Strengths-Leadership to Exploit the Productivity Reservoir

Serial entrepreneur, professor, author, speaker and co-director of the DAS in Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Geneva [email protected]

An untapped reservoir of productivity proves to be a good anti-crisis vaccine

Bringing absenteeism down while boosting productivity is within everyone’s reach. It is a shame that so few managers know this simple yet devilishly effective recipe!

According to a well-documented Gallup study, there is a simple management strategy that reduces absenteeism by 41%, increases productivity by 17% and profits by 21%. Thanks to this approach, absenteeism is reduced without any overly complicated system or personalised monitoring of absentees, as is so often recommended today.

Among the other virtuous effects of this management approach are a 70% reduction in workplace accidents, a 40% reduction in quality defects and a 59% reduction in staff turnover. And, to top it all off, it also brings with it a 20% increase in turnover.

The recipe for obtaining all these “goodies” is simple: you just need engaged employees. The trouble is that a recent study carried out in French-speaking Switzerland shows that nearly 80% of employees are not as engaged as they could be. Their lack of engagement deprives most companies of a large share of the benefits mentioned above.

Engagement is therefore quite clearly the key issue. As I sought to show in my latest book, there is no single recipe for generating engagement. There are, however, more than fifty levers that can be activated to increase - or, conversely, decrease - the level of engagement within one’s teams. Each manager must therefore find the approach that suits them, it being understood that the only thing that matters is the level of engagement ultimately achieved.

Since a manager’s job is precisely to secure the engagement of their teams, it is essential to check what level they are achieving. To help those who want to measure it, we have made a free tool available to the public: www.EazyMirror.com. It makes it possible to measure engagement levels while absolutely preserving respondents’ anonymity.

Among all the levers that can improve employee engagement, there is one that is little known yet delivers spectacular results: making use of each employee’s strengths. Gallup states that it multiplies engagement levels by... six. Gallup’s study (and Gallup sells the StrengthsFinder test) did not even take into account the effects of the improved version of the approach, strengths leadership, which delivers even more impressive results. This version draws on recent discoveries in positive psychology.

As I am not myself qualified to run strengths leadership workshops, I am free to testify to the impact of these workshops in the MicroMBA programmes that I lead, particularly at Romandie Formation, some of whose projects were mentioned by PME Magazine.

Participants unanimously say that the experience they had in the strengths leadership workshops run by Patricia Torres was a discovery they particularly appreciated. The process for identifying each person’s strengths developed by Patricia Torres leads them to focus on their strengths rather than exhausting themselves trying to make up for their shortcomings. Once they have become aware of their strengths, participants in the strengths leadership workshop learn how to make better use of them within their team. The impact on their motivation boosts productivity while greatly increasing the satisfaction they derive from their work. These workshops also help to improve team dynamics and the quality of relationships between team members.

Strengths leadership also has one enormous advantage: becoming aware of their strengths leads participants to significantly increase their self-confidence, which also makes them more resilient. In a period of social and economic uncertainty such as the present one, increasing employees’ self-confidence is the greatest gift one can give them. They are, moreover, always grateful to their employer for giving them that gift. But it is also a gift for the employer, because resilient employees increase the resilience of the company.

Quite apart from helping participants to make a greater success of their innovation or change project, my aim in introducing strengths leadership workshops into the MicroMBA programme was to let participants experience a tool that they could then pass on to their own teams. It is amusing to note that most participants approach the workshop sceptically, telling themselves that they already know themselves well enough and do not need anyone to tell them what their strengths are. They quickly realise that this was not the case. Above all, they learn to better understand the impact of their strengths on others - which is sometimes negative, incidentally - as well as on their relationships with colleagues.

After several years of strengths leadership workshops in the MicroMBA, I have come to the conclusion that strengths leadership is an excellent complement to the Engaged Team Charters I have already discussed in a previous column. Each of these approaches on its own boosts engagement levels, but the combination of the two is magical.

Together, they represent the best protection against the effects of a crisis such as Covid-19. Investing in the resilience of one’s teams is the best vaccine for companies.