Flourishing People

How do you enable people to flourish, especially in the workplace?  That’s the aim of 3D HR as an organisation so it’s an important question for me.  I was at the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology conference in April with the theme of flourishing communities and flourishing organisations so what follows are a few of the insights I took away from the conference and later reflections.

To flourish means:

to blossom; to grow vigorously, succeed, thrive, prosper;

to be at the peak of development, activity, influence, production etc;

to be in one’s prime

Three real company case studies were presented at the conference – from a large multinational, a medium-sized family firm and a small highly successful new technology company.  In each case, there has been a deliberate emphasis on recruiting and employing people to use their strengths.  If a workplace is filled with people who know what their strengths are and are using those strengths in their day-to-day work, they and the organisation will almost inevitably flourish.

The smaller company had devoted time to clarifying its direction and purpose – to provide 10/10 customer service, to have a happy workforce and to avoid waste.  That’s it.  Using three ‘pillars’ of freedom, support and feedback, workers are able to play to their strengths.  Stripping away a rules-based approach of control over overtime, expense claims and paper-chasing appraisals, the company has increased in profitability, size and achievement of customer and industry awards.

The multinational has dispensed with a complex competency framework and adopted strengths-based recruitment.  If you can identify applicant’s strengths and place them in a role where they can use those strengths, then they are likely to flourish.

In another workshop, ‘multiple scaling’ was introduced as a simple concept to be used in performance and coaching conversations.  On a scale of 0 to 10, where would you rate your overall competence?  Choose 2 or 3 specific competences required to do your job and rate those on a scale of 0 to 10.  Then discuss a scale of your choice and talk about why you think you perform at that level.  What has helped you perform at that level?  Comparing that to another scale, what’s the difference?  What are you doing differently at the higher level?  What would other people notice about you that was different?  And if you were at 10, how would you and other people know?

Having reflected with Jan after the conference, we realised life situations are not so simple.  It’s obvious that we all have weaknesses.   So just to talk about strengths can be misleading for people and for organisations.  However, can we use our strengths to combat our weaknesses?   If we assume that all required competences for a particular role to be performed well need to be at 5 or above, what about those we rate below 5?

For example, someone rates their IT skills at 3.  But they rate their strength to learn through someone else at 8, especially if that includes hands-on learning.   So they need to use their strength of rapport in identifying someone who is strong in IT skills, learning from a manual, summarising it and coaching them in a hands-on, encouraging way.  Their IT skills soar to 5!

If another person’s strength is high (say, 7) in talking through issues while it’s low (say, 4) in sitting down in a room on their own to write an essay, can they use their strength in vocal discussion to combat their relative weakness in written work through using a digital recorder, for example?

People succeed, thrive and prosper – we flourish – when we use our strengths, apply them to strengthen those weaknesses we cannot ignore, and when we are in an enabling environment.  Who will you strengthen and encourage today?

For more information on CAPP see www.cappeu.com and for more on scaling see The Solutions Focus