I just completed my first read of Marcus Buckingham’s Go Put Your Strengths to Work and Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0. If you are devoted to your own “strength training” I highly recommend these two books and the online site tied into each book.

I have spend more time on the sites than with the books. To use the on-line resources you must purchase the books. StrengthsFinder 2.0 has the on-line access code in an envelope and Go Put Your Strengths to Work has the code on the inside of the book jacket.

In a future post I will outline the 5 strengths identified by StrengthsFinder 2.0. I completed the original StrengthsFinder and my top 4 strengths remained the same. I now have Empathy identified as my fifth strength.

The StrengthsFinder website has lots of resources to further understand and apply your strengths. There is an active forum to discuss your results and applications with other readers. A real nice added plus to StrengthsFinder 2.0 is that purchase of the book also gives you a six month subscription to Gallup’s leading management journal.

The Go Put Your Strengths To Work website gives you the opportunity to conduct a SET (Strengths Engagement Track) assessment. This does not look so much at strength identification as the application and knowledge of your strengths. Your SET scores gives you a real time comparison of how engaged your strengths are compared to the rest of the working world. My present level is 89 out of 100 and my future level is 96 out of 100. You can take the assessment 3 times.

Viewers of Buckingham’s video: Trombone Player Wanted will recognize most of the concepts in the book, as they also appear in the video. You can download 2 parts of the 6 part video with your ID code.

I am passionate about strengths and strength development. My early quibble with both books is the trivial extras they have added — StrengthsFinder 2.0 gives you cute little stickers to put your 5 strengths on the front of the book while a resource section in Go Put Your Strengths to Work has a cheesy 10 to 20 page “love it and loath it” notepad. Strong books like these don’t need fluffy extras!

These are just the kind of things that organizational strength naysayers will jump all over to say this is just some kind of shallow self-esteem movement. To be strong, you can always throw away the stickers and rip the little note pads out of the book. Strengths reside inside us and our relationships not in some clever marketing extra that can weaken such a strong message.

I encourage you to purchase both of these resources, accelerate your strength development, and work at leveraging the strengths of the people you lead.

Technorati Tags : strength based leadership, Go Put Your Strengths To Work, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Zinger

A PROMISE MADE…

A promise made is a debt unpaid.  ~Robert Service

Perhaps you participated in a values clarification exercise or you tried to apply your organizational values. Maybe you created a lengthy list of your personal values. After you played the training game, studied the organizational values or wrote your list — what did you do then? For many people this was where a focus on values both started and stopped.

Get value from personal values by transforming them into promises.

I just finished reading Mike Morrison’s: The Other Side of the Card: Where Your Authentic Leadership Story Begins. It is a short yet excellent book. I found the book fully engaging.

Here is a testimony to how engaging the book was —I was reading it on a plane coming home. The plane landed — you know the drill — everyone leaps up and waits to get off.  I was one of the last people off of the plane even though I was sitting near the front because I was so engrossed in the book I didn’t realize everyone had exited. I was still flying with the concepts from Mike Mossison’s book.

I highly recommend Mike’s book. One section that really stuck with me was to recast values as promises. Morrison said: Personal values are the promises we make to ourselves and others.

I encourage you to reflect on your values. Once you are clear on a few key personal values change the word value into promise. Do you keep your promises?

Here is my promise:

I promise to engage in work and connect with others as I ignite engagement and connection in them.

Get engaged:

1. Read Mike Morrison’s book and learn to leverage the other side of your business card.
2. Be a card. Flip over a business card and use the “white space” on the back of the card to write out your most important promise. Make it your business to value your promises and promise your values.
3. If you are a leader, I highly recommend visiting The Other Side of The Card website and requesting the free download on Icebreakers and Exercises Mike offers as a guide for leaders at all levels.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.  ~Hannah Arendt

Welcome to The Monday Morning Employee Engagement Percolator #1.

The purpose of this feature is to give you an overview and ideas from a personal engagement source. The sources will range from blogs to books.

Our first Monday’s resource is from Alexander Kjerulf. He has written a book entitled: Happy Hour is 9 to 5: Learn how to Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt at Work.

The link I encourage you to visit is Chapter 11: Make a Happy Plan. In the United States Chapter 11 involves filing for bankruptcy but Kjerulf’s Chapter 11 is about planning for a rich work life based on happiness.

His chapter begins with a quotation from Arnold J. Toynbee:

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: First, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.

Alexander outlines the usual traps of plans and suggest that our plan be fun rather than ambitious, embrace one small thing a day, follow up without pressure, celebrate results, and share what we do. Make your happy plan fast , easy, and fun.

I encourage you to visit the chapter to create your happy plan. You may want to read the whole book to experience Happy Hour from 9 to 5.

If you find the book helpful and enjoy what you read, I suggest you follow Alexander’s blog at: www.positivesharing.com. I enjoyed his current collection of quotations on fun at work. Here is one from Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA:

Work should always be fun for all colleagues. We all only have one life. A third of life is work. Without desire and fun, work becomes hell.

Get Engaged:

1. Read the chapter.
2. Follow the suggestions.
3. Plan to be happy and be happy with your plan.

Keep perking!

Be strong. Get the two new strength based leadership resources from Marcus Buckingham and Tom Rath.

Photo by Peter Dyck

When you work with bees a football helmet can become a lens or sculpture to see the world in a much richer way.

I had the honor this week of sharing breakfast with Aganetha Dyck. Sometimes referred to as the “bee lady,” Aganetha won Manitoba’s Annual Arts Award of Distinction. I have wanted to talk with Aganetha for quite sometime as I believe her work with bees has clues or responses to foster employee engagement in the workplace.

Aganetha is able to think differently inside the hive, to follow her passion even when others are left wondering about her artistic expression, and she maintains a commitment to lifelong learning.

If you would like to see more pictures of Aganetha’s art you can visit her site by clicking here. I hope you will take the time to look at the sculptures that Aganetha co-created with bees. To demonstrate and confirm her collaboration with the bees, the art is now signed by both the bees and herself.

If you are a leader in the workplace is the work of your team both a signature of yourself and the people you lead?

The first lesson I learned about trying to engage bees in art from Aganetha was how engaged she was by the bees. I believe I may have learned more about the bees in our hour together than I did about her. She loves bees and she loves to learn about them. This includes even learning about the darker sides of their behavior. I did not sense a judgement about some of the bees “darker behavior” rather I sensed a richer and more complete understanding of her artistic partners.

Before we look at fostering employee engagement we must ensure we are engaged with them. Have you learned all you can about the people you work with?

Aganetha uses a variety of methods to engage the bees with her hive-offerings. She is constantly learning. She has experienced a number of successes yet at times the bees have not engaged in a work she offered. I believe in engagement we must look at the work we are asking people to do and must accept at times that the work does not engage them. We may need to change assignments or alter methods.

How do you respond to others who don’t engage in their work? Do you maintain your engagement with them? How flexible are you in helping people engage in work?

Aganetha has been surprised and delighted by some of the work the bees have performed. She thought they might work in a predetermined way yet was able to see the art and contribution of the bees in ways she had not anticipated.

Are you open to being surprised and delighted by the people you work with?

Aganetha is genuinely concerned about the welfare and future of bees. She is developing plans to give back to the bees what they have given her and to have people understand how important bees are to the survival of the planet.

How do you express your gratitude for the people you work with?

Aganetha is so absorbed in her art. She told me about drawing an image of  slightly deformed 3-legged bee that she discovered in a very old book on bees. Not only is she drawn to the image, she draws this image everyday.

Are you able to engage in your passion everyday? Do you have the gumption and tenacity to stick with it?

Unfortunately I can’t resist bad puns, or any puns for that matter. I could drone on and on but what I hope is that you catch the buzz and see your work in employee engagement as more than performance management. Employee engagement can  be the calling forth of artistic expression for yourself and the people you work with.

Get Engaged:

Normally “Get Engaged” offers tips or questions. Today, I encourage you to look at one of my favorite works by Aganetha, Pivot. What do you see? When it comes to employee engagement are you able to think creatively inside the cubicle?

Photo by Peter Dyck.

Today, Valentine’s day, is a sad day of public mourning in Winnipeg as our hearts reach out to the families and firefighters who lost two of their leaders. Thomas Nichols. Harold Lessard.

These two brave captains died last week when a house fire erupted in a deadly fireball.

As one headline said last week: It’s a captain’s job to lead the way. We often take our leaders for granted but a time like this makes me think about how important true leaders are who literally lead the way knowing the possible dangers as they do so.

We sadly lost two firefighters and leaders. They had entered the house to ensure that no one was left inside. My thoughts and heart goes out to these two men, their families, and all firefighters who live the brotherhood of the rope on each and every alarm.

Thank you.

In a landslide the EverestNews climber of the year is Dan Mazur along with his teammates: Andrew Brash, Myles Osborne and Jangbu Sherpa as voted by readers of EverestNews.com. Never before has any climber or group of climbers gotten such a one sided vote.

In a day and on a mountain where so much is about oneself, these 4 men gave up the summit on the highest mountain in the world to stop and save a man they did not know. They risked their lives in stopping and spending an amount of time that most commercial guides would have said on Everest would be unthinkable to feed, give oxygen, and assist Lincoln Hall to a point where he could come down the mountain and live.

Lincoln’s team had already declared him dead and called his wife. But Lincoln was not dead, he was very much alive and clearly just needed help….These 4 men helped: Dan Mazur, Andrew Brash, Myles Osborne, Jangbu Sherpa. They are the EverestNews.com climbers of the Year.

Knots:

1. If these fine climbers, so close to their ultimate goal in high stress conditions, can give up their summit, what can each of us do as we climb through our organizations and reach for our career summits?
   

Technorati Tags : strength based leadership, Brotherhood of the Rope, Mazur, Zinger

My 85-year-old father-in-law, Jack, loves to share stories.

I was driving him home after a family dinner. Living in Winnipeg in February is not quite like living at the top of Everest but the temperature has been below 40 degrees for more than a few days.

One bonus of having so much snow and cold is that you can build a snow fort. The children on my street built a fort on the island at the end of our street. See the picture with this article.

As we drove by it my father-in-law shared a story about building a snow cave when his oldest daughter, Judy, was just a young girl.

The story is a powerful example of trust and faith.

They had been building the snow cave for quite a while when suddenly the fort caved in and Judy was buried underneath all the snow. Jack looked for her and realized he did not know where she was under all the snow. He tried one spot, did not find her, and frantically moved to a new spot. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally found her buried in the snow.

When he pulled Judy out he was surprised how calm she was. He said to her, “Judy, you are so calm, why aren’t you crying, weren’t you afraid?” Judy replied, “I knew you would come and get me Daddy so I wasn’t afraid.”

You could see this as the naive faith of a small child but I see it as the power of trust and faith. As leaders, do the people we lead know that we will come to their aid when they are buried in too many task to complete, too much stress, or suffocating under an avalanche of demands.

Knots (Staying Together):

1. Who has faith in you as a leader and knows that you will rescue them when they need help?
2. How frantically will you work to help others who are having difficulties?
3. Who will pull you out of collapsing cubicle cave?
4. Look around your workplace and pay attention to those people who may be in danger and make it safe.

Technorati Tags : strength based leadership, Brotherhood of the Rope, Winnipeg, Zinger