BY MARK WALLACE
Should you focus on your strengths or your weaknesses? What do you spend the most time talking about with your supervisor? Your strengths? Your weaknesses? Or something else? We all report to someone, and we should be having frequent conversations with that person. Think about what you talk about.
What percentage of your day do you spend doing work that involves using your personal strengths? Your weaknesses? Do you know the difference? Have you ever thought about what your strengths are? Do you have or are you known for having a “distinctive competency”? What are you really, really good at doing? What energizes you? What are the things that you do when you realize that four to five hours have passed “suddenly” because you’ve been so engrossed in an activity? If you realize what you are doing and how productive you’ve been doing “it,” can you replicate this performance again and again in the future? If so, your overall performance will improve.
These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself. Most of us hope to make the biggest possible contribution to our department for the longest period of time possible. But how does that happen? Sure, we have a mission statement that explains who we are, what we do, and for whom we do what we do. Many departments have published a list of values, goals, and desired outcomes. Some have fully developed vision statements. When it comes down to it, the vast majority of people in the fire service simply want to make a difference and leave their department better off than when they first joined it. They want to contribute and do the job in a way that will fulfill and sustain them as they do their part to keep their community safe.
Markus Buckingham and others involved in a concept they call the Strengths Movement (together with the Gallup Organization) have been looking at this issue for the past 20 years across a broad sample of the general public throughout the world. This article explores how some of their findings relate to the fire service and suggests what we can do to put our best organizational effort, innovation, and creativity into our collective strengths and manage around our weaknesses.
Assessing the Internal Environment
A key step in my fire department strategic planning model is “assessing the weaknesses and strengths of the internal environment.” The internal environment includes those things that are within the control of the department and are comprised of organizational weaknesses and strengths. At the same time, this assessment must consider the weaknesses and strengths of its individual members.
There are two ways to consider the internal environment. First is a global consideration of the department as a whole. Collectively, every fire department has weaknesses and strengths. The services the department delivers with the highest competence and best outcomes and those most highly regarded by the community and peers are among its organizational strengths and can be called a distinctive competency. Every fire department would prefer to be excellent in all that it does. The simple fact is that few will ever achieve this level of excellence. And, nearly all departments have one or a few of its services that can be considered as top quality or highly effective-i.e., a distinctive competency. Whether they are performing vehicle extrication, swift water rescue, high-angle rescue, ladder operations, or another service, the members of the department are the local or regional role model for other departments. They are known by their peers as the department to emulate because their department provides the “best practices” for that particular service.
If you evaluate the reason that department is distinctively competent in one or more of the services it provides, it’s often that it’s a service the department delivers frequently. Looking deeper, however, you will normally find that the skills, knowledge, and abilities of key members of the department required for highly effective service delivery are the personal strengths of the leaders of the organization. The leaders have deliberately gathered a team and used the members’ strengths to compound service strengths over time. They have invested sufficient effort and training to compound the strengths of their service delivery “virtuosos” in a way that the other members of the team are considered to be at least at the mastery level of service delivery.
Every fire company may not enjoy the same success or have its virtuosos, but success breeds success. They have put significant organizational effort and innovation into that strength, striving for maximum effectiveness. The “not-so-strong” companies become stronger, following the lead of the best as well as the training and education provided by the virtuoso. This leads to additional innovation and creativity around this strength and often results in contagious success across shifts and stations. Unfortunately, this is often counterintuitive to most managers and supervisors. I haven’t, as you may have noticed, qualified this phenomenon to any particular distinctive competency.
Focusing on Our Strengths
A Gallup survey, as reported by Buckingham, asked a large group of nonfire service people what they spent most of their time talking about with their supervisors or managers. These often important discussions reportedly involved strengths only 24 percent of the time, weaknesses 36 percent of the time, and “other stuff” 40 percent of the time. We have a big tendency as humans to fix people, problems, or systems 50 percent more often than we use our strengths to excel at those things that energize our lives.
However, individuals would prefer to do the things that make them feel stronger. If you like doing something that involves applying one of your personal strengths, you will likely do a better job at it. If you could, you would choose to focus your work on your strengths. Still, we easily get caught up in fixing our weaknesses.
Being good at something doesn’t always translate into its being one of your strengths. It’s really how you feel when you do it. So, how do you determine your personal strengths? If you have a desire to do it even when there are opportunities to do something else, it’s likely one of your strengths. Your strengths are things that you are naturally inquisitive about. And your strengths have a restorative quality to them: You feel good when you are applying your strengths. You find yourself doing the same thing as often as possible.
At the same time, few of us can really describe our personal strengths in detail. We tend to frame our weaknesses around our strengths. If someone asks us directly what our personal strengths are, the most common answer (according to Gallup) is that we like dealing with people (a safe and largely expected answer) because we haven’t spent the time defining, describing, and exploring our strengths in any organized manner. Only two in 10 people (17 percent) claimed during the Gallup Poll to leverage their strengths most of the time.
Interestingly, people in the United States reportedly are among the best at leveraging their strengths worldwide. When asked if people at work in the United States strive to leverage their strengths or fix their weaknesses, only 41 percent indicated that they leveraged their strengths. In England and Canada, this percentage was 38 percent. In Japan and China, the percentage was down to 24 percent. We live in a remedial world. Fire departments, like most organizations in the world, tend to take their strengths for granted and strive to “fix” their weaknesses. In reality, these efforts are not likely to be successful. You can mitigate or manage your weaknesses but are not likely to eliminate them or turn them into strengths.
Strengths are not the flip side of weaknesses. They are not “two sides of the same coin.” We can make strengths stronger. We can make weaknesses not so weak. But we cannot transform weaknesses into strengths.
Defining Three Personality Myths
Buckingham talks about three myths surrounding the core of your personality; they apply to the department as well.
Myth #1: As you grow as a person, you will change. Most theories today contend that your basic personality is set for life early in your childhood. Fire departments can grow, but it takes a fairly major replacement in staff over time to significantly change a department.
Myth #2: As you learn more about your job and about life in general, you will grow most or learn the most where you are weakest. This is not true. You grow the most in the areas you know the most about. Those are the areas you master and, over time, can be considered a virtuoso in. Most people struggle to minimize or manage their weaknesses but don’t gain strengths in the process; they learn coping mechanisms. People are energized and find enjoyment when they are using their strengths and do what they need to do when a task involves one of their weaknesses.
Myth #3: Team members should put their personal strengths aside and do what the team needs. Again, this is wrong. Take nearly any sports team and look at the skills of each position. The best teams don’t strive for everyone to operate on the same scale doing the same task. The individuals bring their strengths to the forefront for the overall benefit of the team. Their collective effort compounds their work to achieve the desired outcomes. Michael Jordan once said, “There is no ‘i’ in team, but there is in ‘win.’ ” Everyone should deliberately bring their strengths to the team and play to their personal strengths. If everyone does that to the best of his ability, the team usually “wins” or at least performs at a high level.
Creating Future Excellence
So how can you use your strengths to help your department create future excellence? Here are a few suggestions.
- Strive to use your personal strengths on the job every day. Statistically, only 17 percent of people do this. Be one of the 17 percent.
- When you’ve had a bad day, know which of your strengths you can use to build yourself back up.
- Invest time and effort and deliberately train on your strengths with the goal of getting better and better and better over time. First, you must know your personal strengths.
- Know which of your strengths you can use when you need to be the most creative, and have great ideas to accomplish your goals.
- Know which of your strengths make you feel fulfilled and will sustain you as you move forward in your career. Count on them when the going gets tough or you have a bad day.
You are the best person to identify your strengths. You will get good at things you practice, but you don’t practice everything the same way. Those things that make you feel stronger and energize you are the strengths you should focus on at every opportunity. Certainly, you cannot forget about your weaknesses, and you train deliberately to manage and mitigate them. At the same time, strive to be one of the 17 percent, and spend your best efforts and time maximizing your strengths to the point that you become a virtuoso on your strengths and it is considered a distinctive competency those around you will admire.
MARK WALLACE, MPA, EFO,CFO, FIFireE, is the author of Fire Department Strategic Planning: Creating Future Excellence (Fire Engineering, 1998, 2006). He is the former state fire marshal of Oregon and a former chief in Colorado and Texas. He operates Fireeagle Consulting. He wrote the planning chapter in the seventh edition of the Fire Chief’s Handbook (Fire Engineering, 2015).
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