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1-Page Summary of Now, Discover Your Strengths

Overview

This book is based on a Gallup study of managers who are the best at getting their employees to achieve performance excellence. The authors show how conventional ideas about career and management are actually misleading, and they introduce readers to the key notions that great managers use in their jobs.

By this point in your life, you probably know all of your flaws and shortcomings. You’re not good at basketball or networking, and your punctuation is poor. But what are the things that you do well? What is a strength to begin with? And most importantly, why don’t we focus on them?

Now, Discover Your Strengths will help you identify your strengths and how to use them. It also provides insights into how to engage with employees’ strengths so that the business can thrive.

In this piece, you’ll learn how your brain is the key to discovering hidden talents; why empathy is a crucial skill for every leader; and whether you’re an analytic type or a commander.

Big Idea #1: Most of us focus on fixing our weaknesses instead of building upon our strengths.

In schools and in the workplace, we’re encouraged to seek out our weaknesses and correct them. But why? After all, it’s using your strengths that will really get you going toward success.

How do you know when something is a strength? You can tell by looking for activities that people are good at and enjoy doing. If they’re able to perform those things repeatedly, then they have a strength.

It’s no surprise that organizations where employees are able to use their strengths every day are successful and sustainable. The Gallup Organization asked 198,000 employees across different businesses whether they’re able to do what they do best at work each day. Employees who strongly agreed with the question were 50 percent more likely to work in companies with lower employee turnover, 38 percent more likely to be productive and 44 percent more likely to have higher customer satisfaction. Despite these findings, many organizations still waste time and money by focusing on fixing weaknesses rather than developing strengths.

Of course, damage control is sometimes necessary. However, it should not be the focal point of employee management because if you want your employees to develop and grow and your company to grow with them, you need a different approach.

Big Idea #2: You can build your strength by combining natural talent with knowledge and skills.

Everyone likes to do things that they’re good at. But why are we good at those things in the first place? There’s a myth that you become better by practicing, but it’s not true! You have built up your strengths because you started off with natural talent.

Talents are patterns of thought and behavior that make some things easier for you. You might be great at connecting with strangers, but others may not find socializing so easy. We can’t change our talents, but we can learn to use them effectively in order to succeed in life.

But we can’t learn everything about a subject. Instead, we should identify our strengths and develop them by studying the subject in depth and learning how to apply it.

Knowledge can be either factual or experiential. Some people learn to play piano by learning about music, whereas others gain knowledge through practice and performance.

As you gain experience, you’ll begin to develop skills that will help you excel in your field. If you’re an experienced public speaker, for example, then you’ll have developed the skill of captivating and holding onto your audience’s attention.

Now, Discover Your Strengths Book Summary, by MarcusBuckingham

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