Even with the help of tools such as StandOut it can be quite the challenge to build your strengths for a lifetime.
Sure, you have innate genius. Everybody does. This word “genius” might strike you as a bit overblown, but only because genius gets tossed around pretty cavalierly these days. Everyone from the latest disposable pop star to a chef who knows how to make crème brulée is dubbed with the term. In fact, if you do a search for “Marcus Buckingham is a genius,” you’ll get . . . well, you won’t get any hits at all. But let’s not dwell on that. What I’m getting at is simply that the word genius has become diluted and has evolved, as many words do, quite far from its original meaning.
Genius derives from the Latin gignere, meaning “to beget,” and its original sense in English described a guardian spirit present with a person from birth—something like a guardian angel. Many of us in the twenty-first century may not think a lot about guardian spirits, but the word changed over time to take on the broader sense of a person’s natural, inherited abilities. And in this sense, we do all have a genius.
I’ve seen it in my own kids. Okay, I didn’t actually see any spirits hovering over my daughter Lilia when she was born, but I have seen her genius in action literally from her first words. Lilia started talking later than most children do, but when she did start, she spoke in complete sentences. One of her first utterances, as she lay there, a sweet-natured, wide-eyed, three-year-old, looking up at her mom, was this: “Mommy, that’s a lovely necklace.”
Of all the possible sentences she could have picked, why did she pick that one? No simple “More!” or “Stop!” for her, no sir. She chose to compliment her mother’s accessories. And I think I know why.
You might expect me to say that she went on to become a child prodigy fashion designer, or that she was reading at a fifth-grade level in the first grade. Well, I suppose Lilia is as interested in clothes as any young girl, but she doesn’t have any designs ready to show in Milan. And I think she’s plenty bright, but it’s not as if she’s already parsing Shakespearean iambic pentameters in kindergarten.
No, what Lilia was showing us with that first sentence was a precocious tendency toward something psychologists call “reciprocal altruism.” That is to say, she was aware that goodwill is harvestable: if you sow it now, you may be able to reap it in the future. So when she complimented Mommy on her necklace, she realized that by saying something nice right now, later on Mommy might be nice to her in return. We didn’t teach her this—and if she didn’t possess it, I have no idea how we would. Lilia just instinctively understands reciprocal altruism, and she uses it to get people to do what she wants them to do.
That may sound cynical on her part, but the thing is, Lilia doesn’t know she’s doing it. She just does it, naturally. It’s part of her genius. And in ways far beyond her conscious understanding it guides her actions and pushes her to do things that most other kids don’t. At school, for example, Lilia has deployed this genius to finagle her way into her schoolmates’ hearts. What should be a twenty-second walk from the assembly hall to her classroom routinely takes ten minutes as fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, who shouldn’t even know she exists, scoop her up into a smoochy “Lilia!” hug, as she squeals with delight. After being at the school only a couple of months, she’d already been sowing goodwill. She can’t stop herself.
At her most recent parent-teacher conference, Lilia’s teacher showed us the results of a class project in which the children had set goals for the upcoming semester (excellent training for the future denizens of corporate America). The first goal seemed worthy enough: “Learn to write better” (misspelled). All right, that’s to do with knowledge. We can work on that. No real worries here. Move along to the next one.
The second goal was more alarming: “Stop fooling the teachers.” Excuse me? Stop fooling the teachers? Since when do children this young have to be reminded not to manipulate their teachers? Have I missed something? Maybe it’s a generational thing? Perhaps many of the other children had that on their list of goals as well? How many—ah, none. Okay, then. Apparently our child is unique.
If I needed confirmation that not every child approaches life the same way Lilia does, I got it that night from my son, Jack. I shared the story of Lilia’s goals with him—mea culpa. Not the wisest parenting move, I now realize, expecting him to chuckle with me when I got to the “stop fooling the teachers” part. There were no chuckles. Not even a grin.
“You can fool the teachers?” he asked, baffled.
“Er, no,” I fumbled. “I just meant that . . .” I stopped. I could see I’d lost him. He was trying to recalibrate his understanding of a universe in which teachers could actually be fooled. His confusion was less “How do you do that?” than “Why would you even want to do that?”
Such behavior in my five-year-old is amusing, even kind of adorable. But you can see how this same genius for reciprocal altruism that makes her schoolmates love her might get her into trouble down the line. She’s not too young to have this genius, but she’s still too young to channel it intentionally and put it to good use. She could turn out to be very effective at influencing people in sales, say, or as a leader. But if she’s not conscious and careful about what she’s doing, she could easily squander this gift and turn into a manipulative person.
Of course, one would hope that we adults are all conscious and intentional enough that we recognize our genius for what it is, and channel it appropriately.
But what if we’re not?
What if we’re all, when it comes to our genius, our unique combination of strengths, the equivalent of five-year-olds— using our genius, if at all, haphazardly and without any real sense of purpose and direction?
Obviously I don’t mean to compare you to a five-year-old. My point is simply that despite the fact that your genius—your particular combination of strengths—is deeply a part of who you are, it is exceedingly challenging to understand it, take control of it, and make it work for you.
The most basic challenge, of course, is that it’s hard to see your own uniqueness. As I saw with Lilia, your strengths are a part of you whether you’re conscious of them or not. And because they’re so woven into the fabric of who you are, they can actually be quite difficult to pinpoint. Certain things come so naturally to you that you don’t see your ability to do them as unique; you just think it’s you. Or rather, you don’t even think anything. You just do what you do because it comes to you too easily to require any analysis. It’s not that you don’t value your uniqueness; it’s that you don’t see it. You may even assume that your abilities are no big deal because everybody must have them.
Which points to a second challenge: other people don’t care what makes you unique. As oblivious as we can be to our own strengths, it’s even easier to ignore the particular and unique strengths of others. We assume that if we have a talent or inherent ability, everybody else does too. Or if we’re not naturally drawn to doing something, we find it hard to understand why anybody else would be.
No one else is worrying about what makes you unique. Nobody is dedicated to identifying that special cluster of talents you have. School doesn’t do it—they want to make sure that everybody learns what everybody is supposed to learn. Work doesn’t do it—they’re most concerned about what needs to get done. Everybody in your life has expectations and demands that don’t necessarily have any direct connection to your strengths. It makes for a lot of background noise.
If you were an engineer, you might say that your life has a terrible signal-to-noise ratio. Even if you felt impelled to ask yourself, “What is my genius? What am I drawn to do naturally? What makes me who I am?” you are surrounded by crowds of people advising you to “try this” and “you have to do it this way” and “be like that,” drowning out that impulse.
Though your genius is ingrained, the right way to channel it is not. This final challenge is that even if you do cut through the noise and identify what unique strengths you have to offer, that’s still not enough. To be truly your best, it isn’t sufficient merely to understand that you’re unique or even to understand what makes you unique. Sustained success comes only when you take what’s unique about you and figure out how to make it useful.
Your strengths, in essence, are value-neutral. They can be put to good use, or they can (as Lilia’s poor teachers can attest) be put to bad use. If you don’t own your strengths, if you don’t know them and understand them and consciously decide how you can best apply them in your life, they will come out anyway. But you won’t be in control of how they do.
On your own personal strengths journey, here are three principles to guide you:
Principle #1: Your Genius Is Precise
Current thinking about effectiveness advises us to be flexible, versatile quick-studiers, ready-willing-and-able to jump from one challenge to another. A close scrutiny of excellence, however, reveals that our edge—our particular genius—is quite precise. We each have specific areas where we consistently stand out, where we can do things, see things, understand things, and learn things better and faster than ten thousand other people can. And when we find ourselves in these areas, our “strengths zone” if you will, we are magnificent. Self-assured and flushed with success, we imagine we can do just about anything that we turn our minds to.
And yet we can’t. Move us even slightly out of our strengths zone, and our outstanding performance falls to average alarmingly quickly.
Michael Jordan offers an extreme example. As foolhardy as it now seems in retrospect, Jordan retired from the NBA in his prime to attempt to do in baseball what he had already accomplished in basketball. Jordan had been a high school baseball all-star, and, although he opted for basketball in college, it remained a lifelong dream of his and his father’s to be a professional baseball player. After his dad’s untimely death he felt compelled to honor the dream they had shared. When he first started out, Jordan hit .202 in the minor leagues (barely above the fabled “Mendoza Line” of .200 that baseball fans refer to as the minimum competence for a hitter at any level). But his work ethic in basketball was legendary, and he applied the same dedication to his baseball career. In just one year, he raised his average to .252.
A 50-point year-to-year increase in batting average is remarkable in any league. Terry Francona, his manager at the time (and current manager of the Boston Red Sox) claims that with a little more work, Jordan could well have made it to the big leagues—and furthermore, Francona insists that there the legendary Michael Jordan would have been . . . a journeyman player. At best. And if that’s all he’d ever done, you’d never have heard of him.
After one season in the minors, Jordan returned to the Chicago Bulls to win three more NBA Championships. He was not the same player he was before—not according to his coach Phil Jackson. According to Jackson he was a better player, more passionate about the game, more in control of his gifts, and, significantly, much more inclusive of his teammates.
His time away from basketball had taught him not that career experiments are useless—during his time with the Birmingham Barons he discovered a great deal about the extent and the limits of his own strengths, as you will if you decide on what turns out to be a misguided career detour. Rather, what he learned is that you have to fully own your own genius before you can responsibly offer it up to others.
Michael Jordan is a distant figure, both in level of achievement and, now, in years since he last graced the basketball court. I saw the precision of genius much closer to home. At a very early age my sister, Pippa, discovered that she could dance—not just move in time to the music, but dance as though her guardian angel had been teaching her for centuries. She donned her tutu, skipped off to ballet class every afternoon, and then, at thirteen, attended the Royal Ballet Boarding School where years of bar work and choreography and movement classes prepared her to graduate into the Royal Ballet Company itself and become the perfect classical English ballet dancer.
The problem for Pippa was that the “perfect classical English ballet dancer,” the dancer who could take the lead role in Swan Lake or the Nutcracker, was supposed to be a brilliant technical athlete. She was supposed to be able to do four pirouettes to the left and four to the right, and then do it again and again, without breaking a sweat. And Pippa couldn’t. She could do three—no problem, three to the left and three to the right—but not four. More than ten thousand hours of deliberate practice, huge talent, unbelievable dedication, but still she couldn’t do what was needed to excel in her chosen field. At this point it looked as if she’d never become a principal dancer. It looked as if she’d picked the wrong career.
But she hadn’t. Her career didn’t stall. During her years in school, Pippa had discovered that she wasn’t just a “dancer.” Instead she was a dancer with a particular set of strengths. She was a lyrical dancer, a dancer of beautiful lines, flowing form, long legs, and the most expressive arms you’d ever seen. And so when she realized that she would never excel in the ballet company she had dedicated her life to, she wasn’t utterly derailed. Instead, she thought deeply about the precise nature of her “genius” as a dancer, and then sought out a very particular dance company, the Nederlands Dans Theatre, which specialized in making dance pieces for lyrical dancers, dancers whose strength was grace rather than pure athleticism. After a couple of nerve-racking auditions, she was hired by the company and then spent the next ten years— ten wonderful, challenging, highly successful years—expressing her unique strengths in dance.
No matter where you look, you can find examples of how surprisingly precise genius is. Ellen DeGeneres is a stellar entertainer? Well, no. Ellen is a gifted comedienne, but move her even slightly off her game and put her behind the judges’ desk of American Idol and her brilliance fades. Likewise, Jon Stewart is a funny, ironic, and always winning host. Well, yes . . . of his own political commentary show. Ask him to host the Oscars and his irony translates as condescension, so the jokes aren’t funny and the audience is lost.
Robert Nardelli, president of GE’s Power Systems division, is a genius-level leader, and leadership is transferable, right? Not necessarily. Install him as CEO of Home Depot or Chrysler and he doesn’t look quite so impressive.
As CEO of Hearst, Cathy Black was the modern-day model of the modern media executive, versatile, plugged in, focused, and efficient. Upon her retirement, she was appointed superintendent of New York City Schools. She flamed out after three months.
Malcolm Gladwell is a phenomenal writer, and since writing is writing, shouldn’t his skill be transferable from articles to books? Not exactly. His true genius is the carefully argued, silky-prosed, three-thousand-word article—today there is no one better. But when he comes to write his books, this genius accompanies him, he can’t shake it, and so his books all have the same recognizable quality: a series of elegant articles wrapped around a common theme.
Your genius will be similarly precise. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with new positions or stretch yourself with new challenges, as Gladwell did in moving from articles to books. You should. But when you do, know that, consciously or not, you will bring your particular brand of genius with you.
This means that if you want to become, let’s say, a manager, you won’t be able to be just any sort of manager. On the contrary, your genius as a manager will depend on the specific strengths you possess. Similarly, if you put yourself in a leadership position, you will be a very particular kind of leader. If you are in client service, you will excel in a distinct way.
For example, imagine that the StandOut assessment reveals your top two strengths Roles as Influencer and Pioneer. This is what your results say about the competitive advantage you will bring to any position, any team:
You keep innovation high on the agenda, challenging us to make the exceptional real. You are usually the first on the block to own the newest toy or gadget and you love to tell the stories of how you got it, how it works, how it’s going to revolutionize . . . everything. As soon as everyone starts buying what you’re selling, however, you’re on the waiting list for version 2.0. You revel in introducing ideas that create a furl in people’s brow. If you see a skeptical, quizzical look in their eyes, you know you’ve hooked one. You don’t like to rally behind anything obvious or conventional. If everyone else is doing it, it pains you to tow that line. In fact, you will swim against the tide for the simple joy of seeing if you can get anyone to swim with you.
Apply these characteristics to a manager position and you will be the kind of manager who challenges, cajoles, persuades, is never satisfied, pushing for more, pressing for action. It will always be an intense experience working directly for you. But whether this intensity comes across to us, your employees, as invigorating or as exhausting depends on how good a job you do at understanding and channeling your genius.
As a leader your style will be characterized by optimism about the future and an impatience to get us there. Your sense of momentum is acute, visceral. It will define you as a leader. But, again, whether this translates to us, your followers, as a dynamism from which we can all draw energy or as mere recklessness will depend on how well you focus it.
In a service role your power will be your confidence that things will work out right. You will confront any obstacles and root out any shortcut to make things right for me, your client. You cannot not be this sort of service provider. Whether this winds up making me, your client, happy in the long run, however, isn’t certain. You could become a blowhard who promises more than he can deliver. Or, with your strengths sharp and focused, you could excel as the first line of defense for difficult clients needing help with novel, as yet untested, products.
In each of these positions you can excel, as you can in many others. But you are most likely to do so only when you understand and respect how precise your genius truly is.
Which, of course, leads to the next principle.
Principle #2: You Can’t Respect What You Don’t Remember
In a world that doesn’t really care about you and your strengths, the responsibility falls to you to apply your strengths consciously every day. Ironically, the unconscious nature of strengths—the fact that you are most yourself when you vanish into whatever you are doing—makes this quite difficult to do. And yet, if you don’t do it, if you allow your strengths to remain as unconscious, subliminal reactions, you won’t have a lifeline to grab on to when events conspire to yank, lull, or lure you off your strengths path.
After college Michael became a software engineer, writing code. And because he was good at it and hardworking and reliable, he got promoted to team leader. Here he also excelled. He is a wonderful explainer. Some people get impatient when new team members don’t understand something. Not Michael. For some reason the more difficulty a person has in understanding something, the more patient he becomes. He slows right down to their speed and walks them through what they need to “get,” step by step. (In the language of StandOut, his top two strength Roles are Teacher and Equalizer.)
His team loved him. And so he was promoted again, this time to project manager.
Now he was being paid to run an entire project for his company, and the strengths required were very different from the team leader position. The two most important were first, designing-testing-redesigning the software as the project went along (Pioneer), and second, handling the client warmly and tactfully (Provider).
Michael struggled with both. He hated it when the software didn’t do what it was supposed to do, and then having the client see it not do what it was supposed to do, and then having to charm his way through the meeting so that the client wouldn’t feel panicked, and then having to repeat the whole horrible process at the next update meeting. Each time the software wouldn’t do something it was supposed to, and each time he would have to find the right way to dance around it and put the client at ease.
This might not sound like hell to you. You might embrace the inherent ambiguity in this kind of design-and-hand-hold-as-you-go position. But Michael didn’t. He was capable of it—he’s smart and reliable and hardworking—but it drained him. Day by day it dragged him down, slower and slower, until one day he stopped altogether. In his words: “One morning I just couldn’t put my key in the car door.”
That day was fifteen years ago. And he hasn’t worked since.
They say that burnout happens the same way that bankruptcy does: gradually, gradually, then suddenly. This was certainly true for Michael. In the project manager position, he found himself day after day being asked to have strengths he didn’t have. He became weaker and weaker, until suddenly one day he broke down. That day is where he is today. Fifteen years have gone by, and though he has fought hard—harder than I think I might have done if my life had emptied me out—he hasn’t moved.
I was talking to him the other day and for the first time in a long time he brought up that day when everything stopped.
“I just didn’t have it, Marcus. I didn’t have what it took to get the job done. I knew it. My boss knew it. Everyone knew it.”
“Well, what did you used to be good at?” I asked quietly. “When you used to look forward to going to work, which activities did you look forward to?”
At first he said nothing. He just sat back on his sofa staring up at the ceiling, and I thought he’d ignored me or couldn’t be bothered to answer. Then, with a small smile, he looked at me and said: “Tutorials. I was really good at writing tutorials. I loved trying to pretend I was looking at a computer screen for the first time and had no idea what to do, what button to press, what sequence to follow. I loved doing that. I loved writing really helpful tutorials.”
It was such a weirdly precise thing to say, and yet he said it as if he’d never known it before that moment. He certainly hadn’t known it fifteen years ago. Or at least he hadn’t known it clearly enough. When he started to struggle, when “everyone knew” that he didn’t have what it took to succeed in his new position, he had no conscious strengths to fall back on. He came to believe what everyone around him was telling him, that he didn’t have what it took to get the job done, and gradually— then suddenly—his confidence disappeared. And one day he couldn’t put the key in the car door and drive to work.
Obviously I’m not saying what happened to Michael will happen to you. I am saying that life will throw obstacles at you. Take responsibility now for remembering what your core strengths are so that you can grab on tightly to them when things go awry. When you take a job you should never have taken, when your boss doesn’t understand you, when your company RIFs you, when you start to question whether you have anything of value to offer, understanding your strengths will hold you in place, reorient you, and show you the way forward.
All that to say one of the most important outcomes from taking the StandOut assessment is simply that you remember your results. This is why we’ve chosen to target only your top two strength Roles. We could keep cutting these Roles into ever-thinner slices, or drill down into your third, fourth, and fifth Roles, but what we would gain in complexity we would lose in practicality—a week after taking the test you wouldn’t be able to recall what your strengths were, and since what you can’t recall you can’t consciously apply, much of StandOut’s power would slip away.
When I took StandOut, my top two were Creator-Stimulator. If you want to know what this says about me, by all means turn to Principle #3: You Must Reach Beyond Your Roles, but, frankly, at the most basic level, what matters is that I remember those two words. If I can remember those two words for a week, then I am more likely to think consciously about how I am using those strengths that week. And if I can do this for one week, my brain’s retrieval of those two words will become just that little bit easier, and so I am more likely to be conscious of how I am applying them the next week, and the next, until ten years from now, if you ask me what my StandOut results were, my memory paths would be so well worn—technically, the memory would have migrated from the hippocampus, where all midterm memories are stored, to the cortex, where long-term memories live—that they would be instantly accessible to me.
To beat life’s terrible signal-to-noise ratio, you are going to have to turn up the signal. And the best way to do that is repetition. So keep it simple. Take StandOut, remember your top two Roles, think about how you’re going to channel them today, and then do the same again tomorrow. And tomorrow.
Principle #3: You Must Reach Beyond Your Roles
Conventional wisdom tells you to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Yet when you study the most successful people you discover that they do something quite different: they push themselves within their strengths zone. They certainly aren’t complacent. It’s more that they realize they will be at their most productive, their most creative, their most generous, their most collaborative if having found their edge, they spend their life sharpening it.
How do they do this? By using the raw material of their life to add detail to their understanding of their strengths. As I mentioned, my top two strength Roles are Creator-Stimulator. Since there are seventy-two different permutations of top two strengths Roles, it is possible that you have the same combination. And if you do, you and I will have much in common. We will both be enthusiasts, always looking to bring energy and optimism to new ideas. We will both be at our best when we know our subjects deeply, when we have crafted stories about our ideas, and when we have tailored our stories to each of our “audiences.” Yes, we will have to watch out that we don’t throw our full force behind an idea before we have vetted it fully, but, on our best days, both of us will be a compelling and uplifting force to our friends, colleagues, and families.
And yet there the similarities might end. The content of your ideas, the way in which you present them to others, how you dramatize them, and indeed your ultimate reasons for doing so, will almost certainly be different from mine.
To sharpen your edge, use your top two Roles as a starting point for investigating what your strengths look like in the real world. To help you begin, try an exercise that I call (tongue-ever-so-slightly-in-cheek) “Love It/Loathe It.” Simply draw a line down the middle of the pages of a note pad, write Loved It at the top of one column and Loathed It at the top of the other, and then carry the pad around with you for a week. Any time you find yourself looking forward to an activity, or getting so involved in the activity that you lose track of time, or feeling invigorated when you’re done with an activity, in the Loved It column scribble down precisely what you were doing. On the flip side, when you find yourself procrastinating an activity, or struggling to concentrate while you’re doing an activity, or feeling drained and empty after finishing an activity, scribble it down in the Loathed It column. (In both cases, be sure to write down only activities that you are doing, not activities that are being done to you.)
This teasing-apart of your reactions to a regular week of your life won’t take up much additional time, but it will force you to pay attention to the specific content of what you’re filling your weeks with and how you’re feeling about it. In short, it is the simplest way to gather the raw material you need to sharpen and refine your understanding of your strengths.
I have used my Creator-Stimulator combination to study human individuality, design strengths assessments, write books, speak on them, and build a company that trains managers to get better at getting the best from their people.
My sister is also a Creator-Stimulator. She used it to express her lyricism in ballet dancing. Then, after she retired and became a kindergarten teacher and hated it, she used it again to redirect her career back to the stage, where she could keep working with creative adults who wanted to learn how to perform as gracefully as she performs. She finished her masters in Fine Arts and now teaches at the London School of Contemporary Dance.
Michael didn’t know his own strength and lost his way. Now, after fifteen years he is back at school, learning how to use his Teacher-Equalizer combination to design online software tutorials.
Lilia? Who knows? My hope, as her dad, is that she will take control of her genius, respect it, understand it, express it, and refine it, so that she can—in her own way and in a career of her own choosing—become one.
And you? Well, only you can decide.