High Performance Requires Core Strengths and
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To handle the challenges they’ll face on the job, leaders and employees alike have to develop two core strengths that count more than any others: Personal Strengths and People Skills. These abilities are not formally taught in schools. Most likely your leaders and employees acquired the ones they have through life experience, not in a systematic way. |
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Why leaders and employees need Personal Strengths
Personal Strengths are the behavior patterns people need to do the hard things in life.
Examples include courage, flexibility, self-discipline, effort, open-mindedness and patience. There are dozens of others.
If managers and employees haven't developed these strengths, they may not be able to use them effectively when they're in a difficult situation. Instead, they might respond in ways that cost you customers, your reputation or worse. They could lose their cool, give up too quickly, or get distracted by less important tasks. That’s why people need strengths like composure, perseverance, focus, decisiveness and self-confidence.
They also need People Skills
The ability to build strong relationships is critical to everything you need leaders and employees to accomplish. Even if they have good work skills and technical know-how, poor people skills can keep them from establishing the kinds of relationships, connections and alliances they need to be successful.
To deal effectively with the people who are important to their job performance, they'll need to be strong in skills like listening, giving and receiving feedback, engaging in dialogue and resolving conflict.
The secret to building core strengths
It’s fine to take a course, read books, or watch videos. But these activities alone can’t actually develop people skills and personal strengths.
That’s because developing these core strengths is a lot like working out at a gym to build physical strength. People learn how to do an exercise, but then they need to follow up with lots of practice and repetition. As their muscles get stronger, the exercises get easier.
Improving personal strengths and people skills works the same way. That’s because:
Even if your leaders and employees know what to do, that doesn’t mean they’ll actually do it when they need to.
When people face an unexpected challenge, they usually don’t have time to think about what they learned. They only have time to react. So they automatically do what already feels familiar and comfortable.
The reason: Old habits are hard-wired in the brain. Over time, the brain cells that trigger these actions connected themselves into a circuit that made the pattern automatic. Once someone learns about a new approach, they may be motivated to do things differently, but they still have work to do…
to create the new habits.
This takes time and requires a lot of repetition, just like they’d need to do if they were learning to play a sport or a musical instrument. There’s no shortcut.
Learn how to deal with difficult situations
What people need is a system that shows them
how to perform the core strengths AND
engages them in a proven process to ingrain the right behaviors and skills.
If you’re ready for your leaders and employees to build their Personal Strengths and People Skills so they can achieve outstanding results for your organization, find out what Strong for Performance can do for them.
