The Power of Strengths-Based Leadership in Job Crafting

As a leader, you’ve likely encountered the term ‘strengths-based leadership’ on various social media platforms.

This term, which gained popularity in the early 2000s through the research of Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, advocates focusing personal and professional development on strengths rather than weaknesses.

While the concept may seem straightforward, its practical application requires some mental gymnastics. Reflecting on my career, I realised I’ve spent the past two decades maximising my strengths and managing my weaknesses.

Many of you will have engaged in job crafting, perhaps without realising it. Job crafting occurs when individuals proactively modify aspects of their jobs to better align with their skills, interests, and motivations. Given a chance, many of us will have focused our energies on those aspects of the role we enjoy the most and had a boss periodically chastise us to complete a task that we found less desirable.

Job crafting has traditionally occurred as an employee-driven process, often without direct benefits for the employer. However, there’s an opportunity for a paradigm shift.

Employers can proactively engage in job crafting by shifting their mindset from person-job role fit to person-business outcome fit. This change in perspective can lead to a more productive and engaged workforce, with employees who feel their strengths are valued and utilised.

While this may represent a mindset change for employers, the positive outcomes are grounded in research.

Gallup is a well-known research and consulting firm that has conducted extensive studies on employee engagement and workplace dynamics.

One of the key findings is the importance of allowing employees to focus on their strengths. According to Gallup, employees who can use their strengths and abilities in their work are more engaged, productive, and satisfied.

While the outcomes listed are desirable, the challenge becomes where to start.

We advocate starting small and practical with a process accessible to every leader. It’s called a conversation.

However, we offer several suggestions to ensure the conversation is productive.

1. Consider the quality of your relationship: Safety comes first, and the conversation could feel threatening where trust has not been built.
2. Give time for reflection: Give the employee the questions days before meeting with them.
3. Listen and be curious: When meeting with employees, listen to what they say without judgment. Recognising that employees will feel vulnerable when talking about tasks they don’t enjoy is essential.

Here are several questions that could be helpful. ‘What parts of your role most energise you?’ ‘What parts of your role frustrate you the most?’ ‘What would you like the opportunity to do more of in your role?’ ‘If you had the choice, what tasks would you like to remove from your job?’

It’s important to note that asking these questions does not commit you to changing the role based on the person’s answers. However, it will give you greater insight into their strengths and motivations, and you may find easy wins available.

Fitting people to position descriptions is equivalent to pushing a square peg through a round hole.

 
The paradigm shift is thinking about employees beyond position descriptions and how we can better leverage their strengths to achieve business outcomes.