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Q&A with Chuck Martin, Author of “Work Your Strengths”
July 28, 2010
My father spent almost his entire career as a junior and senior high school guidance counselor and while I was growing up, I remember begging him every year to let me take the latest career aptitude tests so I could try to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Do you remember those tests when you were in school? I look back and fondly remember the fun and laughter of taking those tests and seeing what the results would tell me. What those aptitude tests tried to do is determine what my strengths were and then match me to broad categories of careers, based on those strengths.
As a career coach (and someone who still loves taking those career aptitude tests!), I always have an eye out for the latest way to help people find a job that will best fit their skills and abilities so I was intrigued when I came across this recently published book titled, “Work Your Strengths: A Scientific Process to Identify Your Skills and Match Them to the Best Career for You” by Chuck Martin, Richard Guare, PH.D., and Peg Dawson, ED.D. I contacted Chuck and asked him to participate in a Q&A session in order to help the readers of my “Career Memos” blog.
Q&A with Chuck Martin
Q: The idea of identifying your strongest career-building skills isn’t new, as we’ve seen in Markus Buckingham’s books, “Now Discover Your Strengths” and “Strength-Finder 2.0″, and other popular books, including your last book, “Smarts”. What makes your new book, “Work Your Strengths” uniquely insightful and useful?
A: The book is based on inherent cognitive strengths and weaknesses that are ‘hardwired’ into people at birth. This concept is based on decades of neuroscience brain research, so it is well based in clinical psychology – it is science based. While many books agree on identifying strengths and then playing to strengths, many use different methods to identify those strengths. Ours bases this on science, and how Executive Skills, located in the frontal lobes of the brain, develop all the way through adolescence into early adulthood, where psychologists believe they essentially mature. By that time, people generally have two or three Executive Skills that are their strongest and two or three that are their weakest. The other unique aspect of “Work Your Strengths” is that we measured these Executive Skills strengths in thousands of high performers around the world.
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Q: I understand you based the information in your book on groundbreaking research and an original two-year study. Would you share a little about that?
A: We wanted to determine if there were common cognitive characteristics, specifically Executive Skills strengths and weaknesses, found in high performing individuals in business. Over the course of two years, we contacts hundreds of organizations of all types – financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, nonprofits, among many others – and these organizations identified their high performers. We then sent these individuals the Executive Skills Profile and we analyzed the results of profiles of thousands of high performers. We then broke them down by job function, industry, department, etc., and found that there were common characteristics or strengths based on each of these. The value is that once you know your own strengths you can go to the study results in the book and see where people with those same strengths are successful.
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Q: Would you clarify the meaning of the term “Executive Skills”? How can Executive Skills profiling help a woman not only choose the right career path, but also fulfill her potential for success?
A: Executive Skills, which have nothing to do with skills of executives, were named by psychologists because they help people execute tasks. (Psychologists refer to the brain as the central executive). Also, these are not skills that can be learned since they are cognitive functions that are hardwired into the brain from birth, so the word skills here is somewhat misleading as well. The use in neuropsychology of the term Executive Skills dates back decades.
Each person, male or female, has a set of strongest and weakest of these cognitive functions in their makeup. Generally, they have two or three that are their strongest and two or three that are their weakest. Those in the middle are not likely to get women in trouble, though they can’t be dramatically improved either. In the book, we focus on the three strongest and the three weakest of the Executive Skills across all high performers. Everyone has this personal combination of strengths and weaknesses, and the mix varies from person to person.
Here are the names and brief descriptions of the 12 Executive Skills:
1. Response Inhibition: The ability to think before you act.
2. Working Memory: The ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks
3. Emotional Control: The ability to manage emotions in order to achieve goals, complete tasks, or control and direct behavior.
4. Sustained Attention: The capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility, fatigue, or boredom.
5. Task Initiation: The ability to begin projects or tasks without undue procrastination.
6. Planning/Prioritization: The capacity to develop a road map to arrive at a destination or goal, and knowing which are the most important signposts along the way.
7. Organization: The ability to arrange or place according to a system.
8. Time Management: The capacity to estimate how much time one has, to allocate it effectively.
9. Goal-Directed Persistence: The capacity to have a goal and follow through to the completion of the goal.
10. Flexibility: The ability to revise plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks and new information.
11. Metacognition: The capacity to stand back and take a bird’s-eye view of yourself.
12. Stress Tolerance: The ability to thrive in stressful situations.
Once a woman knows her strengths, she can seek jobs, careers, and tasks that play to those strengths.
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Q: Based on what you learned from business leaders, what characteristics set high-performing people in all fields apart?
A: Our study found that it depends on which area of work a person is in. The good news is that there is a place, at least of high performers, for any combination of strengths. For example, in healthcare we found that Working Memory is a commonly found strength while in technology it is Planning/Prioritization.
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Q: Are there differences in the strengths of high-performing men and high-performing women?
A: We found that males and females commonly have two of the same three strengths. Commonly found strengths among both groups were Working Memory and Planning/Prioritization. However, the most frequent Executive Skills in males and females is totally different. In females, the most common strength is Organization, the ability to arrange according to a system. That was not commonly found in male high performers.
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Q: Why is it important for aspiring high-performers to identify their weaknesses as well as their strengths?
A: The key to knowing Executive Skills weaknesses is twofold. It allows a person to identify tasks or even careers that would not be suited to how the person’s brain is ‘wired.’ Tasks that require a person’s weaknesses may be doable, but they will be difficult. And under pressure, a person’s weakest Executive Skills fail first. Secondly, knowing a person’s Executive Skills weaknesses allows her to compensate for that weakness by making sure someone around her has it as a strength. For example, an executive weak in Time Management should make sure her assistant has that as a strength, so that the assistant can keep her on time.
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Q: Of all the high-performing people you studied, what is the most common weakness?
A: The most commonly found weaknesses in high performers overall is Task Initiation.
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Q: Any final advice you’d like to offer to career women in particular?
A: Yes, always try to seek and get into situations that play to your strengths. And when managing, work to get your subordinates into situations that play to their Executive Skills strengths as well.
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Thank you to Chuck Martin for taking time to answer our questions! I think it’s very interesting that Chuck and his team’s research demonstrated there were common characteristics or strengths of high performers in various jobs, departments, and industries. This will be helpful information for women as they seek to re-evaluate a current job or are looking at changing positions or even careers.
If you’d like to learn more about the book, “Work Your Strengths”, you can visit the book page at the publisher site by clicking here.
~ Lisa Quast
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July 28th, 2010 at 6:22 am
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July 28th, 2010 at 6:54 am
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July 28th, 2010 at 11:15 am
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July 28th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
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July 28th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
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