The Larsen Group

Circles of Change:  Conversations with Dr. Zara Larsen

 on Change Leadership and Career Fulfillment

April 6, 2008

“Do Not Try to Teach a Pig to Sing”

Guest:  Andrea Sigetich, co-author, Play to Your Strengths

Anchoring Points:

1. Strengths are innate talents and gifts that underpin skills and passions.  They have a yearning quality to them – want to be used.   We feel good, strong and energized when they are at play.  Life flows and learning is easy.  They are triggered when a challenge comes.
2. We are brought up with the myth of well-roundedness.  As we progress, we can become generalists and loose sight of our passions.
3.  Strengths are a positive message for everyone in the workforce.  Stop dwelling on weaknesses and focus on our strengths to increase our success and our fulfillment.
4. Learning about our strengths is a process of self-discovery.  It’s fun and revealing!  It requires standing outside of ourselves and suspending the way we see the world.
5. Once we discover our strengths, we next have the opportunity to engage our strengths, by applying them to our work, adapting our work to match our strengths, and building our strengths.
6. Yes, you may need a weakness management plan – but it is simple to construct and implement. For low impact weaknesses, delegate it, purchase it, or ignore it.  For high impact, mitigate and/or shift.
7. As a leader, your power is in your strengths.  Build your leadership brand so that it plays to your unique array of strengths.  Tell the world!
8. You can increase the engagement of the people you lead, simply by asking them about their strengths.
9. Your legacy is a natural outgrowth of your strengths.  You strengths ARE your unique gifts and talents that you contribute to the world.

Overall point:    Development, in our personal lives and in organizations, has been focused for way too long on weakness development.  Developing to our weaknesses is boring, dis-engaging, and not likely to be successful.  Let's turn the weakness paradigm topsy-turvy.

Additional Thoughts from Dr. Zara Larsen:

1. Talent leadership in this day and age should not be about fitting round pegs into round holes, or reshaping square pegs so they fit into round holes.  This is about allowing and in fact creating a place for all sorts of shapes and sizes.
2. A leader’s challenge is to invest and to give the organization permission to safely experiment – but always transparently with true heart and empathy for its people.