals feel that they spend the majority of their workdays playing to their strengths. This means that just 2 out of every 10 people are truly utilizing their strengths at work daily.
There’s no such thing as a perfect job where every activity aligns with your strengths. Every role involves a mix of tasks, some of which may not play to your strengths. The key to thriving in your career is to first identify your strengths and then actively apply them.
Buckingham’s book is rooted in practice and application, built on the Clifton StrengthsFinder profile. Each copy of the book includes a code for an online assessment that helps you understand how engaged you currently are with your strengths and how likely you are to be engaged in the future. The goal is to improve your engagement scores as you progress through the book.
In this post, we’ll outline the six steps necessary to start leveraging your strengths effectively.
6 Steps to Start Leveraging Your Strengths
Step 1: Bust the Myths (Get the Right Mindset)
One of the biggest barriers to leveraging our strengths is the false beliefs we hold about growth and performance. The book highlights three common myths that must be debunked to truly play to your strengths:
- Myth #1: As you grow, your personality will change.
- Reality: As you grow, you become more of who you already are.
- Myth #2: You will grow the most where you’re weakest.
- Reality: You will grow the most where you have the greatest strength.
- Myth #3: Good team members do whatever it takes for the team.
- Reality: Good team members contribute their strengths to the team most of the time.
Step 2: Get Clear (Know Your Strengths in Vivid Detail)
To effectively leverage your strengths, you need to identify them clearly. Your strengths are not just general qualities but specific activities you consistently perform well, often to a world-class standard. Your strengths comprise:
- Talents: Natural abilities, such as competitiveness or swimming.
- Skills: Acquired capabilities, like conducting a competitive analysis.
- Know-how: Practical knowledge, such as sourcing fresh ingredients.
Buckingham introduces the concept of the four “SIGNs” that indicate your strengths:
- Success: Activities where you feel confident and have been recognized for excelling.
- Instinct: Activities you are naturally drawn to and enjoy doing.
- Growth: Activities where you learn quickly, feel creative, and lose track of time.
- Needs: Activities that leave you feeling fulfilled and eager to do them again.
Using the Capture => Clarify => Confirm process, you can narrow down to your top three strengths—the activities that make you feel truly alive and engaged.
Steps 3-4: Free Your Strengths & Stop Your Weaknesses
Once you’ve identified your strengths, the next step is to incorporate them into your job. Focus on how you can use your strengths to meet the demands of your customers, bosses, and colleagues, and establish routines to maintain this focus. Similarly, you should aim to steer away from your weaknesses.
Buckingham’s “Strong Week Plan” helps you do this by identifying:
- Two actions to free up your strengths.
- Two actions to stop your weaknesses.
Step 5: Speak Up (Be a Strong Team Player)
Outstanding performance requires effective communication about your strengths and weaknesses. This step is about speaking up in a way that positions your strengths as valuable to your team while addressing your weaknesses without coming across as negative.
Buckingham outlines four essential conversations:
- The Strengths Chat
- “How Can I Help You?”
- The Weakness Chat
- “How Can You Help Me?”
These conversations help you align your strengths with the needs of your team and manager, fostering a more collaborative and effective work environment.
Step 6: Build Strong Habits (Make This Sustainable)
Even after following the first five steps, old habits can easily pull you back into less effective routines. To sustain the progress you’ve made, it’s crucial to build habits that reinforce your strengths-based approach. Buckingham suggests developing habits on a daily, weekly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual basis to keep yourself on track.
Getting the Most from Go Put Your Strengths to Work
This book is a sequel to First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, and it serves as a step-by-step guide to putting your strengths to work. Each chapter is packed with case studies, exercises, and tips to help you apply the concepts in real life. By following the steps outlined in the book, you should see a measurable improvement in your engagement with your strengths.
The book also addresses situational challenges that might hinder your ability to apply your strengths, offering practical solutions for each scenario. Whether you’re new to a job or struggling to connect with your boss, Buckingham provides strategies to overcome these obstacles.
The Book in Just 20 Words
Unlock your full potential by embracing your strengths, and transform your job into a powerful engine for personal growth.
About the Author
Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance is written by Marcus Buckingham, a renowned British-American author, researcher, speaker, and business consultant. He is the founder of his own consulting, training, and e-learning company. After 17 years at Gallup, where he conducted extensive research into workplace performance, Buckingham became an influential voice in the business world. He speaks to over 250,000 people globally each year and is a Cambridge University graduate. Buckingham has also co-authored other bestsellers like First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths.
Go Put Your Strengths to Work Quotes
- “Holding out for that perfect ‘job we love’ is a fool’s game. Instead, we simply need to learn how to take our existing job and each week, reshape it around our strengths.”
- “‘Play to your strengths’ sounds so commonsensical that, when you say it, everyone happily nods his assent. And yet, most of us really don’t believe that we can live our life this way.”
- “As you grow, your goal should not be to transform yourself to somehow conjure new forces from within you. Instead, your goal should be to free up and focus the forces already there.”
- “You will learn the most, grow the most, and develop the most in your areas of greatest strength. Your strengths are your multiplier. Your strengths magnify you.”
- “Your strengths are defined by your actual activities. They are things you do, and more specifically, things you do consistently and near perfectly.”
Conclusion
Go Put Your Strengths to Work is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to maximize their potential by focusing on their strengths. By following the six steps outlined in the book, you can reshape your work life, improve your performance, and find greater satisfaction in what you do. Remember, the key to success is not in trying to fix your weaknesses but in fully embracing and leveraging your strengths.