This book is answering such questions as: 1) Why building on your strengths is smarter than trying to fix your weaknesses 2) How to identify your unique strengths 3) How to reposition yourself at work to use those strengths more fully 4) How to keep a fresh set of strengths in place as you grow Marcus Buckingham is passionate about helping you identify your unique strengths and unleash their power. As you read and work your way through the program in this book, you will become convinced that growing through your strengths is the ticket to your future happiness, effectiveness and success. He refutes the approach of improvement by fixing mistakes as a dead end that cannot help you discover how you can be exceptional.

Strengths and Mistakes
Everybody make mistakes, the question is whether you would do better by learning from those mistakes of by focusing on building your strengths instead. For instance lets think ? do athletes perform better by filling their minds with images of winning or images of losing?

Recent research has explored two approaches toward business success, ?Appreciative Inquiry? and ?Positive Organizational Change?. Both of them based on the same fundamental principle: Managing mistakes can help you limit the range of negative outcomes you might incur, but will not contribute to great success. However, if you study what works in your organization and build on it, you can expand your ?positive deviance? ? that is, the good side of being out of sync with the ordinary.

You get a great feeling of accomplishment when you have used your best efforts to do a great piece of work. How often do you feel it? For most people , it is about once a week, but why not reverse that and feel great four of five days a week? When most of your assignments do not use your best talents and skills, are you really contributing all you can to your company? You can build positive deviance at work by capitalizing on your strengths.

The process of engaging your strengths more fully has six steps:
1) ?Bust The Myths? by determining what is blocking your way;
2) ?Get Clear? by assessing your strengths;
3) ?Free Your Strengths? by using them the best way;
4) ?Stop Your Weaknesses? by learning how to eliminate them;
5) ?Speak Up? by building a solid team;
6) ?Build Strong Habits? by learning how to sustain your new approach.

Myths about Personal Growth
The first myth is: ?As you grow, your personality changes?. The truth is that growth comes from discovering and building on who you are already.
The second myth is that you have the greatest room for growth where you are weak, so it pays to seek growth there. Although you need to pay attention to weaknesses that can endanger your well-being, you will find that you have more ability to grow where you are strong. You will experience greater growth by emphasizing what you already do well than by spending time and energy on something you are not motivated to do.
The third myth is that you should do ?whatever it takes to help your team?. The answer is not just doing anything that needs to be done, but finding ways to give your strongest talents to the team effort.

Clarify Your Strengths
Your strengths are your talents, skills and knowledge. Talent is your innate aptitude for an activity. A skill is something you learn and become more adept at doing through practice. Knowledge is your understanding of what needs to be done in a specific situation.
If someone asks you about your weaknesses, you are likely to recite a long, specific list. However, if someone asks you about your strengths, you may list a few vague ideas or some general characteristic. Instead, think about those things that give you a feeling of glowing strength. Write them down in a specific sentence. Your goal is to ?capture, clarify and confirm? these strengths. When you find yourself in an activity you particularly dislike, write that down, too. Ask yourself these questions to clarify which aspects of your job matter:
1. Does the reason why you do your work matter?
2. Do the people you are doing it with or for matter?
3. Does when you are doing it matter?
4. Does the nature of the activity matter?
Use the ?yes? answer to create a general statement of what your strengths are. Before you commit yourself to enhancing your strengths in front of other people, confirm your analysis of your skills and assets by checking them against the ?SIGNs? of strengths:

- ?Success? ? Do you do the activities successfully?
- ?Instincts? ? Do you intuitively feel like doing these activities?
- ?Growth? ? Do these activities come easily to you?
- ?Needs? ? Do they make you feel satisfied and true to yourself?

Note that building on your strengths is an ongoing process. Your strengths will change over time as you grow. You will add new ones, while previous strengths will drop away because they cease to be relevant to your situation.

Use Your Strengths.
Look at your top three strengths and consider how well you have been using them. The task is to make them more prominent in your work. Evaluate how well you are abandoning your weaknesses. Filter out tasks that distract you from what you are trying to accomplish. To focus on you strengths, work through the four ?FREE? areas : ?Focus, release, educate, expand?.
- Focus ? Understand how, when and how often you use a specific strengths at work, and the feedback you get when you use it.
- Release ? Assess where you are underutilizing each of your strengths. Try new things, see things differently and bring what you do best to bear.
- Educate ? Beef up your skill set. Become more adroit at using your strengths.
- Expand ? Redefine your job around your strengths. Your proficiency helps the whole team.

Stop Doing It
Probably you are motivated to stop doing tasks and activities you dislike. Acronym for figuring out how to do this is ?STOP: Stop, Team Up, Offer Up, Perceive?:
- Stop ? Cease the activity you dislike and see if anyone notices. Sometimes people do irrelevant tasks that aren?t connected to anything. Simply ending them frees up time for yourself, lowers your stress level and allows you to contribute more to the team.
- Team up ? Consider who on your team actually enjoys this activity. Can you swap part of your respective jobs? Does this person know a trick that could help you do the job in a more enjoyable manner?
- Offer up ? Substitute using one of your strengths to get the job done or offer to do a different task instead.
- Perceive ? Look at your weakness with fresh eyes. Can you learn to see it differently? Can you connect it to something you enjoy doing?

Build a Strong Team
You can change your team by changing your role within it. Definitely you have to talk to your manager first, but you can prepare to that by having a series of conversations with you colleagues or friends. Have a half ? hour talk about your strengths. Base this chat on the strengths you have identified, backed up with a couple of clear examples from your recent work. Explain why those strengths are important to your work. Encourage your colleagues to ask question and offer feedback. Then ask another friend or two to go through the same process.

When you feel comfortable with your materials, meet with you boss. Plan as much of the meeting as you can in advance. Writing a plan will help you keep the meeting on track. Your goal is to move your job definition toward your strengths, not to change everything overnight. Discuss your strengths with the manager and ask for his/her feedback/input. Plan some action items together and set some timelines to make the commitment more concrete.
If you?re the boss on the receiving end of these conversations, it is important to hear and validate what your employee says. However, you have to handle the realities of running the team, so you will have to be firm about what needs to be done as you work through building a strengths-based team. Sometimes you will need to have reality-check conversations with people who think they have strengths that they have not demonstrated.

Make Your Strengths Last
Develop a method of continuing to identify, use and build your strengths, or the effects will dissipate quickly. Make it a daily routine to evaluate the three strengths you are using to change your job into a strengths-based experience and the three weaknesses you are trying to shut down. Each week, identify two actions that will strengthen your strengths and weaken your weaknesses.

Examine each quarter on what you have been working to accomplish, and evaluate your strengths and weaknesses for the next quarter. Go through this process regularly to clarify and confirm your strengths. You will be growing and your job is likely to change, so be sure of what you want to accomplish as you multiply your strengths. Keep your long-range goals in focus.

By Marcus Buckingham
Copyright 2007 by One Thing Productions, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon&Schuster, Inc., N.Y. 270 pages.