Accelerate Growth by Building on Strengths

Discovering our strengths transformed our company.

In the six years since my business partner and I read Now, Discover Your Strengths, our firm has increased our annual revenue by more than 300 percent by building upon our strongest skills and those of our team.

Written by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, the book convinced us that working to address our weaknesses wastes valuable time and energy, and that we should play to our strengths instead.

When we altered some employees’ roles in accordance with this idea, they blossomed, gaining greater satisfaction from their work and becoming more productive. We have since continued to apply the “strengths” principle on many levels with excellent results, including by requiring a promising candidate for an internal position to complete a “strengths profile” to confirm they’re the right match.

PREMIUM RESEARCH: Best Practices in Employee Engagement

Our pre-employment assessment screens for such factors as drive, organizational fit, leadership style and culture. It also assesses values such as the needs for power and security.

This look inside a candidate’s head helps us to learn things about them that they might not know themselves, and to see if their values and traits align with, or complement, those of our team. Our team members prefer autonomy in their pursuit of mastery, for example, so we look for candidates who in evaluations with managers will candidly assess their own performances in terms of how they have capitalized on their strengths and mitigated their weaknesses.

At iMethods, each recruiter and account manager has a dashboard with about a dozen daily priorities built around their strengths and position. These priorities can include tasks like recruiting cold calls, recruiting contacts, new leads, client visits and new job orders.

In addition to the dashboard, every employee in the company has a “one thing” weekly priority that we will accomplish — no matter what. Being so finely focused helps us work more efficiently and satisfactorily.

When team members enjoy their work, they are more likely to do it and to do it well.  This has helped us maintain a successful placement ratio — as evaluated by clients and consultants — of more than 90 percent, while limiting internal turnover to 15 percent.

The Gallup Organization found that teams whose members strongly agree that they can play to their strengths every day are:

• 38 percent more likely to be highly productive
• 44 percent more likely to earn high customer-satisfaction scores
• 50 percent more likely to have high employee retention rates

The key, according to Buckingham, is to have employees answer “yes,” when you ask them: “At work, do you have the chance to do what you do best every day?”

At iMethods, we find what they do best early, and help them do it daily so that they can answer “yes.” In doing so, we have discovered that ensuring their success enables us to grow.