Why Most Managers Suck: No Strengths Based Leadership!

How Strengths Based Leadership, Team Building, and Hiring Practices Can Transform Any Organization and Help You Soar With Your Strengths.

It’s always been intuitive to me, but it wasn’t until serving on Special Forces A-Teams that I was able to connect the dots between working in our inherent strengths and the enhanced outcomes and mind-blowing productivity that comes from super high achievers. Sure, I miss the camaraderie from my time in Special Forces, but it’s the efficiency in which a 12-man A-Team can accomplish its mission when each member is pursuing excellence and is afforded the opportunity to work within his area of natural strengths that drives me. I’ve become a bit obsessed with trying to recreate that same model in my own businesses, and in those I work with in mastermind and mentoring programs.

It was twenty years ago, after leaving the military, that I was blessed to attend a three-day Varsity Management Seminar at the Gallup Organization headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, taught by the genius behind strengths-based psychology, Donald Clifton. The warm and kind-hearted Don Clifton (who purchased the Gallup Organization in 1988) wrote the ground-breaking book, Soar With Your Strengths, which was the precursor to Now, Discover Your Strengths (with co-author Marcus Buckingham), which ultimately lead to the powerful strengths assessment we now know as StrengthsFinder 2.0.

I continue to be amazed at how life seems to come full circle. Back in March 2014 the Gallup Organization, and the amazing team at Called To Coach, invited me to share my story of building elite teams and highly productive organizations using the principles of strengths-based leadership. If strengths-based initiatives, StrengthsFinder, and any of the terms in this article are foreign to you, then I invite you to watch this video. If you’re using strengths-based programs now, I’ve got some tips in the video that might prove helpful.

Sharing Strengths Based Leadership principles

In this Google Hangout video interview from my home office in Anaheim, CA, I share the financial implications of strengths-based organizations; poor leadership; crappy managers; building team morale; our moral obligation to our sphere of influence & communicating with team members; preparing for greatness; and the three things we should all be considering when building a team.

I apologize for some of the scratchy audio you’ll here in the video. It’s completely my fault, as the microphone I used for the interview continued to brush against my shirt…but hang in there, the content we discuss and share is pretty powerful. It’s a 48-minute video, so start watching it now, and set aside some time later today to finish it up if you can’t digest it all in one sitting.

Thanks so much to Called to Coach hosts Jim Collison and Jeremy Pietrocini for providing this powerful video series to managers, leaders, and entrepreneurs who are interested in creating more with less, and for being leaders in the strengths-based psychology & leadership movement.

What’s your experience with a strengths-based approach to leadership & team building? Have you experienced an organization, manager, or leader who resists or fights against strengths-based performance practices? I’d love to hear your comments and stories below.