These are the two assumptions that guide the world’s best managers:

	Firstly that each person’s talents are enduring and unique;
	Secondly that each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of their greatest strength.

The Gallup Organisation has done a meta-analysis of 198,000 employees working in 7,939 business units within 36 companies. They asked: At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?  They then compared the responses to the performance of the business units and discovered the following: When employees answered ‘strongly agree’ to this question, they were 50% more likely to work in business units with lower employee turnover, 38% more likely to work in more productive business units, and 44% more likely to work in business units with higher customer satisfaction scores.

And over time those business units that increased the number of employees who strongly agreed saw comparable increases in productivity, customer loyalty, and employee retention. Whichever way you slice the data, the organisation whose employees feel their strengths are used every day is more powerful and more robust.

Even if your own organisation has not yet adopted these two vital assumptions, you can improve your own performance and satisfaction at work. Your feelings can guide you. In fact, feeling an emotional high at work is a sure sign you are playing to a strength. 51% say they feel one “about once a week”. Ask them how often they get so involved in what they are doing at work that they lose track of time – another strength-in-play sign – and 73% say “about once a week”. So, most of us have heard the voice of our strengths loudly enough to seek out roles that call upon some aspect of our strengths at least once a week. Most of us are in the vicinity.

But we can’t win on once a week. We can’t make our greatest and longest-lasting contribution on once a week. We can’t achieve anything of significance on once a week. So the challenge is to increase dramatically how often we play to our strengths. On high-performance teams, people say they call upon their strengths more than 75% of the time. To reach this level, we don’t need to cast aside current work and strike out for the perfect dream job. Besides, that perfect job doesn’t exist.

Whatever our job happens to be, it doesn’t consist of one activity. It comprises many different activities. Some invigorate us, some leave us neutral, and some deplete us or bore us or drain us. Given this, holding out for that perfect “job we love” is a fool’s game.

What are your strengths? How can you capitalise on them? What are your most powerful combinations? Where do they take you? What one, two, or three things can you do better than 10,000 other people? These are the kinds of questions coaches help you with. After all, you can’t lead a strengths revolution if you don’t know how to find. name, and develop your own.

You can learn how to take your existing job and reshape it around your strengths – even in the face of interference from the world around you. Each week you can gradually, degree by degree, tilt the playing field so that the BEST of your job becomes MOST of your job.

In sequential order:

First, we need to sort through our activities and pinpoint precisely which ones invigorate us and which deplete us.

Second, while others are pulling us in every direction, we need to stay sufficiently in control of our hours at work so that, over time, we load up on the invigorating kind and push back hard if the scales gradually tip the other way.

Third, we must learn how to explain what we are doing persuasively enough to get our colleagues to want to help us.

Fourth, whenever we get a new boss or a new job or a new corporate directive, we must stay clearheaded enough to keep our weeks intentionally tilted toward the invigorating activities and away from the others.

You take responsibility for identifying your own strengths and weaknesses – no one can do this better than you. Then, having identified them, you take a stand for them. In practical terms, this means that you push the people at work, along with their many expectations, toward your strengths and away from your weaknesses.

This doesn’t mean you can demand that you be asked to do only strength-based activities. No one would want to work with you if you did this. But what you can do each week, late on a Friday evening or early on a Monday morning, is start a new discipline. A discipline that begins with the simple question “How will I ensure that I put my strengths into play just a little more this week than I did last week?” and ends with your building your job around the best of you.

If you are a manager, this sounds radical. In fact, this is exactly what you want your employees to be doing. You want them to be pushing you to load up on their strengths. Why? Because you want them to be both productive today and resilient tomorrow. You want them to be creative, come up with new ideas, and seize the initiative. In corporate speak, you want them to take responsibility for their own performance and development.

To succeed, you need to become increasingly clear about your skills, knowledge, and talents. You also need to understand, in detail, what your ideal next step/s would entail and why you think you would excel at it. How do you do that? There are many assessments that can help.

Click here for some questions for help in focusing your thoughts to reach some valuable conclusions about your present performance and your potential.

Then, click here for practical steps/questions to enable you to put your strengths to work.

Finally, click here for five creative strategies for managing a weakness and four strategies to minimize your weaknesses - to do less of what you hate.