This is Part 2 in a 3-part series of posts based on a workshop I developed and presented to a group of leaders in Los Angeles in June. Here's Part 1, on Happiness (which includes a discussion of this series' fundamental premise), and here's Part 3, on Boundaries.
II. Excellence, Signature Strengths and Strategic Quitting
Peter Drucker and Managing Oneself
Peter Drucker was one of the 20th century's foremost organizational thinkers, and his work has had a substantial influence not only on my approach to executive coaching but also on my own personal and professional development. Drucker's brilliant essay Managing Oneself, which I discussed earlier this year, was first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1999 and highlights the importance of focusing on our strengths:
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people--especially most teachers and most organizations--concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead into making a competent person into a star performer.
I find Drucker's article a valuable resource in helping my clients and students make decisions about their careers because it encourages us to answer three challenging questions: What are my strengths? What do I value? and Under what conditions do I do my best work?
I believe all three questions are equally important, but at the moment I want to focus on the first. So ask yourself: What are my strengths? Where could I improve from first-rate performance to excellence? Where should I be focusing my energy, resources and time? Just as important, where am I wasting effort trying to improve from incompetence to mediocrity?
Martin Seligman and Signature Strengths
We can begin to address these questions by returning to the work of psychologist Martin Seligman (discussed previously in Part 1 of this series) and his concept of Signature Strengths.
In seeking to understand the components of mental health Seligman and his colleagues identified six fundamental virtues which he describes as "the core characteristics endorsed by almost all religious and philosophical traditions [which, taken together,] capture the notion of good character." These virtues are as follows--I've added definitions from Seligman in parentheses where I find them useful:
1.Wisdom and Knowledge
2. Courage ("The open-eyed exercise of will toward…worthy ends that are not certain of attainment.")
3. Love and Humanity
4. Justice
5. Temperance ("The appropriate and moderate expression of your appetites and wants.")
6. Transcendence ("Emotional strengths that reach outside and beyond you to connect you to something larger and more permanent.")
As Seligman notes, these six virtues "are unworkably abstract for psychologists who want to build and measure these things. Moreover, for each virtue, we can think of several ways to achieve it, and the goal of measuring and building leads us to focus on these specific routes." So he and his colleagues also identified 24 traits associated with happiness, meaning and fulfillment--the practical means by which we exercise the primary virtues--which he calls strengths. These traits share three characteristics:
- Like the primary virtues, these strengths are ubiquitous, valued by almost every culture around the world.
- The 24 strengths are learnable, meaning that they're not innate and can be developed.
- Finally, the strengths are voluntary, meaning that they're not automatic reflexes and must be intentionally exercised.
Here's a list of the 24 strengths that Seligman organizes in clusters under each of the primary virtues:
Wisdom and Knowledge
1. Curiosity / Interest in the World
2. Love of Learning
3. Judgment / Critical Thinking / Open-Mindedness
4. Ingenuity / Originality / Practical Intelligence / Street Smarts
5. Social Intelligence / Personal Intelligence / Emotional Intelligence
6. Perspective
Courage
7. Valor and Bravery
8. Perseverance / Industry / Diligence
9. Integrity / Genuineness / Honesty
Humanity and Love
10. Kindness and Generosity
11. Loving and Allowing Oneself to Be Loved
Justice
12. Citizenship / Duty / Teamwork / Loyalty
13. Fairness and Equity
14. Leadership
Temperance
15. Self-Control
16. Prudence / Discretion / Caution
17. Humility and Modesty
Transcendence
18. Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
19. Gratitude
20. Hope / Optimism / Future-Mindedness
21. Spirituality / Sense of Purpose / Faith / Religiousness
22. Forgiveness and Mercy
23. Playfulness and Humor
24. Zest / Passion / Enthusiasm
Most of these traits are self-explanatory, but I refer you to Seligman's book Authentic Happiness for complete definitions that help to explain why he frequently buckets multiple traits as a single "strength."
What Are My Signature Strengths?
Seligman and his colleague Christopher Peterson devised a questionnaire that allows us to determine which of these traits are most important to us, known as the VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths. The complete, 240-question version of this survey is available online through the VIA Institute on Character and the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, which are both associated with Seligman. A 48-question paper version is also available in Authentic Happiness, although it actually takes more time to complete than the longer online version because you have to score it yourself. (I've completed all three, and I find the online versions more useful. Registration with an email address is required at both sites, but it's a simple, straightforward process, and I've never received any spam from either organization as a result.)
These surveys rank the 24 strengths in order of their importance to us, but Seligman encourages us to also assess them qualitatively in order to be able to apply them most effectively. He writes:
Look at the list of your top five strengths. Most of these will feel authentic to you, but one or two of them may not be the real you...
I believe each person possesses several signature strengths. These are strengths of character that a person self-consciously owns, celebrates, and (if he or she can arrange life successfully) exercises every day in work, love, play and parenting. Take your life of top strengths, and for each one ask if any of these criteria apply:
- A sense of ownership and authenticity ("This is the real me")
- A feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first
- A rapid learning curve as the strength is first practiced
- Continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength
- A sense of yearning to find ways to use it
- A feeling of inevitability in using the strength ("Try and stop me")
- Invigoration rather than exhaustion while using the strength
- The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around it
- Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it
If one or more of these apply to your top strengths [as reported by the survey], they are signature strengths... Herein is my formulation of the good life: Using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of your life to bring abundant gratification and authentic happiness.
Seth Godin and Strategic Quitting
While I find Seligman's definition of the good life useful because it supports my sense of agency in the process of attaining fulfillment and happiness, I can also find that same quality overwhelming, particularly when things aren't going well--and when I may be susceptible to feeling that a lack of fulfillment or happiness is a deficiency on my part, as if I just weren't trying hard enough.
I'm reminded of another quote from Drucker's "Managing Oneself":
[M]ost people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong.
Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong... [Emphasis mine]
Drucker is pushing us to recognize that there are many careers and jobs that are not a good fit with our strengths, our values or the conditions under which we do our best work--and we need to be able to close doors, limit options and move forward in order to find those places where we do fit. Given that many of my clients and students are making or considering a career transition and are looking to expand, not limit, their options, this concept can be both scary and liberating.
But what if you know you're in the right job, in the right career, on the right path...and you're still feeling unhappy or unfulfilled? Perhaps rather than making a BIG change, you could make some little changes. This leads me to the concept of "strategic quitting," a term from Seth Godin's 2007 book The Dip that I first discussed a few years ago. Godin writes:
Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive (and fail) to get what they want. And most people do just that. They quit when it's painful and stick when they can't be bothered to quit...
Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices available to you. If you realize you're at a dead end compared with what you could be investing in, quitting is not only a reasonable choice, it's a smart one...
Coping is what people do when they try to muddle through... The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance... All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy. If the best you can do is cope, you're better off quitting. Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else...
Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff.
I find Godin's framework a useful parallel to Drucker's on a smaller scale. Where Drucker is helping us chart our life by choosing (and rejecting) careers and jobs, Godin is helping us plan our days and weeks by sticking with (and quitting) projects, responsibilities, ventures.
In both cases they're encouraging us to focus--to focus our time, energy and attention on areas where we can deliver excellence. In my experience most of us are over-committed, spreading ourselves too thin, and failing to deliver excellence where it really counts. We're coping, when we should be quitting. But what Drucker and Godin are saying is that only excellence matters. Improving from incompetence to mediocrity is worse than useless, because time and effort expended in those areas are being stolen from areas where excellence is within our grasp.
I find it liberating to think along these lines, not only in my professional life but also in my personal life. Where can I deliver excellence? Where should I expect excellence in return? And how can I focus my time and energy to make this as likely as possible?
This allows me to do some strategic quitting--or even better, not to start misguided efforts in the first place--and substantially increase the return on my personal investments. And even when I can't quit outright, I'm better able to set boundaries that put projects and activities in perspective and prevent them from hogging resources (most significantly, my finite time and energy) that they don't deserve.
And the real payoff comes when I bring my signature strengths to bear on the process of strategic quitting. By understanding not only what skills I possess but also which skills I find particularly fulfilling to exercise, and then by focusing my time, energy and attention on activities where those skills are called upon--and by quitting those activities where they're NOT called upon--I find that I experience Seligman's definition of the good life more readily and with less effort.
Next Steps and Questions to Consider
- Take the VIA Survey of Character Strengths, online at the VIA Institute on Character or the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, or on paper in Seligman's Authentic Happiness.
- What are your Signature Strengths, and which ones are most meaningful to you?
- How can you make more effective use of your strengths to deliver excellence?
- Where are you merely coping rather than succeeding?
- How do these efforts correspond with your scores on the Strengths Survey?
- What strategic quitting can you do?
- Commit to employing your three most meaningful Signature Strengths more intentionally for three weeks and assess their impact.
Again, here's Part 1 of this 3-part series, on Happiness (which includes a discussion of the series' fundamental premise), and here's Part 3, on Boundaries.
Continued thanks to my colleagues Mike Allison, Andrea Corney, Carole Robin, Lisa Schwallie and Ricki Frankel. And many, many thanks to Peter Drucker, Martin Seligman, and Seth Godin--their work has made it possible for me to be of much greater service to my clients and students, and I'm tremendously grateful.
