The Strengths Companion

Peak performers seem to have a sixth sense in the areas where they perform brilliantly. This highlights one way to identify a person’s strengths. It is to clarify the specific activities in which they have what Al Siebert called personal ‘radar’.

Famous for his books such as The Survivor Personality, Al began his studies of survivors when he joined the paratroopers. Looking at the hardened professionals, he found that many survivors demonstrated a specific characteristic. He wrote:

"During our training I noticed that combat survivors have a type of personal radar always on 'scan'. Anything that happens, or any noise draws a quick, brief look. They have a relaxed awareness. I began to realize it wasn't just luck or fate that these were the few who came back alive. Something about them as people had tipped the scales in their favor."

Peak performers in sports, business and many other fields possess a similar quality. They seem to know ‘what will happen before it happens’. This gives them more time and space to use their repertoire of talents to deliver great results.

So what happens when people use their personal radar? Entering the situation in which they excel, they feel alive and alert. Employing their antennae, they rapidly gather information about three things.

* They quickly see and extrapolate patterns.

* They see the potential picture of success.

* They see how to pursue the best strategy for achieving the picture of success.

A person may have good radar in some situations, for example, but not in others. It's also important to know where they have bad radar. They can then develop a strategy for dealing with those situations.

Radar is given. A person’s greatest area for growth, however, often lies in expanding their repertoire of strategies and skills for delivering results. This is something that develops with age, experience and wisdom.

Peak performers keep putting themselves into places where they have good radar. Grasping the situation quickly, they then reach into their repertoire and use the right tools to achieve the required results.

Links

* 3 tips for employing your personal radar.

This article describes how to develop and apply your radar.

Radar.

* The Strengths Foundation’s introduction to Al Siebert’s work.

Al.

* Resiliency Center.

Here is a link to the Resiliency Center. This provides more information about the work of Al and others who have focused on overcoming setbacks.

http://www.resiliencycenter.com/

Resilient people develop the inner strength, strategies and skills to overcome setbacks. Managing such challenges can sometime provide the platform for achieving future success.

Al Siebert did pioneering work on resilience. His superb books – such as The Survivor Personality and The Resiliency Advantage – enabled many people to develop their inner strength.

Al provided more than inspiring stories. He offered positive models and practical tools that enabled people to develop their resiliency skills. They could then apply these to overcome challenges when using their strengths. He helped many people to make breakthroughs in their personal and professional lives.

Returning to college after completing his military service, Al resolved to study psychology, but he grew frustrated by its emphasis on mental illness.

He decided to study life’s survivors – those who grew when overcoming tough challenges. Scoping out the areas of study, he chose to focus on people that met four criteria:

* They had survived a major crisis.

* They had surmounted the crisis through personal effort.

* They had emerged from the experience with previously unknown strengths and abilities.

* They had, in retrospect, found value in the experience.

Building on his research, Al outlined some of the strategies survivors adopt to overcome crises successfully. These include the following.

The Survivor Personality is one of the first and best books on the topic. Al went on to start Thrivenet. This a web site packed with stories and tools that people can use to overcome adversity. Here is the link:

Thrivenet.

Al then expanded on the topic to produce another compelling book.

The Resiliency Advantage

Expanding on the theme of survival, Al focused on how people can thrive in a fast-changing world. This calls for individuals, teams and organisations to develop their resiliency skills.

Why? In the old days many people relied on ‘institutions’ to tell them what to learn and how to behave. Nowadays people must manage increasing information, complexity and unpredictability. Such events may include, for example, personal setbacks, sickness, redundancy, market changes, reduced budgets, technological changes, economic downturns or whatever.

People will need to deal with such challenges. This calls for them taking responsibility, seeing to the heart of the matter and making good decisions. Even if they choose the right strategy, events may conspire to throw them off-track. They will need to recover quickly, practice ‘course correction’ and do everything possible to reach their goals. People who develop such resiliency skills are more likely to increase their chances of success.

Al illustrated these ideas with real-life inspiring stories. Some are in the book; some on The Resiliency Center web site. You can access these stories at:

Resiliency Center.

The Adversity Advantage

Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer wrote The Adversity Advantage. This shows how overcoming setbacks can fuel a person’s ability to produce greatness.

Paul originally gained public attention with his work on AQ, Adversity Quotient. This enabled people to measure and improve their ability to overcome adversity.

Erik became the first blind person to climb Everest. A journey he chronicled in his book Touch The Top of The World.

After seeing Erik featured on the front of Time Magazine, Paul sought him out. Building on the views they shared in common, they decided to write The Adversity Advantage. Their site outlines seven strategies for overcoming adversity and achieving peak performance. Here is a brief summary taken from the site, which describes these in more detail.

http://www.adversityadvantage.com/

1) Take It On.

Learn how to overcome frustration, helplessness, and anger — and benefit from adversity.

2) Summon Your Strengths.

Challenge the conventional wisdom that natural strengths drive success. Exceed expectations of what you and others can, or should, attempt to do.

3) Engage Your CORE.

Learn how to handle adversity better and faster. Engage your CORE and learn how to turn adversities into advantages. (CORE stands for: Control, Ownership, Reach and Endurance.)

4) Pioneer Possibilities.

Devise signature systems for turning the impossible into the possible. Learn to create strategies that others fail to see.

5) Pack Light, Pack Right.

Learn how packing poorly cripples you… but how choosing the right things, people, obligations, and pursuits strengthen you. ,Spring clean, so you can rise up, rather than crumble, under the weight of adversity.

6) Suffer Well.

Character is forged in the flames of adversity. Done right, suffering can fuel greatness.

7) Deliver Greatness, Everyday.

This summit, the culmination, weaves together the most important ideas of the book, providing a coherent, portable package of practices that you can apply anywhere, anytime.

Links

* Resiliency Center.

Here is a link to the Resiliency Center. This provides more information about the work of Al and others who have focused on overcoming setbacks.

http://www.resiliencycenter.com/

* Paul Stoltz’s web site.

http://www.peaklearning.com/

* Erik Weihenmayer web site.

http://www.touchthetop.com/

There are many ways to find a team’s strengths. Whichever approach you use, it can be useful to help people in the team to focus on three things.

* The Team's Strengths.

These are the specific activities in which the team delivers As, rather that Bs or Cs.

* The Team's Specific Customers.

These are the kinds of customers with whom it works best.

* The Team's Specific Contribution.

This is how the team can use its strengths to help their customers to succeed.

Imagine you are helping a team to go through these stages. Here are some questions you can ask under each of these headings.

Strengths

How to find a team’s strengths? One approach is to explore its positive history.

Looking back, when has the team performed brilliantly? What were the principles people followed to do great work? How did they put these into practice? How can they follow these principles more in the future?

If appropriate, you can invite the team members to explore the following exercises and then clarify their strengths.

Specific Customers

Different teams work best with different types of customers. If appropriate you can invite people to focus on:

* The specific kinds of customers with whom the team works best.

* The specific challenges these customers will face in the future.

So you can invite them to do the following exercises.

Specific Contribution

So far you have covered: a) The team’s specific strengths; b) The team’s specific customers – together with the challenges they face.

It is now time to move on to the team’s specific contribution. These are the specific things it can offer and deliver to help the customers to succeed. So you can invite people to complete the following exercise.

There are many approaches to helping a team to find its strengths. Some focus on the team as a whole, some on the strengths of the individual team members.

The approach outlined above clarifies the team’s strengths and how it can help specific customers to achieve success.

Links

* Appreciative Inquiry’s approach to finding a team’s strengths.

AI invites teams to focus on when they have performed brilliantly and how they want to follow these principles in the future. You can find more information at the following links.

http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/

http://www.positivechange.org/

http://www.thestrengthsfoundation.org/3-tips-for-understanding-appreciative-inquirys-work-on-strengths

The Key School in Indianapolis was one of the first to apply Howard Gardner’s ideas on multiple intelligences. The teachers combined his approach with the learning principles outlined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

The pioneering work done at Key embodies many elements of the strengths approach. Beginning in 1987, the school aimed to find and nurture each student’s various intelligences and learning styles. Two decades later it is still applying these ideas successfully. The school is now called The Key Learning Community.

The following paragraphs give a snapshot of what was happening in their early days. Marie Winn, writing in The Good Health Magazine, described her visit to the Key School.

"In Room 25 one day last winter, 22 highly concentrated little violinists are eagerly honing their musical intelligence to the tune of 'Frosty the Snowman'.

“In Room 17 Carol Forbes is demonstrating the difference between a small triangle and a large circle – in Spanish – a lesson that combines exercises in both linguistic and spatial intelligence. Intelligences run amok in Room 10, where a two-month-long school wide effort has produced a spectacular re-creation of a tropical rain forest.

"It is hard to remember that this is not a special school for gifted children, but one whose racially and ethnically diverse population is chosen by lottery, with more than a third of the students qualifying for free or reduced-price school lunch.

“In its third year of operation, the Key School shows every sign of being a runaway success. Scores on the standardised tests show that the two intelligences most valued in our education system (Linguistic and Logical-Mathematical) are thriving. Only five children in the entire school failed to reach the acceptable level mandated by the school district."

Here is a video from 2001. This starts in a rather academic way, but then moves on to the actual work in the school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNw97uLswTk

As mentioned earlier, Key is based on the theory of multiple intelligences outlined in Howard Gardner’s book Frames of Mind, published in 1983. A Harvard professor himself, he believed there were other ways to identify intelligence beyond academic IQ tests.

Written in a scholarly style, his book described various other intelligences. You can find is an excellent overview of these at the following site:

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm

Thomas Armstrong and other people have translated these intelligences into different kinds of ‘smarts’. They have also added other intelligences, plus leaving space for more in the future. Here is a somewhat wordy overview of the different intelligences.

The term Multiple Intelligences has now entered mainstream education. Some schools have implemented the ideas properly. Others have translated the approach into a tick box exercise.

The Key Learning Community has used MI to help students to learn how to learn, build on their strengths and achieve success.

Links

* The Multiple Intelligence Institute.

http://www.miinstitute.info/

There are many different views of strengths. Broadly speaking, however, these fall into two main categories.

* Character Strengths.

These are strengths related to a person’s character. Such strengths may include, for example, honesty, resilience, courage and other character traits.

Martin Seligman, for instance, outlines human virtues and character strengths. Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder also describes patterns that can be considered as character traits.

* Creative Strengths. (Some people may talk about these as Capabilities.)

These are strengths related to a person’s creative or other abilities to perform superb work. Such strengths are often related to extremely specific activities, projects or other tasks where the person delivers peak performance.

Bernard Haldane focused on such strengths from the 1940s onwards. Mike Pegg adopted a similar approach. He invited people, teams and organisations to clarify the specific activities where they delivered As, rather than Bs or Cs. Marcus Buckingham outlined several exercises for taking this route in his book Go Put Your Strengths To Work.

* Combining Character and Creative Strengths.

People can, of course, combine both sets of resources. Al Siebert’s work on resilience, for example, shows how people employ their character and creative strengths to overcome adversity and produce exceptional results.

There are, of course, many ways of looking at strengths. You can find more information at the links below.

Links

* The Positive Psychology Center.

The Center gives an introduction to the work of Martin Seligman and other positive psychologists.

http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/

* The Strengths Foundation's introduction to Martin Seligman's work.

You can also find a summary of Martin’s work at The Strengths Foundation’s site.

Link

* CAPP – The Centre for Applied Positive Psychology.

You can find an overview of the Centre’s approach to identifying strengths at the following link.

http://www.cappeu.com/

* The Gallup StrengthsFinder Themes.

This gives an introduction to the 34 StrengthsFinder Themes.

http://gmj.gallup.com/content/102310/clifton-strengthfinder-book-center.aspx

* The Center for Dependable Strengths.

This gives an introduction to Bernard Haldane and other people’s work with Dependable Strengths.

http://www.dependablestrengths.org/

* The Marcus Buckingham Company.

This gives an introduction to Marcus Buckingham’s work on strengths.

http://tmbc.com/

* The Resiliency Center.

This gives an introduction to the work of Al Siebert and others who focus on developing inner strength.

http://www.resiliencycenter.com/

* 3 tips for doing a Strengths Inventory.

This is an exercise that you can do as a leader. It enables you to identify each person’ strengths, successful style and specific contribution to helping a team to reach its goals.

StrengthsInventory