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Moving Relationships Forward: Get Your Volume Right, with Todd Davis, Chief People Officer, FranklinCovey and Author, Get Better
Manage your strengths
There is a lot of information and data and books out there on running with your strengths, and I certainly agree with that. These things that come naturally to us or these things that we’ve developed over time, we should run with them. What I have found with individuals, and one of the practices I’ve titled Get Your Volume Right, is that sometimes we go to our go-to strength because it’s worked for us so many times in the past. And if we don’t get the volume right–if we have a strength, any strength, and I’ve yet to find out one that it’s not true here–any strength dialed up too high starts to work against us.
For example, one of my strengths is empathy. With a lot of empathy I also have the strength of being very accomodating. I care deeply about people, and I want to accommodate and help. What a great strength, and you think, gosh, who wouldn’t want that strength. But the accommodation strength turned up too high, I have found that I’m trying to be everything to everybody. While that still sounds nice, I end up doing a mediocre job, at best, at a lot of things versus a stellar job at just a few things. That’s an example of getting the volume right, or needing to get the volume right, by dialing down the accommodation strength and maybe dialing up the quality strength. What are the few things I want to be good at?
Manage others’ strengths
I work with a woman who is very talented. She’s highly educated and has been with the company many years. She’s very efficient, very organized, very detailed oriented. You’re thinking, oh my gosh, let’s put her on every team, every project. Here’s the challenge: nobody wanted to work with her. She was continuously passed over for really cool, awesome, fun assignments. She came to me one day and said, “I don’t get it. So and so just got this position. I’ve been here this many years longer than she has, I have this much more education, this much more experience. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.” I was waiting for the opportunity. Advice is best received when it’s asked for. I said, “I have an idea about what’s going on here.” She said, “You do?” Her intent was so pure, she just wanted to understand. I said, “I do. I’d be happy to share with you, but I don’t want to offend you. I only want to help.” There’s the declaring your intent. She said, “Todd, please, why have you been holding back?” I said, “Because the challenge is, people don’t want to work with you.” She said, “You’re kidding.” I said, “No.” She was very sincere in her intent, she said, “Can you tell me why?” I said, “You’re difficult to work with. You’re rigid. Please know I’m not sharing this with you to hurt you at all. I really want to help. You’re rigid. You’re so organized, but that strength is dialed up so high that when something doesn’t fall into your plan that you’ve organized, it’s off-putting. And people can sense it, they feel like they’re walking on egg shells around you.”
We went through a number of things, and I know most people don’t change overnight, but this person did. They were so blind to this dialed up strength, and she asked me for specific examples and I gave them to her, and she immediately started to address those. So any strength, and like I said, I’ve yet to find one that this isn’t the case. You can take any strength and if you dial it up too high it will start to work against you. And it doesn’t mean, well, I’m in trouble if I don’t have the strengths that are needed. We all have way more strengths than we give ourselves credit for. Sometimes it calls for not only dialing down a particular go-to strength, but using another strength–calling on or developing another strength for a particular situation.