Treating Employees Like People Makes Them Work Like Machines

Stuart Crabb: We live in a world that is completely fascinated by weaknesses and takes strengths and positive emotions for granted. You only have to pick up the newspaper to see that. You only have to see the way people slow down on a freeway when there’s an accident. To understand your credit worthiness, we look at the amount of debt you carry. To try and understand what makes a happy customer we go talk to angry ones. Everywhere you look you’ll see this focus upon weaknesses as a basis to understand performance excellence. Now I think there’s lots of reasons for that. Some of that speaks to the human condition and the way in which the brain interprets external information and external threats. We’ve only told half the story about performance inside organizations. We’ve really cracked the code around understanding how to identify and really overcome those areas that people struggle in. But most organizations are not having conversations about how to build a positive engaging work culture. And they’re not having conversations about how to leverage people’s strengths at work.

This is an enormous game changer for organizations and for Facebook what we found is that those employees that felt that they had the opportunity to engage their strengths most of the time at Facebook were more likely to be high performing. They were more likely to be part of a higher performing team. They were more likely to stay longer with the company and it was also a key driver of fulfillment. In other words, their experience of work is a meaningful experience was massively promoted by the experience and the opportunity to be able to leverage their strengths every day.

We did it in a number of ways. There’s no question that the consequences of many performance problems can be traced back to a poor hiring decision. So hiring for strengths is critical right out of the gate. If you create the right conditions for candidates to share and reveal their strengths to you then you have the right opportunity to determine whether or not they’re going to be successful in this role. But it goes beyond just the hiring process. Starting an internal conversation within the culture of the organization was something that we also did very, very early on. Encouraging all new employees that came through the new hire orientation to take the Clifton Strengthsfinder so they could start to understand their strengths and what they may mean. Training managers to help managers understand how to have a conversation when it came to setting goals or giving feedback or sitting down and talking about longer term creative element were all essential ways in which we inculcated this message. We also launched a strengths based coaching program for all people managers and leaders in the organization which specifically focused on the better half of where they were having impact and helping to bring some balance to what is in many respects an obsession with weaknesses and a focus on fixing ourselves which can be important if it has the potential to derail us. But in most cases is a really, really poor place for you to be investing your time and energy when it comes to your own development.