“At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” What would be your answer to this simple but vital question?

When asked, this same question as part of a 20 year long survey into natural talents, strengths development and performance excellence in the workplace, less than a 1/3 of the 10 million individuals surveyed felt that their talents are in play every day. When people answered that they “strongly agree to using their talents and strengths daily”, they worked in a high performance business with low staff turnover, higher productivity and higher customer satisfaction scores.

Identifying natural talents has been largely ignored in the workplace and personal development realms and in its place we have become obsessed with trying to fix weakness and shortcomings. Most training programmes focus on teaching new knowledge and developing new skills.  Is this the right course? Or should we be focusing upon identifying people’s natural talents and then assisting them to develop these into real strengths, helping them to become better at what they are naturally best at, and to attain near perfect performance.

We have challenged ourselves with these questions, and have developed a programme that does precisely this – identify strengths, then build on them.

So what is a natural, innate or raw talent?  It can be simply defined as a person’s enduring naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour. These talents can be easily observed in the performance of the natural salesman, in some of the harmonising ability to create empathy and trust with anyone, or the highly talented strategist, or the person with the genuine command presence, or the inspiring person who constantly exudes belief or the person with innate analytical strength in abundance.

Building upon the bedrock of an innate talent, a constantly utilised strength can be developed to provide consistent near perfect performance. When witnessed, we are led to ask of them, “how come this person is always that good?” A well known business guru states it succinctly; “Most people think that they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong …. And yet, a person can perform only from strength”.

In our experience of conducting strengths development workshops with our clients, we have seen the dramatic impact derived from assisting managers and professionals identify and discover their often untapped innate talents. They then craft ways of investing more time in practising and using these talents in their workplace activities. Then, multiply the effectiveness of their talents by adding the complementary skills and knowledge that dovetail them into strengths. The results of this approach are often dramatic improvements in self-satisfaction, enjoyment, greater self-engagement and motivation, performance and productivity increase.

The fundamental key to strengths development is not to focus on employees’ weaknesses; what they can’t do, what they don’t like or want to do, or activities that give them no satisfaction. Rather it’s to Discover what is right with people (their natural talents) and then support them to develop what’s innately good, to build outstanding strengths.

William Wallace