Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

- Andrew Marvell

Amelia Bedelia is a children’s short story about a young woman trying to make her way in the world as a housekeeper. She is earnest, hard-working, and a total idiot. Her idiocy is the direct result from taking instructions explicitly, too explicitly. For example, when told to draw the curtains, she draws a nice picture of the drapes on a piece of paper. This, of course, is amusing to children, but completely frustrating for her employers who have no patience for Amelia’s incompetence.

That is until she meets the Rogers’. After blowing all of her assignments (dressing the chicken in a nice little boy’s outfit, trimming the steak with ribbon and lace, etc.), Mrs. Rogers is about to fire Amelia. Except Mr. Rogers stops her. Why? He had one taste of her lemon meringue pie and decided that she had to stay. To make things work, Mrs. Rogers adjusted her instructions so that Amelia’s earnestness, hard work, and thoroughness became an advantage.

Without question, most managers would have fired an employee like Amelia Bedelia. But most managers would be wrong.

Why?

On the surface, Amelia cannot take direction well. She misinterprets even the simplest tasks. Who wants an employee who can’t take direction? But if we look deeper, we see that Amelia’s talents are numerous. She is hard working, has a model work ethic, is kind, and has a great attitude – all the qualities we want in our employees. She is also great at execution – except she did the wrong things. Once her employer adjusted instructions, Amelia’s execution went from complete failure to nearly flawless.

Great Managing Is Like Playing Chess

Managing can be likened to playing checkers or chess. Checkers and chess are played on the same board, but are totally different games. The difference between chess and checkers is that in chess each piece moves differently. That one small difference makes chess far more complex, strategic, and interesting.

Most managers treat managing like checkers. That is, they treat their staff like they all work the same way, have the same sets skills and talents, and react the same way to direction. But managing well is more like chess. People, including our staff, are not the same. They react differently to direction. They have different skills and talents, and they don’t work the same way. The managers’ job is then to find the right combinations that allow our staff to be successful. Far too often, I have been told that someone has struggled in the past, or isn’t very good, only to find out that with the right combination of understanding, motivation, and teaching, that person could be highly successful on an audit. The difference is that the manager must learn to adapt to the staff’s needs; in other words, to play chess.

Defining Strengths at Work

According to Marcus Buckingham, a strength is anything that makes us feel strong. I remember growing up I would play baseball all the time. I didn’t start out very well. I played right field. I only had one hit all season, although that turned into a homerun with the help of several fielding errors. But for whatever reason, I kept playing baseball. During the summer, our days would consist of wiffle ball in the backyard, over-the-line games at the park, playing a baseball board game called APBA (which is where I fell in love with baseball strategy and statistics), and having baseball practice or a league game. Over time, I became good enough to play in junior college.

Baseball was a strength. There was a connection between the game itself and my brain chemistry. I could play all day, talk about it all day, and even now I can watch or coach games all day. How do these strengths develop? We aren’t quite sure how certain activities can fire off the right chemical mix in our brain to give us intense pleasure for things. For me, it was baseball, but it was also numbers and business. For others, it might be music or medicine. What we do know is that these pleasurable activities trigger a pleasurable mix of brain chemicals and over time, as we do more of the things that we enjoy, we develop stronger synaptic connections. Our brain forms deeper and more inter-connected neural highways, so that the brain retains information related to that area longer, can respond quicker, and learns and adapts more quickly. Think of our brains as a series of roads. For me baseball is a superhighway that can get me from point A to point Z quickly and efficiently. But interior decorating is an unimproved dirt road at best.

These strengths reveal themselves in how we feel while we are doing them. As a kid, I could play, talk, and read about baseball all day, every day, without tiring. I was in an endless flow – time flew by when I was involved in a game, and I anticipated the next challenge. Playing baseball made me feel strong. Learning was quick and easy. There were challenges that I would continue to work on, but even in those I loved the process of learning and improving. That’s how strengths work. Flow, feels good, feels strong. Can you identify those times in your work?

Great Managers Build Teams from Strengths

One of my jobs as a manager is to identify the strengths of my team. The best ways to identify strengths are to observe areas and situations where the staff and senior has performed exceptionally well, and to ask questions about when, and what context, the staff or senior has felt strong. For example, when has the staff felt like she was in a flow, where time flew by, and felt exhilarated by her work? What areas did that staff excel? In what areas did she feel like she was learning and growing the fastest? When did she feel the strongest? These are the types of questions we can ask our teams to diagnose their strengths.

Recently, I met with one of my team members to discuss strengths. After talking for a while, we realized that this person’s strengths were in the more technical aspects of the work we do, such as in operating system security reviews, as well as an excitement that comes with more challenging assignments. How might I tailor her role on the project? I would have her focus on the most difficult area of that client. It could be logical access, or it could be application controls. But I would want her to focus on the areas that were the most complex and most prone to problems and capitalize on them. I would also want to work with the scheduler to identify projects that would continue to challenge her. If I knew what made her feel weak, I would work to help her to avoid those areas, or leverage another team member to take on those areas.

By leveraging strengths, the team will be more productive. Imagine a football team where everyone was designed like a wide receiver; they can run fast, catch, and be elusive. The team would be severely weak at the offensive line position, the backfield positions, and most defensive positions. That’s why football teams are highly specialized: through specialists coordinating work together, the team performs better.

Project management offers lots of opportunities to customize our teams to maximize project performance. To do this, we must be keenly aware of our team members strengths and weaknesses. As we assign tasks based not on what someone does well, but rather what makes them feel strong, tasks will get better performance, and I suspect more timeliness and team engagement.

Going back to Amelia Bedelia, the Rogers’ learned to tailor their management style to Amelia. This enabled Amelia to be a high performing housekeeper. As managers, it’s our job to tailor our management style to unleash the strengths of our people.