Business Benefits of Strengths based Change

Appreciative  Inquiry is a great example of strengths based change, and its positive focus is one of the keys to the energy and commitment it creates. But of course, it’s not the only example of positive psychology that’s growing in popularity around the globe.

Ever since Marcus Buckingham’s book “First, Break All The Rules” highlighted the business benefits of identifying and maximising talents and strengths, increasingly organisations are thinking differently about how we recruit, manage and develop people at work. In fact, there’s lots of applications of the strengths based theory. But why are hard nosed HR Directors and Business Leaders interested in something that seems to be rather fluffy on a cursory first glance?

Well, the Centre for Positive Psychology highlights a number of things that strengths based change helps to do in organisations today. Here are a few to chew over:

• A strengths based approach often taps into the talents that people have, but don’t use at work. So in effect, we bring more of ourselves into work. How much of your natural strengths do you use every day at work?
• Helps us to attract and keep people. We all like to do the things we’re good at, and the success we achieve reinforces the good performance, so we enjoy our job. And we want to do more of it, and get more of the buzz. Happy employee, happy boss!
• As we get the reinforcement of success, so our performance improves. Why should we waste our time and energy trying to develop the skills that we haven’t got, when the positive performance and feedback  is possible through a virtuous circle via focusing on strengths?
• Employee are more engaged and deliver more discretionary effort, improved performance, customer satisfaction and ultimately business growth. A focus on strengths significantly aids personal engagement to the job and task in hand, and this delivers results.
• Drives flexibility in the workforce by harnessing a future focus on what someone can do (based on their strengths and possibilities) rather than what they have done (based on their role or task history). Asking someone to take on a new role or responsibilities - but something that they realise that they like and can excel at – is likely to ease the path along the change curve considerably.

Of course, we believe at ai-consulting.co.ukthat appreciative inquiry as a huge role to play in strengths based change as part of a package of measures. There’s a lot of sceptics out there, though, and in future blogs, we’ll look at more business benefits and how we can introduce ai and strengths based change painlessly!

Paul Nicholson

Chartered Occupational Psychologist, AI Consulting.