Are you out of work and looking for a job at the moment? This is a great posting from Peter Bregman about why you shouldn’t try too hard, and why you should instead spend most of your time doing things you love doing. The theory is that doing stuff you really enjoy helps motivate you, makes you energised and interesting, committed and passionate, all qualities that employers value. My friend Melody says the same thing (that if you work at things you love doing, the work will eventually find you) and you couldn’t find a better example; she’s a talented and successful trainer – she loves her job and she’s never short of contracts: it works for her.

Peter gives his own 4-step recipe for finding work when you’re not actively looking for it. I think the words ‘with other people’ should be highlighted in big bold letters. The key thing is that you don’t do the activities you love doing on your own, you find other people to do them with. The reason this is such an important point and one worth saying again and again is that finding a job is all about who you know, not what you know.

A couple of other things worth adding:  this is not about finding things to distract you from worrying about your unemployed status (such as drinking in the pub every afternoon with your mates), and it will take some courage to ‘give up’ a frenzied 24/7  job-search which is probably what your logical left-brain keeps telling you to do. Oh, and you will need to have an understanding partner, since s/he may think you’re just wasting time. And having far too much fun for someone who’s out of work.

In addition to Peter’s advice I’d also stress that you look for ways to engage your strengths during this period of unemployment. If your top VIA-IS strength is courage or curiosity, use it to try new activities and to meet new people. If it’s leadership, use it to organise an activity involving others. If it’s creativity, use it to sign up for a new art or craft class at your local college. If it’s team-work, volunteer your time to a local charity. The reason for suggesting using your strengths in new ways is that this has been proven to increase your well-being. And when you’re out of work, you’re likely to need this more than ever.

Thanks to Senia Maymin for the link.

Image: CarbonNYC

If you’re sceptical about the value of using Positive Psychology at work, and don’t think it can add much by way of improved business performance, think again.

In this article in 1st November’s edition of the CIPD Magazine “People Management“, Tim Smedley explains how global defence and aerospace company, BAE Systems, is adopting a common sense approach to using strengths at work, supported by Alex Linley, director of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology.

According to Linley, it’s not about concentrating only on ones strengths and ignoring ones weaknesses altogether, it’s more about striking the right balance, and that will depend very much on your role and where you sit within the organisation. “Get your strengths up to an A grade – absolutely make the most of them. But if there’s a discipline that you’re not so good at, but that you need, then get that up to a pass, a C grade”, he says.

Of course, many business people do think Positive Psychology is for tree-huggers. As Linley points out, one of the results of using a strengths approach is increased employee engagement and well-being, however that wasn’t the main objective for BAE Systems. They had their sights firmly set on improving their business performance, and that’s exactly what a strengths approach has enabled them to achieve.

You don’t often find Positive Psychology being overtly criticised (I suppose this would be very un-American) so when I came across this article on Richard Dawkins’ website, I thought you might be interested; it gives a very different perspective.

It would appear that the Templeton Foundation does fund a huge amount of academic research into many Positive Psychology subjects such as gratitude, strengths and wisdom, and that Seligman’s Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania was established on the back of a multi-million dollar Templeton grant. Templeton also funds other research unconnected with Positive Psychology, such as the natural sciences, world religions, freedom and free enterprise.

As far as I’m aware though, the Positive Psychology Summit (or the Global Wellbeing Forum as it’s now called) referred to in Ehrenreich’s article is actually funded by the mighty Gallup Organisation, which since the 1930s has provided consulting services and market research on public opinion to Fortune 500 clients.

According to one of my fellow MAPP students who attended the Washington conference, it was unexpectedly badly organised, so I think there are some sympathies with Ehrenreich’s opinion on that score. As for her criticisms of the content of the conference, there is increasing evidence ((see Lyubomirsky, King and Diener (2005) for example)) that positive and/or strengths-based approaches in organisations ultimately provide a boost to the bottom-line. Even without the supporting research, common sense tells you that business benefits if its employees have more job satisfaction and are more engaged. It makes good business sense; we have previously featured organisations like Norwich Union and Standard Chartered who have benefitted from taking a strengths-based approach.

Incidentally, it turns out that The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business is also partly funded by the Templeton Foundation and by the Gallup Organisation. The Centre, whose purpose is to energise and transform organisations through academic research into the theory and practice of positive organising and leadership, is the number one source of information on this subject, so if you want leading edge ideas about business transformation and positive leadership, this is the place to start.

Thanks to UEL MAPP student Viv Thackray for this link

Over the past couple of months I’ve written many times about the benefits of focussing on your strengths (e.g. here and here); most Positive Psychology literature (unsurprisingly) concentrates on what’s good about using a strengths-based approach and mentions very little in the way of the downsides. I’ve come across the phrase “overusing strengths”, but that’s about it. You need to look quite hard at the VIA-IS, StrengthsFinder and Strengthscope websites to find anything suggesting there might also be disadvantages.

Carol Dweck’s* research on fixed and growth mindsets made me wonder whether developing an inflexible view even of one’s good points (e.g. strengths) might actually be a bad thing, and that’s how I came to write my recent posting on Positive Psychology News Daily.

Anyhow, today I was sent a link to a post on the Berkun Blog, called “Why you should be bad at something“. It’s not just that being bad at something is OK, according to Scott Berkun it’s an absolute necessity if you’re going to learn something. How right he is. In order to learn you need to have a growth mindset, to try, and to keep trying over again when you fail. As a child you had a growth mindset – you’d never have learnt to speak, walk, read and write if you’d waited until you were good at it first.

What I like about Berkun’s post is it links the themes of comfort zones (which we have also discussed before here), learning, ageing, mindsets and happiness.

Berkun says “This sounds idiotic but I think being good, as in proficient, isn’t good all the time… as I get older I realize how important it is for my soul to be bad or awful in at least one thing I do, and to take pleasure in it anyway. There is a way to take pleasure in things independent of my ability at them and I’m convinced that cultivating it will make me a happier person“.

I dare you to be really bad at something!

* Carol Dweck (2006) Mindset: The new psychology of success

Thanks to Neil for the link to Scott Berkun’s blog.

According to Debbie Whitaker, Standard Chartered’s Head of Sustainability, ‘everyone has talents that we wish to leverage’.

This is a bold statement, considering Standard Chartered is a bank with over 60,000 employees in 56 countries. Their reasons for focusing on talent are fourfold:

i) greater growth potential
ii) better people performance
iii) increased employee engagement and
iv) attracting and retaining talent.

Many big organisations are sceptical of applying Strengths at work, yet Standard Chartered’s experience shows that it can make sound business sense.

A strengths-based approach to management has been operating in the organisation for the past 7 years, using Gallup’s StrengthsFinder tool. Whitaker describes a strength as the combination of talent, skill and knowledge, which motivation can transform into world-class performance. In her words, given equal skills and knowledge, talent is what differentiates superior performance from the rest.

So what does Standard Chartered actually do differently to other organisations? Well StrengthsFinder wasn’t designed for recruitment purposes, but it can be used to ensure good role fit and that’s exactly what has contributed to Standard Chartered’s success.The essentials for a salesperson, for example, are good product knowledge and to be able to negotiate and close a deal. But if the salesperson has the additional talents of competitiveness and building rapport with customers, they can become a world-class performer. Not only does Standard Chartered look for specific skills and knowledge, they take innate talents into account too.

It has to be said that there are several definitions of a strength, and the one used here is based on Gallup’s research. The VIA-IS or CAPP definitions are different; as always you need to be clear what you are trying to measure.

Standard Chartered also focuses on building employee engagement, and like Royal & SunAlliance which we featured here, they take volunteering seriously, offering two days paid leave for staff to contribute to voluntary organisations.

What the Standard Chartered story shows is that focusing on strengths can make a big difference to the business and to the people who work there. And applying Positive Psychology at work shouldn’t be something you do in addition to everything else. Look at your existing people-related processes (e.g. recruitment, development, coaching, mentoring and so on) and see how a strengths-approach would make a positive contribution.