Building on Strengths

I was training a group of managers recently and one of the delegates, the manager of a Direct Labour Organisation, shared an inspiring story from his days as an international squash coach.(suggestion - read this with an antipodean accent and you’ll get an even better sense of what it was like listening to him)“A player came to me and asked if I would coach him.  He was ranked 62nd in the World and had been coached by many top class coaches.  He said ‘I’m doing everything I’m told, really working on my weak areas, which are low gentle slow shots, just as I’m told, but still my games don’t get any better and my ranking isn’t changing.’ I looked him in the eye and said ‘I’ll take you on, but the condition is this:  you have to do it my way or not at all and I guarantee it will deliver results”

The rest of the delegates raised a collective eyebrow at his certainty at this point and listened whilst he continued, “He said, ‘Yes’, and so then I asked him, ‘What are your strengths?’. ‘Well’ he said, ‘I’m great at playing faster and more aggressively than my opponents.’ So from that moment on I worked with him on playing the fastest, most aggressive game, keeping his shots low.  He started to control the game, playing to his strengths and keeping the ball away from his danger zone, the high soft shots.  At the end of the year he moved to 6th place in the World ranking.”

It got the group thinking.  How much time and energy were they putting into minimising the impact of their own and their team’s weaknesses rather than growing, developing and promoting strengths?  It got them wondering about their performance management systems where the emphasis is on giving feedback about what’s wrong (even when the rhetoric is about positive feedback). It stimulated them to question: What do I do about weaker areas? Do I simply ignore them? Or could I use the team’s strengths in some way to minimise the impact of its weaknesses? Some of them remembered times when simply working in the areas which they were strong at gave them such energy and confidence that the weak areas seemed to be less of a struggle anyway.Tiger Woods was ranked number one in the world in 2002 on “Green in Regulation” shots.  Golfers will know that this is a measure of how many shots you are expected to play before getting your ball onto the green.  A fine accolade.  Did you know though, that he was ranked 62nd in the world at “Sand Saves” which means his history of getting out of a bunker and into the hole in a maximum of two shots?  By 2007 he’d even slipped to 83rd in the ranking for Sand Saves.  Yet, he was ranked highest in the world for golf.  What was happening?  Like the squash player, he was making the Sand Saves irrelevant.  He worked on his strong swing until it was so predictable he would consistently land on the green.

Food for thought.

Many thanks to Paul Z Jackson and Janine Waldman for telling the Tiger Woods story in their book Positively Speaking