Build on Strengths

Have you ever felt like you were never quite "there," like you were giving it your all, making good progress, even succeeding, but still not "measuring up," in your own eyes or in the eyes of someone who matters to you?

Some people thrive on that feeling. I'm thinking Olympic athletes, the kind of high achievers who use "not there yet" as fuel. But for the rest of us, feeling like you're never there can wear you down. And it doesn’t stay home when you go to work. It sits in on every planning meeting and every month end performance review.

Looking for Gaps

You have the same situation running a business. You’ll find it in all the spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. No matter what level of performance you achieve, the game is all about purposefully moving the goal posts and defining the next higher level goals and performance required to get ahead and stay ahead.

The difference between where you are and this next level is the performance “gap” the organization has to fill. By definition, any ambitious business will always have a performance gap. The alternative, the status quo, is rarely an option or a desired state.

Gap definition and gap analysis is a philosophy that comprises a lot of tried and true methods. The question of “where are we,” versus “where do we want to be”? shows up everywhere in business: SWOT analysis in strategic planning, “kaizen” on the shop floor, variance analysis in accounting all measure actual results against forecast. These are meat and potatoes management tools, and they're indispensable. You cannot run a business without knowing where you stand versus where you want to stand.

The Human Cost

But there is a human dimension to organizational striving, and the human dimension can be tricky. There are elite athletes on every team of course, but in many cases continuously moving the goals posts can wear down the team. If you've been around a while it’s easy to zero in on the variances, identify the gaps and ask tough questions faster than anyone can answer them.

What did we expect? What did we get? If we missed it, why? If we beat it, were the goals too low? Unfavorable variances tend to get a lot more meeting time than favorable variances. We've all sat on one side of that table or the other. The gaps we willingly embrace become a threat to the team, the company, career progression.

Organizational striving is not for the faint of heart. While it may invigorate the “A” students, it can wear down the average player, challenge morale, and otherwise stress a company culture intended to be warm and otherwise healthy. Even the best players can suffer burnout if pushed too hard for too long. Trying to get better feels an awful lot like you’re never good enough. The positive tone of continually trying to make progress can feel an awful lot like the continual failure to measure up.

The Evolution Default Switch

There's a reason gaps get more attention than strengths. It's a feature of how we're built. Martin Seligman and others in positive psychology point out that our instinct to obsess over threats is a survival trait, not a character defect. He traces the case for it in his book, “Learned Optimism”: it kept our ancestors alive long enough to have children. Gaps in your peripheral vision got you eaten. Gaps in your food supply caused your kids to starve. We are naturally programmed to continually scan for, plan for, avoid-at-all-cost gaps of all kinds and the anxiety born of that instinct doesn't know the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and a bad quarter. “Gap anxiety” got us all to the dance.

None of that makes gap analysis per se the villain. You have to move the organization forward, everyday, all ways, and forever, otherwise the competition out there will be waiting to eat you, and unlike the saber tooth, there’s no chance it will become extinct. Anxiety surrounding the gaps is not a villain, it’s the default, the thing our wiring tends to lead us toward without much prompting, and in business it’s constantly getting a lot of prompting.

Focus on the Positive

Enlightened management looks for ways to embrace and counterbalance the commercial and evolutionary anxiety our teams face. How do you keep the team leaning into progress. Over the years management has become increasingly more enlightened about how to get results in a way that optimizes the human dimension: participative management, team-based structures, flatter hierarchies, employee game rooms and lounges have emerged as elements of the desire to keep the team relaxed yet striving. They made the tone friendlier, the organization less hierarchical, and team members more autonomous. But gap analysis still tends to take center stage in many organizations.

What Seligman and Barbara Fredrickson offer is a richer language for the other side of the scale. Over many decades, their evidence based research indicates that “Learned Optimism” and “Positivity” are crucial to human happiness. So in a management context, focusing on the positive, strengths, capabilities, and progress should deserve the same rigor and focus that the gaps get: strengths should be measured, discussed, celebrated, and studied for all that they reveal. When there is a general shortage of talent in almost every level, focusing on strengths may very well bolster happiness, reduce burnout, and improve retention.

Terra Firma

Picture a business trying to close a gap the way you'd picture crossing a river. You're on an island, you need to get to the mainland, and there's water in between. You need a bridge, or a boat, or something.

Here's the question that gap analysis alone doesn't ask: what's the land like where you're standing? A bridge is only as good as the ground it's anchored to. Before you start building anything to cross the gap, you need an inventory of strengths and the possibilities those strengths imply. What does this team actually do really well? Who already knows something about building bridges, or rafts, or anything that floats? What resources are close by that the team could gather and leverage? Rocks? Lumber? Who knows anything about masonry? Who knows carpentry? Those strengths and resources are the material the bridge gets built from.

Broaden and Build

Focusing on strengths and possibilities frees the mind to relax, open up and imagine new solutions. Barbara Fredrickson from her book “Positivity” calls this “broaden and build.” This is how progress gets made. The research suggests that people close down in the face of pessimism and negativity but open up and blossom in the face of optimism and positivity. So don’t just focus on the gap and what is deficient.

Just telling someone what's wrong with a product or a process shuts down the room pretty fast, but asking where the “compromises” are, in an otherwise “good” product tends to open up discussion. No one needs to defend themselves or feel threatened by the history that we found perfectly acceptable yesterday, but that today we choose to respectfully embrace, leverage, and then systematically move on from.

The same holds at the individual level. Everyone on a team has weaknesses. Everyone also has real strengths. Naming those strengths first, out loud and often, gives team members the footing to come back tomorrow and try again. Nobody does their best work while being told that where they stand is not good enough. It’s just where they are today. We build for tomorrow and the possibilities there are endless.

Trial and Error

Making progress requires moving off of where you are and into the unknown. Finding certainty in the unknown is expensive and slow. You need intelligent risk-taking and that requires confident players that know how to build on their strengths and the strengths of their other members. Beyond that, optimism and positivity build the confidence to embrace trial and error, and that process is a force multiplier. Build on real strengths, select ideas with merit, take some action, see what happens. If it doesn't work, double back quickly, and try the next thing.

Organizations that obsess over gaps and fail to recognize their strengths can get too cautious. They don’t know where to build. Caution turns into analysis paralysis, studying a decision well past the point where more study helps anyone. It’s that slow grind to avoid mistakes at all costs, including progress. Positivity promotes smart risk taking, trial and error, and forward movement; the team that tries something, watches what happens, and adjusts faster and will outrun the team still perfecting its model. What makes that speed possible isn't recklessness. It's knowing your own strengths well enough to have the confidence to bet intelligently on the match-up between strengths and weaknesses, and take the risk in the first place.

So don't ignore the gap. If it's there, own it, study it, close what can be closed. If it’s not there, define it. But don't stare into it all day. The status quo is not an option. Look down into the ravine long enough to know what you're crossing. Then look up, take stock of the ground under your feet, celebrate the strengths of the people standing with you, and go build something.