I recently read "
Go Put Your Strenghts To Work," which is one of those career self assessment books that helps you understand what your strengths are. I was motivated to read this book, because I was reading a book about starting a business and it said your good business ideas should be something that you like and something that you can be good at. I read "Go Put Your Strenghts To Work" to determine what I was good at...and I think I made some head way.
"Go Put Your Strenghts To Work" has an interesting perspective. Most of the time, when an employee reviews his performance with his manager, they develop a plan where the employee can work to improve in the area of his or her weaknesses. The author of this book said we should do the opposite. Instead of trying to improve our weaknesses, we should cultivate our strengths and try to move into jobs that engage more of our strengths. As a manager we should help our reports leverage their strengths. If people work at improving their weakness there will be far less return, and they may never get better. One of my weaknesses is public speaking. If I worked hard at improving my public speaking, I would still not be very good. I don't think working at improving my public speaking is worth my time.
In our world today, we have the opportunity to specialize. People have been organizing to do work for a long time now. It is increasingly possible for people to find a place in an organization where they specialize in their strengths.
Recently I have been able to tweak my job description into something that fits better with my strengths. I was able to do this because of the kind of manager I have. He lets you do the work how ever you want, but he will challenge your thinking by peppering you with questions. I love it.
One way I was able to influence my job responsibilities was by creating my own performance objectives. Our company has major objectives that change each year and each area of the business has objectives that tie to the companies overall objectives. And then, the areas/departments objectives tie to the VPs objectives. These objectives link all the way down to each employee and get more specific as they go down. Each employee is evaluated by these objectives on a quarterly basis. My manager let me create my own performance objectives. I think the main reason he let me do it was that he didn't want to. I had just read this book on strengths so I created objectives that were fitting with my strengths. Of course, I could not just write anything down. My objectives had to tie to my managers objectives, but I had some room to play with. Here are some of the measures I gave myself:
- Ensure Business and User Requirements are incorporated in the design and construction of the Data Warehouse
- Achieve high levels of inspiration and idea generation on how Healthways can use Analytics and collaborate with others to implement those ideas
- Become inspired by the ways other internal departments and companies apply analytics to their business models
- Generously shares ideas, tools and best practices with others, and does not participate in office politics
- Manage requirements as they go through construction
The picture at the top of this post is something I created while I was reading this book on strengths. You can click on it to enlarge it. The book said that your unique set of strengths would combine to form a single strength. I tried to think about what single thing I was good at or wanted to be good at and what individual strengths I had that would make me good at it. I really want to start companies that compete with for-profit companies, but instead of existing to make investors rich, the company would exist to give money to non-profits and help others. I want to be an organization designer that designs those kinds of organizations. I think I can have individual strengths in the areas of inspiration, design, and strategy. I am still young and need to learn and grow, but I feel that these are things that are with in my reach. I think I can be good at finding inspiration. I can do this by getting out in the world and by reading and by studying people. I am the type of person that gets inspired easily. I also like to design things and I like things at are designed well, eg. iPod, S-Class. Finally, I like to stratagize about how to reach a goal. I don't know if I am good at this, but I do know that it is something I do naturally. I am always sceaming. Inspiration, design, and strategy are activities that I get very excited about and are activities that I will likely get better at. They are also activities that contribute to getting things done better.
This past Sunday, Scott Patty talked about how individual church member's gifts should function within the church. The passage from Romans 12 reads, "Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness." He talked about identifying your gift and using it within they church. This is something I need to do more thinking about. I have always thought my gift was encouragement, but I have not thought about how I encourage people on a regular basis.
I feel that my role as a missionary in the world of business is clear and what I want to do with my career is becoming more clear, but I am not entirely sure at this point what my role is in my local church. Hmmmm....
