Question

Case Situation: Minnesota Engineering, LLC has been operating in the Twin Cities for over 20 years. Chris Pilcher founded the company, which provides product design services. The company has grown to over 150 employees. Over the past 12 months Chris has noticed a decline in productivity at the company. He has received several complaints from customers about projects that are behind schedule and the Company’s profit margins have been dropping due to increased cost. Chris’ “gut feel” is that the problems are in part a result of declining motivation and morale among the engineering work force. Chris has contacted you for help. “We have a problem,” he said during your initial meeting. “Our leaders are great engineers, but they are not motivating our work teams. The situation is really hurting our customer relationships and costing us money.” Chris continued, “I recently read an article about companies using a “strengths mindset” to improve morale and performance. Do you think that approach might help us? How could we implement a strengths mindset here?” Questions (Analysis Section): 1. Do some outside research on specific people and companies that have applied Strengths Finder and the Strengths Mindset to their business and careers (be sure to cite your sources). List some advantages and disadvantages of this approach. 2. What is the leader’s role in developing a strengths mindset in the organization? 3. What are some practical ideas from Strengths Finder 2.0 and your research that Chris could implement to improve employee motivation and performance?

Answer 1

Strength Finder is a guide and test where the leader will evaluate an individual’s skill set and assign work accordingly. This allows the management to use the individual’s natural talents. It should be used as an ongoing process not as a onetime exercise. The company which aligns the skills, strengths, passions, and talents of an individual to their dream profile will get amazing results.

It is being used in many organizations to name a few Facebook, 3M, Google etc.

In FaceBook best talent is on-boarded and not assigned to a profile. The people are not recruited for a profile, after recruitment, they can select the project that’s suitable for them. After 18 months engineers are forced to shift to a new project. The idea is to increase and improve creativity, ignite new ideas. There are all-night hackathons where you can share new ideas and create ideas for others to implement. You need to work only on someone else’s project.

In 3M allows employees to spend 15% of their work time in finding and creating new ideas, it’s also followed by Google now who allows 20% employee time to work on new ideas and projects.

The 4 steps of Strenght finder is as follows:

1. Align doesn’t fix: We can align talent and skill sets to the projects not give solutions. Reshuffle your teams and find the right skills for the right project.
2. Build diverse teams: Build teams from diverse cultures, ages, sex, gender, religion and backgrounds, this will increase cross-cultural and diverse ideas which will bring fresh ideas and encourage newness.
3. Create Transparency: Let the team share their ideas, passions, and views with you. You should listen and communicate 110% of your time.
4. Encourage and empower: Recruiting and identifying is 50% of the task balance 50% is encouraging them to implement and execute the ideas.

Disadvantages are as follows:

1. There might be conflict in ideas and might need close watch and mentoring
2. The chances of error and failure are high but like Google, they are prepared to take failure than stagnate.
3. The communication channels must be extremely fine-tuned and leader should have an open door policy.
4. There are no hierarchies and it is a flat organization.

Advantages are as follows:

1. Fresh innovative ideas and excellent execution of the project which will lead to maximized profits.
2. The passionate skill set will bring ownership in individual hence improving performance
3. The execution and implementation will be effective and efficient.
4. There will high motivation and longevity of employee.

The role of the leader is as follows:

• Identifying the skill sets and assigning them to the correct projects
• Communicating and continuously looking for new ideas
• Empower and support the employees
• Look out for fresh and innovative ideas to increase business.
• Driving the passion of the employees and encouraging them to think differently.

Chris should sit down and map the teams with the HR. He should evaluate each individual’s skills, talents, passions, experience and list it in details.

He should spend some time in talking separately to team leaders and engineers to identifying the weakness. Then he can do the following:

1. Re-align the team passions with the individual skills, change the leaders where required, create cross-cultural and cross-functional teams.
2. Reallocate teams and assign targets, empower employees to meet the targets. Link benefits with targets and performance.
3. Encourage the team to talk to him and communicate their passions, their problems etc with solutions.
4. Further, he can higher fresh skill set where gaps are identified.