TRANSCRIPT

Leaders Journal EP02: Driving High Performance With Strengths-Based Leadership

INTRODUCTION:
Hello again! I am Coach Jason Ho and welcome back to the Leaders Journal — a source for MNC leaders, directors and SME business owners to discover practical leadership stories and coaching insights.

In the first episode, I shared about why every leader must master the 4Ds of team performance: Dominance, Deployment, Development and Directness.

When that happens, you set your team and your business up to perform at their peak.

Today, I want to talk about the 3rd D — Development — specifically, how to develop people who drive high performance with strengths-based leadership.

And I want to start by using an analogy.

So, at this point, I want you to imagine with me a garden, a gardener and the plants.

In this scenario, the gardener represents you, the leader; the plants represent your team; and the garden is the environment that you create.

What every gardener strives to do is to make sure that every plant in his or her garden grows healthily and steadily, to the point where it bears fruit.

The same goes for every leader.

What every leader should strive towards is to develop every person in your team to the point where they are consistently attaining peak levels of performance.

Now, when we talk about this idea of development, the one tenet that we believe in is this: everyone grows differently.

(1:07) THE GARDEN ANALOGY:
WIth this in mind, we go back to the garden analogy.

As a great gardener, the first thing that you must understand is what kind of seeds you are dealing with.

Because every seed has its own needs.

If those needs are not met, the right conditions are not created, then it cannot thrive.

But, if those conditions are met, every seed will germinate and grow into a plant that bears fruit by themselves, because that’s the natural thing to do.

This is what every leader must seek to understand for the people in your team.

You, as a leader, must have this fundamental belief that everyone you work with wants to do good, they desire to produce high levels of performance.

All they need is a great and conducive environment that actually encourages and facilitates that growth.

If you succeed in meeting the right conditions for your people to develop, then the inevitable and the natural progression is that they will emerge as highly driven individuals who yield a high performance day in day out.

This is what strengths-based leadership is all about and this is the key to driving high performance in your team.

Just as every plant grows differently, every person grows differently.

That means that everybody will excel in different things.

When we put this in the context of organisational growth, the organisation is always about these two things — knowledge and skill.

Which means that in an ideal scenario, every member of your team should be constantly growing and developing in terms of knowledge and skill.

But the funny thing is that — and this is also the tricky part — every person has different interests.

And that intersection between their interests and their knowledge and skill their job requires causes them to grow at different speeds.

(4:10) CASE STUDY: SPEED READING:
Let me give you an example.

A Speed Reading study was conducted in Nebraska where 2 groups of people were tested for speed reading.

How they conducted the speed reading test is this: they not only seek to measure the words or the number of pages that you read through.

At the end, they will also measure your comprehension of what you read.

So if there are 10 questions and you only managed to answer 5, then you only “retained” 50% of the entire number of pages that you read.

So the readers were segmented into 2 groups — Gifted and Normal.

First group was tested and they averaged about 90 words per minute, with comprehension.

This is the Normal group.

The Gifted group, on the other hand, clocked an impressive rate of 350 words per minute, with comprehension.

What followed is that the researchers decided to let both these groups go through the exact same speed reading course to find out what will happen.

Here’s what transpired after they all went through the same speed reading course.

The Normal group, that is those who were reading at 90 words per minute improved to 150 words per minute, with comprehension.

That’s about a 66% increase.

Sounds impressive right?

But wait till you hear this.

What do you think happened to the Gifted group?

The ones that were reading at 350 words per minute.

Will the results go up or remain stagnant?

This is the truly impressive bit.

The results of the Gifted group surged all the way up to 2,900 words per minute!

That's a startling 828% increase!

(6:34) APPLICATION OF PRINCIPLE:
The principle we want to draw here is this: the capacity you have to improve in your areas of natural talent far outweighs that of your areas of weakness.

Now take a moment to digest the results of this Speed Reading study and think about how those principles can be applied to your own team members.

The exponential growth from this case originated from the group where they were already naturally talented at what they did.

The same goes for your team.

If you think about it, some of them, when given the same amount of knowledge and skill — that could mean they were attending the same upskilling courses or workshops — some will see progression but in a very flat kind of tangent, whilst some will be able to excel exponentially and surpass the levels they achieved prior to that.

Imagine the group who went from 90 words per minute to 150 words per minute.

Was there growth?

Yes, of course!

But it’s hardly as remarkable as the group who went from 350 words per minute to 2,900 words per minute!

What implication does this have for you as a leader?

Moving forward, you want to look back and have that awareness that you succeeded in positioning every member of your team in such a way that their development can grow on an exponential level, not just a mediocre level.

The more you commit to understanding the people you work with, the more you understand the kind of “seeds” you are dealing with, the more you learn their needs — what energises them and what drains them — and the more you discover how to create the optimal conditions for your people to thrive and to work at their best.

(8:03) CLOSING:
Let’s revisit the garden analogy once more.

One tenet we talked about in terms of people development is that everyone grows differently.

Another tenet that we draw from the analogy — and this links to the gardener — is that everything starts with me. This me refers to the leader.

If the plants in the garden are not growing, the gardener cannot be possibly reprimanding the seed for not sprouting and bearing fruit.

Because the fact is that the gardener is responsible for knowing what conditions the seed needs to grow.

Same thing applies to the leader.

If the people in your team are not growing and if it is inhibiting the overall performance of your team, instead of focusing on what they did or did not do, perhaps it is time to start questioning what you have or have not done.

A quote that I stand by goes like this: Success requires no apologies. Failure permits no alibis.

As leaders, this essentially means that you must bear the responsibility of your team’s growth.

The point of change for your team and your organisation begins with you as the leader acknowledging that it starts with you.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where I share more behind this principle and how leaders can begin taking ownership by discovering the first D of team performance, Dominance, through a tool that I have designed following my many years of coaching leaders, known as Primal Greatness.

Till then, this is Coach Jason Ho.

Let’s bring out the best in our teams.

(key words: leadership, leadershiptips, strengths, strengthsbasedleadership)