At the beginning of my career in industry, I was taught that performance reviews and development plans needed to focus on my weaknesses. It was frustrating to have my accomplishments and strengths overlooked, while being asked to develop skills that were peripheral to my core objectives and being criticized for weaknesses that did not directly affect my role. As I became a supervisor and lab manager, my colleagues complained that staff ignored their development plans and that weaknesses persisted despite being documented in performance reviews.
Why you should focus on staff strengths
As a lab manager, I had the opportunity to take a different approach and support the people in my lab in ways I had not experienced myself. I already had some ideas about how I wanted to lead, and when I discovered the book First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, those instincts were validated and reinforced with practical ways to put them into action. In the book, the authors discuss the importance of strengths and link strength-building to driving excellence, one of my core values.
This learning led to a fundamental shift in how I developed staff. Instead of pushing minor improvements to weaknesses they did not care about, we focused on growing strengths they were already motivated to invest in. The differences were dramatic. The staff were very interested in how they could further develop strengths and how those strengths could be applied in important aspects of our business.
Front Line Leadership has demonstrated that the consistent use of strengths contributes to employee engagement. Having the opportunity to use and develop their strengths is a fundamental staff need. Being able to consistently use their strengths at work provides a stronger emotional connection to the lab, the work, the mission, and to their supervisor. Gallup polls show that engagement brings many benefits, including more discretionary effort, the sharing of ideas, greater productivity, greater retention, and less absenteeism.
Recognizing strengths
Invest time and energy into getting to know the people in your teams. Observe how they deliver their roles. Talk with their colleagues about what they appreciate in each other. Some strengths are readily apparent in labs, like strong technical skills, critical thinking, well-developed problem-solving, and project management. These skills can be directly applied to the technical work of the lab.
Other skills are less obvious, like emotional intelligence, networking, listening, influence, kindness, inclusivity, and sharing. These strengths are equally valuable as the technical skills. They enable teamwork, complex problem-solving, and build the community of the lab. It often takes more work for the lab manager to discover and use these skills to reach a higher level of lab performance.
Once key skills are identified, it is the lab manager’s responsibility to ensure they are applied to deliver benefits to both the individual and the lab. This involves tailoring roles for people that emphasize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. It may also include job crafting to ensure that people can use their strengths to define how they deliver their roles.
Building teams that cover gaps, not expose them
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Visualize this—hold your hand up in front of you. Your fingers represent your strengths, and the spaces between them represent your weaknesses. On your own, both your strengths and weaknesses are fully on display. However, if we build teams with a diversity of strengths, we can cover one person’s weaknesses with another’s strengths. Now, hold up your other hand and offset your fingers—the spaces between the fingers are no longer visible. Those individual weaknesses aren’t on display to stakeholders or colleagues.
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Development plans
During an annual performance review, the lab manager has the responsibility to provide direction and coaching on areas of improvement that will benefit the individual. Instead of focusing on improving weaknesses, which will largely be resisted and, at best, will accomplish only mediocrity, focus on identifying two to four strengths, which, if improved further, will deliver value to the individual and the lab.
The only time to focus on improving a weakness is if it is fatal or will cause the person to miss an important opportunity. In these cases, mediocrity in these areas is acceptable. For example, if a key scientist struggles to communicate his ideas, spending some time to improve his ability to speak clearly in a meeting or to write more effective emails allows him to continue in the lab doing excellent science.
Performance
In my experience, a common root cause for poor individual performance is a staff member whose role expects them to consistently work in areas of weakness. In hindsight, this is no surprise. How many of us can meet expectations when we are asked to work in our weaknesses? One approach to solving a performance problem is to evaluate the existing role against the individual’s strengths and weaknesses. If you identify someone who is working more than 50 percent in weaknesses, changing the role to ensure that the majority of their role embraces their strengths may solve the problem. I’ve done this successfully many times. One of the more interesting examples was when another lab manager and I traded staff members. Both were low performers in their old roles but became high performers in their new roles because each moved to roles that amplified their strengths.
A simple shift that drives engagement and growth
Focusing on a person’s strengths, rather than on their weaknesses, provides significant benefits for lab managers. People are much more receptive to feedback conversations and are more likely to invest time and energy into further developing strengths. As an added bonus, focusing on strengths provides clear employee engagement benefits. This relatively simple change helps everyone and enables the lab to grow and develop.
