Focusing on strengths boosts engagement: Gallup

25 November 2009 8:23am

Employees who are overlooked at work are twice as likely to be actively disengaged as those whose managers focus on their weaknesses, research by Gallup has found.

"Being overlooked, it seems, is more harmful to employees' engagement than having to discuss their weaknesses with their manager," say Gallup's Brian Brim and Jim Asplund.

Their report, Driving engagement by focusing on strengths, details how different management styles can have a powerful impact on employee engagement. They use data from a Gallup survey of more than 1000 employees who were asked to agree or disagree with the statements: "My supervisor focuses on my strengths or positive characteristics" and "My supervisor focuses on my weaknesses or negative characteristics". Employees who didn't agree with either statement were placed in an "ignored" category.

The study found that only one in 100 workers whose supervisors focused on their strengths was likely to be actively disengaged (while 61% were likely to be engaged).

Among employees whose supervisors focused on their weaknesses, about 22 per cent were actively disengaged, while two in every five workers who were ignored by their supervisor fell into this category. (And among the "ignored" workers, only 2% were engaged.)

This is important information for managers, Brim and Asplund say, because "employees who are ignored feel like they don't matter".

"There's a crucial phenomenon inherent in employee engagement: The best employees don't want to be coddled; they want to matter... They want to be heard, and above all, they do not want to be ignored."

Employees' chances of being engaged improve when managers focus on their weaknesses, the authors say, even though it seems counterintuitive. "That's because people prefer to get any feedback over no feedback at all - even if that feedback is criticism."

Problem-fixing methods outdated

Focusing on employees' weaknesses to "fix" them is a hangover from the industrial age when eliminating errors in the manufacturing process was the most successful way to achieve efficient production, the authors say.

"But people aren't machines, and trying to fix them as if they were simply doesn't work. Yet many organisations persist in approaching employee development with the idea that fixing weaknesses creates the greatest gain."

This focus is only effective when compared to the "terrible results" managers achieve by ignoring their workers, they say.

Engagement starting point

Gallup suggests that a 4:1 ratio of engaged to actively disengaged workers is "a reasonable starting point" for organisations that want to improve performance by increasing engagement, the report says.

Employers that focus on weaknesses will have an employee engagement ratio that's half the recommended starting point, the authors note.

"Ultimately the data show that managers who focus on the strengths of their employees create the strongest levels of engagement: These managers can achieve a 60:1 ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees. Managers can reach that ratio when they realise that employees want to matter. And focusing on people's strengths is a crucial way to show them that they matter.

"Employees with managers who focus on their strengths begin to understand that they are unique and that they can contribute based on the talents that make them unique. They also understand that they are not just a cog in the wheel, but an important part of something greater than themselves."

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