Although originally published in 2001, this book is coauthored by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton and is as relevant today as then. The team at w2wlink.com has taken the web-based interactive Strengths Finder Profile, which is based on years of research by The Gallup Organization. We highly recommend the book and excercises to any leader or manager seeking to identify the talents in their team and turn them into strong performance results. It will also guide you to challenge each member to excel and be confident in the roles they were hired to perform, so they can be the most effective group possible. You will learn to take charge of your own career by clearly knowing your strengths and managing your behavior. The book encourages self-analysis, action and building upon each individual's unique strengths.
Excerpt:
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The Revolution
What are the two assumptions on which great organizations must be built?
We wrote this book to start a revolution, the strengths revolution. At the heart of this revolution is a simple decree: The great organization must not only accomodate the fact that each employee is different, it must capitalize on these differences. It must watch for clues to each employee's natural talents and then position and develop each employee so that his or her talents are transformed into bona fide strengths. By changing the way it selects, measures, develops, and channels the careers of its people, this revolutionary organization must build its entire enterprise around the strengths of each person.
And as it does, this revolutionary organization will be positioned to dramatically outperform its peers. In our latest meta-analysis The Gallup Organization asked this question of 198,000 employees working in 7,939 business units within 36 companies: At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? We then compared the responses to the performance of the business units and discovered the following: When employees answered "strongly agree" to this question, they were 50 percent more likely to work in business units with lower employee turnover, 38 percent more likely to work in more productive business units, and 44 percent more likely to work in business units with higher customer satisfaction scores. And, over time, those business units that increased the number of employees who strongly agreed saw comparable increases in productivity, customer loyalty and employee retention.
Reprinted from excerpt located at amazon.com
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Marcus Buckingham,
has written the four best-selling books First, Break All The Rules (coauthored with Curt Coffman), Now, Discover Your Strengths (coauthored with Donald O. Clifton), The One Thing You Need To Know and Go Put Your Strengths To Work. He gives important insights to maximizing strengths, understanding the crucial differences between leadership and management, and fulfilling the quest for long-lasting personal success. In his role as author, independant consultant and speaker, Marcus Buckingham has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. He challenges conventional wisdom and shows the link between engaged employees and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, and rate of turnover. Buckingham graduated from Cambridge University in 1987 with a master's degree in Social and Political Science.
