Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance | Marcus Buckingham | Worth the read

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Go Put Your Streng...

	Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance Marcus Buckingham Free Press, 2007 - 270 pages average customer review:based on 57 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Positive Approach

I came into this book series backwards. Started with this, the latest, and presently reading "Now, Discover Your Strengths". Probably not the best way for most people, but intrigued me enough to want to read them all. Without knowing anything else about the author's theories, I think that "Go Put Your Strengths to Work" explained the positive/strengths vs negative/weaknesses approach well. I see a connection between my Gallup strengths and my Meyers-Briggs personality strengths. I'm not a manager, supervisor or leader type, so I'm using the information only on a personal level. Reading and understanding strengths has helped me stop wasting energy trying to be a "better person". Intuitively I knew that focusing on my weaknesses is futile. But it's always nice to have research to back us up and feel that we're not alone in our thinking.

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Worth the read

I read this over a brief vacation during the summer. Ive found it has enhanced my abilities dealing with people both at work and my personal life. I plan on reading it again when my busy work schedule permits it.

How to take charge of your work

Marcus Buckingham is passionate about helping you identify your unique strengths and unleash their power. As you read and work your way through the program in this book, you will become convinced that growing through your strengths is the ticket to your future happiness, effectiveness and success. He refutes the approach of improvement by fixing mistakes as a dead end that cannot help you discover how you can be exceptional. The book constantly refers you to its associated Web site for materials that will help you work through the exercises. Buckingham wants you to act rather than just read a theoretical tract. Nothing presented in this book will help you without action and implementation. However, if you take up the challenge, you will become empowered as you take charge of your work through your strengths. We recommend this book because it contains just a few simple ideas that could change your life.

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Follow-up book, much overlap with earlier books

Marcus Buckingham discusses six steps to identifying and putting your strengths to work:

1. Convince yourself that exercising your strengths is more fun and productive that spending your time shoring up your weaknesses.

2. Identify specific activities that exercise your strengths. For example, mine include
a. Determine true value
b. Learn and apply new and useful skills, knowledge
c. Creative problem solving

3. Build your job towards your strengths.

4. Stop / reduce time spent shoring up your weaknesses

5. Build a strong team by enabling each member to exercise their strengths towards delivering business value

6. Make a habit of ensuring that each person's activities around you are aligned with their strengths (including yourself :-)

The book could have been much shorter - the concept was repeated multiple times. More specifics on step 3 would also have been more useful.

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Study the positive

On my flight back from Montréal yesterday I read a Marcus Buckingham book called "Go Put Your Strengths to Work - 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outsanding Performance". I love the general thesis :

1 - Our greatest value comes from using our greatest strengths

2 - Work on strengths to become truly excellent.

Because it is a book about work, it speak to tailoring ones job around ones strengths. It offered some good examples of how to do this.

One interesting comment is that the study of strengths is disconnected from the study of weaknesses. If you study how someone fails, you do not learn how they could have succeeded (and I notice many people tend to look at the world that way - "they failed because they did not do X"). Only by studying success can you learn about success.

It cited polls that say most people are more interested in their weaknesses than strengths. Interesting...

It addresses who is best suited to judge strengths and argued that we each are best to pick our own. I am not as sure on this point. I think sometimes we have difficulty seeing the real us and choose a persona. It did make a valid point though that strengths should be those activities that give (not take) power and energy. And it would be true that only we could know that.

One thing I did not like, is it is tied closely to using a web page to do tests, watch a video etc. Partly this just seems like a money grab because you need a unique password (and as a heavy library user - not sure how that would work) and partly because for me reading a book is different that using a computer so this kills the book experience (not that there is anything wrong with computers). And of course I was on a plane so could not even try to connect if I wanted to.

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