Strengths-based development

People make organisations work well. Not the procedures, processes, structures or governance mechanisms. These elements can all assist, as well as frustrate, the effective working of an organisation, but they rarely if ever play the pivotal role that people do in delivering what an organisation is about.

Our coaching and thought-support work with clients invariably tells us that the deficit or weakness-centred approach to individual and organisational development is strong and worryingly prevalent. It is easy to get stuck in our old ways of thinking. It is also easy to get stuck in our relationships and act in the same way as we always have done. As the saying goes, "if you keep on doing what you have always done, you will keep on getting what you've always got!" In too many cases that means focusing on what's wrong with the organisation, the weaknesses of the individual and the measures required to make things better.


Now, sometimes there really is something worrying in the performance of a team, service or individual and an intervention needs to take place. We recognise that. Often that can take the form of a rapid change of personnel or the creation of a new procedure. Yet, often that proves to be the short-term palliative, not the long-term salvation. Why is this? Well, one reason might be that the positive core of that person or team has simply not been explored and captured because of the concentration on problems. Another reason is that individuals are so inured to the problem-fixing mode of operation that their strengths and talents, the activities that make best use of their talents, and their positive core are not recognised or valued.


Now, many times everything works just fine, but sometimes the person or service could benefit from a small 'nudge,' e.g. some new perspectives, a sharper focus, increased creativity or refreshed energy levels. When these moments occur one way is to invite an external advisor for a time to support the person or team to move forward. We believe that the “experts” are the people in the organization, and we can support them by creating different contexts that encourage people to understand their talents and strengths, to use their skills in new ways, and help people to co operate and become proud of what they are doing. These contexts help people to gather new perspectives and to refresh energy levels, make new commitments and engage with colleagues differently.

Working with strengths-based methods and exploring what works well in the organization instead of focusing at the “problem” pays dividends in our experience. It requires a degree of 're-programming' for the people involved but methods like Gallup's Strengthsfinder, solutions-oriented appraisals and the SOAR strategic planning model (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results) offer new and exciting ways to optimise organisational and people talents.
Our work creates safe and creative environments for personal and service development; environments where people feel they are valued, important and where everyone has something to add to the whole.


This shift of perspective from the problem-centred to the positive and strength focused gives people an opportunity to be proud of what they are doing and feel that they are important contributors to the organisation's goals. When people feel valued and have the potential to use and increase their personal strengths they also become more engaged, accept greater responsibility and increase their ability to see new perspectives and others views.

We create learning opportunities where people can learn about and appreciate their talents, feel that they are important and skillful and learn how to combine their talents with colleagues'. We find when this happens weaknesses frequently become irrelevant.

Contact us to discuss how strength based personal and team development could improve customer and employee satisfaction and results in your organization.

Visit our website at http://www.optimuminterventions.co.uk/

Embracing External Accountability

Reflecting on change as our clients continue to develop their approaches to transforming their organisations - structures, processes and service quality - for some, the power of external overview and scrutiny can be highly influential in driving improvement in service quality and reshaping external relationships.

In discussing aspects of organisational change, such as 're-engineering' and business process improvement, by embracing external political accountability to build support for change, Mark Moore says in 'Creating Public Value (1995), once their (i.e. organisational leaders) purposes are linked to the expectations and demands of powerful overseers standing behind them, their strategic visions cease being the idiosyncratic views of transient figureheads: they become, instead, a 'reality' to which the organisation has to respond."

Moore also argues that, "once armed with a powerful external constituency demanding the changes they want to make, the task of changing their organisation becomes much easier." He suggests that managers who reject accountability risk subsequent disaster by losing touch with the important values that politicians want expressed through their organisations' operations. "They get too far away from an important kind of 'customer'. Similarly, by resisting accountability, managers lose some of their ability to challenge the organisations they lead...they become vulnerable to their own subordinates' desires to be protected from demands for change...the net effect is to reduce the organisation's responsiveness and value to citizens and (the) overseers."

Moore concludes his section on embracing the external accountability by saying, "if managers seek strategic changes in organisations, embracing accountability seems to be an important tool. Without such an embrace, managers confront their organisations alone. With it, managers can focus the massed force of public expectations for change on the organisation - a far more advantageous position."

All of us working in and around the public sector, and our associated partners and stakeholders, now prepare for the inevitable public sector expenditure reductions, as the Prime Minister will announce tomorrow in a speech and the main opposition party have been gradually testing public responses to. As we do prepare, we might usefully think how best to garner the power of external accountability as one of the drivers of change in our organisations that those cuts (assuming they cannot be resisted) will foster, without somehow damaging irreparably the improvements in performance many have achieved in recent years.

A Map of Appreciative Work in the UK

Last Friday, 6th March, along with colleagues of the UK's AI Network, I began to construct a 'map' of our work across the UK, and into Europe. Whilst 'map' might be too grand a term, i.e. I filled a wall with flip chart paper and loosely allocated pieces of our work to a rough geographic outline, the potential of this piece nonetheless struck us as quite significant for a number of reasons.

What prompted me to offer this as one of our activities for the Network's programme that day, was a conversation with a colleague at the December Network session, (Lena Holmberg) where we talked about how those carrying out AI work in the UK (and other places) could make a disproportionate contribution to the transformation of the country's institutions and communities if we could connect to those who we need to influence most. Then, recommend and use AI as the vehicle for deep, lasting and sustainable change, rather than some of the more mechanistic or manufacturing-based models of change that seem to bring with them the promise of programmatic, plan-do-review type ease yet tend to reduce the complex to the merely complicated, (although none of us would take the complicated and make it complex of course!). The premise is that with so much appearing to be 'broken', it is the call to the positive core, the search for good and what works, and the power of the appreciative questions that will provide more hope for the near future and have a profound impact.

Our map therefore was the start of what we think could be an initiative that will grow to encompass many more areas than the UK, capturing the good work going on, frequently by one or two individuals who are oftentimes not connected to other colleagues as we are fortunate to be in the UK via our Network, and making a difference through appreciative and strength-based techniques. As Lena said in an article in this month's AI Practitioner, "picture what we could do if we were to work as one sparkling and tight network." Indeed.

Mapping what is already happening and has been happening for some time in the UK and beyond, might also provide us as practitioners with a picture of the wider scope of appreciative work that we can share with clients and prospective clients when they ask about examples of AI in practice. We have a growing number of case studies now that add to the richness of the US and global library of working examples. The development of the networkplace.eu web site also provides a forum for the burgeoning European AI scene.

There is obviously more work to do here, not least is the need to convert this basic work from flip chart to an electronic mode and to make it interactive, allowing colleagues to annotate and develop the map as they go. There is too the exciting potential of not just recording what is happening but to infer something more and perhaps use the information to plan, and achieve that "profound impact" our colleague Lena talks of.

If you are interested in sharing your appreciative and strength-based thinking and work, the next AI Network meeting is in June, probably in central London. The networkplace.eu site now has over 325 registrations of AI practitioners and the Europan Network meets in Barcelona in April. Do make contact.

Inauguration Speech and Appreciative Inquiry

Spurred on by a good friend who visits this blog and tells me that she enjoys the posts on it,(thanks Anna), and by my obvious lack of recent activity, I have been motivated to pay it attention again.

For those who occasionally find their way here - for which many thanks, and do, please, leave a comment now and then - I am happy to share with you my strong belief that in Barack Obama we have a leader of massive potential (no startling insight from me there) with deep ethics, and with an approach to the role that offers leadership of an appreciative nature.

His inauguration speech talked of "reaffirming our enduring spirit...choose our better history...carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness". These phrases all speak to the Positive Core that Appreciative Inquiry (AI)asks us to inquire into and find as part of transforming our communities and organisations and indeed nations.

His talk of reaffirming the greatness of his nation through earning it, and his noting that those who earned it for the USA were frequently "men and women obscure in their labour who carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom" really talks to the Discovery of those people and attributes that make our communities and organisations as strong as they are, and hold the key to making them even stronger and more successful in the future.

The affirmation from him that ambitions (or Dreams perhaps?) are realised "...when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage" suggested to me that for all of us, change requires clear ambition to be present, and people freed to exercise those attributes in pursuit of that ambition. The very strong 'Destiny' that AI drives us to deliver on the Dreams we have.

Later on he spoke of how "the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...". Throughout he posited appreciative choices and also rejected false choices, such as those "between our safety and our ideals" citing those ideals as lighting the world and "not being given up for expedience's sake."

And so it went, realistic, not doom laden as some would have it, calling often to the Positive Core; rediscovering aspects of his country's greatness; relating more to fairness and justice than "greed and irresponsibility" and calling people to a "new era of responsibility". There was no 1933 Rooseveltian phrase of "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" kind, nor Kennedy's "ask not..." phrase, so perhaps we are to read that the time for soaring rhetoric has come and gone, for now, to be replaced by calls to appreciatively rediscover what works well and grow towards those things. I hope so.

His inauguration speech, critiqued by one writer as "virtuosic in its sincere, magisterial gloom", struck me as much richer than that, and AI has assisted me to appreciate its richness all the more I think.

Keep on Returning to Your Strengths

We just keep on returning strengths, because so much of what is good that we see in organisational life can be tracked back to people using their talents and strengths rather than slavishly developing or eradicating their so called 'weaknesses'.

Dr John Hunt is quoted in Buckingham and Clifton thus:

Concentrating on people's strengths...this and only this, will be the major differentiator for organisations in the future."

And Peter Drucker had it this way:

"Most people do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer."

Our executive coaching is based firmly on talents and strengths for the individual and team. It can take quite some time for clients, and their managers, to really let go of deficit models and tune in to their strengths. One client of ours worked assiduously on understanding their talents and turning them into true strengths via practical activities that improved their performance and that of their team. Yet, even after a year of work, the deficit model is so strong in that organisation that our client still feels driven to find and excise his weaknesses because that's what his manager demands of him, to prove he his getting value from coaching.

Our response? Understand the pressure he is under and acknowledge the paradigm the organisation works to, and help him to keep finding those real-world activities that let his talents shine and become long-term, sustainable strengths for him and the organisation. Not because it makes him happy, although it more often does, or because we deny his manager's view, which we appreciate the genesis of, but because those talent and strength-based activities deliver more effective performance, more often and to a higher standard than 'weakness fixing' ever does.