 It's great to be here tonight and I'd like to start this evening's session by asking you to participate in a very scientific survey for me if you don't mind. I'm going to put up on the slides a bunch of pictures and I'd like you to take a moment to look at them and think to yourself on a Monday morning on your way to work once you're at work early in the day do you ever look like anybody or maybe multiple people that appear in these pictures and if you do please raise your hand so I can take a poll. We've got some shy hands but I'd say maybe about a quarter of the room. So thank you for your participation. The reason I ask if any of you look like this on a Monday morning is because these people look to me like they're engaged employees and Gallup defines an engaged employee as one who's emotionally connected to their work and deeply invested in their company's future. And I think for us all that's our desire in this state in our career. We want to go to work on a Monday morning and maybe give ourselves this little fist bump. Yes, TGAM thank goodness it's Monday. I'm excited about what the week holds ahead of me. I'm excited to make an impact to see my colleagues and to do great things for our clients. And so why I bring this up is because we're going to talk about how taking a strength-based approach to our career will help us to get to this state where we all raise our hands in response to a slide like the one before. Today's agenda is going to cover four main things. I'm going to start by talking a bit about the New Zealand workplace and engagement. We're not going to introduce you to talents and strengths and we've got some exercises so I'm really looking forward to having you all be involved and hopefully enjoy those. Then step three will be the micro approach. I'm going to give you some steps and tools so that you can use strengths every day. And finally we're going to go up a level and think about how can we take a strength-based approach to our career. So I hope that sounds like a good plan to you all and we'll start by talking some statistics about the New Zealand workplace. So actually when I did the scientific poll in the room and I said about a quarter review seemed to be engaged employees, that's pretty much right on because Gallup statistics show that 77% of New Zealand employees are not engaged at work. Now what does this mean? It might not be as depressing as it sounds. So we classify people into three groups. So we've got the engaged people who raise their hand in response to that question. These are people who get excited about coming to work. They're very committed to their organisations and they look a little bit like owners of a business. The bulk of people in New Zealand, these are the New Zealand statistics but most of the world looks pretty similar. We're not particularly better or worse than most other countries. So we have 62% of people sitting in this middle not engaged bucket. And these people may well be quite productive employees. They may be very competent, but they're not psychologically connected to their companies and to their jobs. These people are people that perhaps are clocking in and clocking out, working 9-5, maybe reading a bit of the New Zealand Herald, trying to pass the time. But you want to look at them and say these are overly awful employees. This is the bulk of the New Zealand workforce. People who are doing a fairly good job and not overly excited or connected to their job organisation. And then a fairly large group we call actively disengaged. These are people who are at work but they're not really present. They're pretty unhappy with their job and the company that they work for. And not only are they unhappy inside themselves, but they often insist on spreading their unhappiness to other people who may well sit in the engaged or not engaged buckets. So actually in New Zealand, the majority of people look quite worse. Thank goodness it's Friday. As I said, maybe people who are doing their jobs competently, people who are showing up but not really showing up to work. And then of course these people who are so unhappy with their work that it's having a negative impact on their colleagues. In terms of what does work look like, if 77% of our population are not engaged, we see things like this. Maybe people not taking the initiative that they showed in their job. The job is done, but perhaps not as well as it is what it could be. Quality issues. And then of course as I've mentioned, people want to make sure that everybody else at work on their way to work is not having a good time. So why are most of us not engaged in our work? I think about this often because we spend most of our waking life at work. So it's a little bit sad that most of us aren't engaged. And I think there are a couple of reasons. First of all, there's always an opportunity for us to have better managers because the manager influences about 70% of our engagement. But for almost all of us, we don't really get the opportunity to pick our manager. That's kind of something that gets given to you when you join an organisation. So thinking about what types of things are in our sphere of influence that can help us to be more engaged in our work, led me to develop this presentation for you all today. So I've brought you all pads and pens, and as I'm sure you've all figured out, one side of the pen is a pen and the other side is a highlighter, so we'll be using both. I'd like you to help me with a bit of an exercise. How many of you are parents? Quite a good number, so if you're not a parent, perhaps you can think back to when you were a child at secondary school or even when you were at university and you came home at the end of the term or semester with your report card. So pretend your child, or if you don't have a child, you as a child returns home with the following links on the report card. A is in English and Social Studies. A C in Science, just getting by in Science. A D or a Flaming Grade in Maths. On your piece of paper, just to yourself, would you mind writing down which of these marks you'd spend the most time discussing with your son or daughter? That does a lot of polling and surveying, so unsurprisingly we ask this question to a group of parents and I'd love to have some audience guesses from the options up here on the screen. What percentage of parents see they would spend most of the time focusing on the D or the Flaming Grade that their child brought home on their report card? Seven percent. So more than three quarters on parents would spend most time talking to their child about the area that they were failing really bad at. Seven percent on three quarters of parents would spend the most time focusing on the area that their child was failing at. Because from the cradle to the cubicle we devote more time to our shortcomings than to our strengths. Gallup has discovered that when people have the opportunity to use their strengths every day, there's six times more likely to be engaged in their work, so to be psychologically committed and emotionally connected to their job. And three times more likely to say they have an excellent quality of life or good wellbeing. So this leads me to the second section where we're going to talk in depth about talents and strengths. Where I'd like to start talking about this section in an odd place by addressing weaknesses because particularly as New Zealanders we like to talk about weaknesses and the things that we're not very good at. So with me positivity is one of my top strengths so I like to get this out of the way so we can talk about more uplifting things for the rest of our discussion this evening. So a weakness isn't simply something that you're bad at. A weakness is something that gets in the way of your success. So for me I'm a very vulnerable swimmer. I always have been and even though my parents tried to bribe me with McDonald's I never got any better at swimming. But fortunately my job never involves swimming. So this is something that's not a weakness for me. However if I was weak in communication and I got really frightened going to client meetings and talking to people as for most other people in their work, this would be a weakness. So we often think about things when people say what are your weaknesses. A whole laundry list of things that you're bad at. It's only a weakness if it gets in the way of your job and your performance. A few strategies for overcoming a weakness so that we can focus on our strengths. If you don't have to do it, don't do it and ignore it. Secondly, get just good enough. So maybe it's not an option for your child to get a D in maths. Maybe they need to focus enough attention so that they get a C and so that they're passing. But they don't really need to spend all of their time on it because you know they're probably never going to be an A plus maths student. I also share all my slides with you if you don't want to write everything down. So in the workplace in particular you can form a partnership. So if there's something that you're really good at and somebody else is not good at, invite vice versa, look the form of partnership with somebody because unsurprisingly the things that we're good at we really like doing. Develop a system structure or process or finally overwhelm it with a strength. I want to tell you a bit of a sports story about what you will all probably have heard I'll call Tiger Woods. He was interviewed a few years ago by a sports journalist who asked him what he thought his weaknesses were in his golf game and Tiger Woods said well I'm not going to reveal that for my competitors to know. So the sports reporter decided to guess at what his weaknesses based on years of studying his game. He said I think your weakness is getting out of the sand. I can imagine that you must spend a lot of hours practicing getting out of the sand because that's your main area where you can improve. And Tiger Woods said actually no I spend very little time focusing on getting out of the sand practicing on the sand. I spend most of my time focusing on my drives and my parts so I don't get into the sand in the first place. And this is a perfect example of taking what you're good at building on those things so you're exceptional and therefore not really having to do what you're weak at at all or rarely because you've overwhelmed it on the screen that makes sense. Now Gallup has been researching people and strengths since the 1950s and 60s and Dr Donald Plutton, one of our psychologists did a bunch of research and what he noticed was that in the 50s and 60s there were thousands of articles and publications on what was wrong with people, things like mental illnesses and the other ways that people bought themselves into trouble. But only a handful of publications and academic articles on what was right with people. And so he said this what will happen when we think about what's right with people rather than fixating on what's wrong with them. And from this Gallup's strengths based approach was born. I'd like to ask you to participate in another activity with me if you will. Could you please raise your hand if you always or almost always talk to people pretty much wherever you go in the elevator. What about if you always or almost always gravitate towards the familiar face at a big party if you have a colour coded or otherwise organised wardrobe smaller groups of you. Please raise your hand if you always or almost always to remind them that he's there. What about if you take a long time to make decisions? Do you ask too many questions or you've been told by somebody to ask too many? If you write down a list of things to do when you stick to it and sometimes you'll do something that's not on your list and go back and write it on your list. What about if you write down a list of things to do and stick to it even on weekends when you're supposed to be resting? These things are actually things that make you a weirdo. These are things that give you clues to your talents, to your natural ability to be great at things. Some other clues to your talents so we can start to fit in our unit. Things that you naturally draw to. Rapid mastery where you get really good at doing something quickly and it almost shocks you. Flow. You know that feeling when you're kind of just in the zone and the steps come naturally to you. You don't have to think about something that just happens naturally. There are a number of examples of excellence where you do something and afterwards you think, gosh, I don't even know how I did that. How did that happen? And satisfaction as I mentioned earlier people like doing things that they're good at. So now we're talking talents and I want to explain a bit about how your talent helps you see the world. So your talent is kind of like a pair of glasses to see the world. So we all have inputs coming in, various different things coming at us. We often have the same things coming at us. But because we all have different filters or different talents our responses and behaviour will be very different from one another because we see the world differently through our talent needs. Does that make sense? And so we're here today to talk about strength. So I want to explain a bit about the difference between a talent and strength. So we're all born with talent, which is a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving. And we can think about this as kind of quite raw. And then over time as we develop, as we learn, we get education, we get coaching, we spend time, we invest in developing our skills and building our knowledge base. Our more talents become strengths, which is the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in the role. So if we think about an athlete like Dan Carter, perhaps his parents know just as a toddler that he had really, really above average, by hand coordination for a toddler, and good balance. But of course this is not enough to get him to where he is today. So over the years he's invested many hours in coaching, studying, going for rugby and practising to get to the position where he's well classed and has the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in this role. So for most of us we're at the stage where we've taken our own talent because we're into our careers a bit and we've developed it into a strength. And while there's always room for us to improve on our strengths, I'll be talking mainly as we go through this presentation about strengths. So I hope I've explained the difference from how our talent comes to a strength and we'll move on from that. Most organisations in New Zealand and globally are built on two-throwed assumptions that each person can learn to be great and that each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness. It's a very logical thing to think. Our greatest room for improvement is the D in maths because we can go from a D to an A. I'd like you on your pads for me to please do a bit of a writing exercise. I will time you for 30 seconds and I'd just like you to see how many times you can write down alumni of the employee but write it with your non-dominant hand. Not natural. Not natural. Not natural. Not natural. So for most of you it sounds pretty uncomfortable. It took a lot of energy. It's not as natural as it would be if you use it frequently. And this is kind of like what it's like when we're waiting up a stream when the current's running down and we're wearing a bit of dark boots. This energy standpoint is demoralising. I would like to show you another exercise based on gaps research. So this is based on a real study that we did. We talked to people an average reader will say that's myself because she looks like she reads really fast. So we both do the same reading test and I can read 90 words per minute and now the above average reader can read 350 words per minute. Then we both go through a speed reading course same speed reading course when we come back and we do another reading test. Now I improve myself quite a lot I go from 90 to 150 words per minute on my second attempt at the reading test. Any guesses about how many words per minute now the above average reader will be able to read after investing some time in doing her speed reading course. 370, 500 Less than 150 5000 This is real data. Right. So if focus on weakness will undoubtedly prevent failure. We focus a lot of time and energy on our child getting a D in mass. We can surely take them from a D to a C. But when we focus on a strength this leads to excellence. So if we focus on English I think it was that your child got an A in this could be something at the best in their school at or potentially even the best in New Zealand at or maybe world class as opposed from just taking maths from a D to a C. So as I said most organisations are built on two floor assumptions and I really love it if organisations would start to build on the two right assumptions which are each person's talents are enduring so they don't change that much if at all over time and unique to the individual. And secondly each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength. Let's move on to talking about how we can use our strengths every day and understanding some more specifics about our strengths and how we might labour ourselves using our strengths. We could just tell you a bit about the science of strengths. So as I mentioned our work has been going on for over five decades and around the world using our tool called the Clifton Strengths find a tool developed by Dr Don Clifton. And by the way this isn't the only strengths tool, there are other tools out there that you can use to discover your strengths or in fact you don't even necessarily need a tool to discover your strengths. You can just be reflective and think back on your career and come up with what you think they might be. 15 million people know their strengths through our tool and really interestingly for me New Zealand per head of population has the most strengths takers of any country in the world so we're actually right into it. In the stocks most of the fortune 500 companies use this tool and it comes in the form of a book but you can also take the assessment online but we like to say that this isn't just a book, this is about a movement this is a strengths based movement. What our strengths assessment does is it measures a person's natural talents within 34 themes of talents across four domains. So these are four domains with all of the streaks in the buckets and what I've hidden for you underneath your hats is a list of these 34 points that are coming up and the colour is coded for the four domains. So I'd love for you to just take a few minutes to read through if you've never really thought about putting a language to your strengths and see what leaps out at you as things that you really think are your strengths and you're welcome to use the highlighter at the end of your pen if you see something that leaps out. See if you can pick out a few words. You've got a furious highlighter. Who's picked up something that they think is definitely there? What have you found? Things like context developer although some people think it's a Russian thing but I do actually liberate it in my own way. Yep, that's great. And those are not particularly common strengths as well. Anybody else want to share what they, anything that leaps out strongly for them? I'll leave you to think about the one of your own tyre and I'm happy to talk to you about the afterwards that you'd like to have in with compensation. Let me just explain carefully about four different domains. So you can think about a project that you might do at work how it's really helpful to have four different pieces. We have the people who operate it at ideation coming up with the ideas planning things. We have the relationship builders who put everybody on board and make everybody feel happy. The influencers who get the decisions may make sure that's happening. We have the executors who are going to take what the other groups have done and make sure that everything gets finished and that it gets done. So people when they do their strengths they'll often come back to me and be really, really worried because they'll say, oh no, I've got everything falling in the influencing bucket. Does that mean that I can't build relationships with people or I can't execute and I can't get things done? Visit the best that I have and we at Gallup say no, individuals are pointing. They have hard edges of excellence that make us unique but a team should be well rounded. So you really want to make sure you're enjoying your work, project work as part of a team that you've got all of these four buckets covered but you need not worry if one of your strengths, one of your top five strengths, four into one or two buckets, that's quite common. Now for those of you who like statistics and are thinking, you know, this strength stuff, it sounds good but what does that mean for my performance or for the bottom line of the business? So we've studied this and this is our statistics for the individual level. We also have this for the company level but when compared to their peers, employees who receive strengths based development were found to have a variety of improved performance outcomes in a range. So 8 to 18% increased performance which is based on performance ratings, productivity, sales data, 2 to 10% higher customer nitrates 20 to 73% lower attractiveness turnover, higher employee engagement which we've talked about in between the weight and 10% increased citizenship which basically means participation in extra curricular company activities. So strengths really does make a difference for performance and you also saw that in the speed-routing exercise and just to explain why there's a range on that slide is because you can have a variety of strengths interventions. So you can do a strengths assessment to discover your strengths and that will make some difference to how you perform at work. So in this case if you take the Clifton strengths minor strengths assessment you'll be about 20% less turnover with your staff, 20% less likely to leave your job in that year. But for organisations where they've created a strengths based culture which will be taking an assessment, investing in their strengths. Having the managers have strengths education so they're developing employees based on their strengths rather than working out what's wrong with them and having to focus on their weaknesses and team strengths sessions. So getting an understanding of where everybody sits in the team and knowing where their strengths fall into the four buckets. We can expect 73% of these attrition. But overall on the last slide is that strengths is not just something that it's nice to do I mean it's lovely to talk about it, it's great to present on it everybody loves strengths. But it really makes a difference to our lives as employees and to the companies that we work for. So to what I promise, three easy steps very simple, not rocket science. How can we use our strengths every day? First of all we need to identify what they are then we need to really understand them and accept that they're unique. So I might have context as a strength, is that Phillip? Yes. As context, as a strength but context looks very different between the two of us so what's unique to you? You need to understand what it means in terms of your role, in terms of your life, your experiences and of course I have context but I also have strategic, Phillip has context and he has deliberative. And because of the way his strengths mix together and the way my strengths mix together, the outcome will look very different. So once we know what they are, you spend time understanding them, might be helpful to talk to your colleagues or to your spouse because sometimes we look at our strengths when we've taken an assessment and we say that doesn't sound like me but we ask the people that we work with and we live with and they say that's totally you. They just have a very different perspective on you than you do and thirdly, keep them top of mind. So we don't want to go to the energy of discovering them and diving deep into what we're given in the drawer. So at Gala we have our strengths in our email signatures and on our desks and on our doors and it's an important part of how we interact with one another so that on a day-to-day basis I'm thinking how can I use my strengths as I approach this task. So for our final section and this section builds on section 3 we know what our strengths are, we understand them, they're top of minds and we have money with our strengths. How am I going to take a strengths-based approach to our career? So I've got some different suggestions depending on what part of your career you might be in. So earlier in your career, thinking about your first job, select a role that will allow you to utilise your strengths every day and really core upon you to use your weaknesses. So think of it as a title as if you can. If I'm a person who loves relationship building and communicating reading a job description for an analyst role that says I'll be in Microsoft Excel all day and low is not quite a fulfil you because if we look at a job description and think that we utilise our strengths every day in this role we'll have to use my weaknesses which I know is really exhausting and draining. This will help to maximise your opportunity for success not only for enjoyment and fulfilment of your role but also to be really great at what you do. Everybody loves to feel great at what they do. We all want to be successful. So think about your career but you're considering a career change. Looking at a card and picking out your strengths or taking an assessment might not be enough for you. So what I propose is that you look back on your career and think about the moments and there might just be small moments in your career when you are most energised and productive and then look at your strengths profile and see what marries up. What strengths were you drawing on when you felt really energised and engaged and maybe it was something you only had an opportunity to do for 5% of your job and that's why you want to leave and change your career. So once you figure out what strengths you were drawing on what skills you were using and you feel most energised, figure out how you can do more of that. If you're thinking that you've already identified the field that you want to work in and you're okay with that, you're not thinking about career change but you're thinking about a company change you want to be looking for as a future employer that you have a cultural and values alignment with. Do they follow a strengths based development approach against fixing approach? A lot of companies in New Zealand are starting to develop their employees based on strengths so my brother recently was interviewing from his first role as a solicitor and he interviewed with a lot of different law firms in Auckland and one of the questions that he got all the time to tell me what your weaknesses are. This is a question that depresses me because it came up more than once. This is probably not the type of company that you want to work for if you really buy into following a strengths based approach and want to develop yourself based on strengths. So look for an organisation that really understands that people can be at best and reach their highest potential by focusing on what they're good at and identifying their weaknesses and talking about them and trying to become confident at their weaknesses. We're looking to improve engagement in the current role. Look to form complementary partnerships as I touched on earlier or become part of a team where you can make each other more successful by all contribution in your area of greater strength and find it surprising but quite natural that my strength and what I love to do is somebody else's weakness and something they hate to do and vice versa. So if you look hard enough and get to know people in your workplace you're bound to find people that you can partner up with and help one another to be more successful by capitalising on each other's strengths. That way is asked to appreciate and respect people who bring different strengths to the table. What we actually naturally like is to work with people who are the same as us because it's easy. But what we're probably going to do is work with people who are different to us. So if I were one of those people who pushes the lift button a lot of times that I'm near, chances are high that I might be an activator which is somebody who likes to spring into action and get things done. My worst nightmare might be being partner with somebody who's deliberative. These are the people who are very thoughtful. They weigh up options, they're calculated, they think a lot before they move forward. These two types of people might hate the idea of being put together on a team or a partnership but what a beautiful match when you put together somebody who's thoughtful and strategic and deliberates but somebody who's actually going to spring forward and make it happen with energy. So it may take some time for us to get really comfortable working with people who are quite different to us but it's very effective once we do. In all situations find a way to use and invest in developing your strengths. So we've all taken our role talents and we've developed them into strengths but there's plenty of room for improvements still that you can ever stop improving and building upon your strengths. Some ideas I have that you might like to do in your spare time online education, getting a coach or a mentor that many of you might have. Developing our A system, this is when you might kind of a variation on the coach or mentor where you might get together with a bunch of people your age and similar stage in career, perhaps once a month and you will get together for lunch say on Friday and you talk about where you're at in your career where you'd like to go and you're utilising your strengths and your weaknesses, you hold each other accountable and listen to one another. This could really help what's the development. Can I suggest you add one line to that? Yes. You know the secret to all that is that you allocate time to do it there. People don't allocate time to do it, they don't allocate time to themselves. If you look in your calendar you've allocated time to everybody else not to yourself. You set the sign 15 minutes to half an hour every day and I'm going to do something for me that it would happen. Nothing happens unless you allocate time to it. It's a very key learning here. If you only prove yourself allocate time to it. I think it's a great point and I think if we allocate time, part of this time can be speaking on the standing out streets. We have a whole diary in front of you of people bringing up and you give it away to people. Instead of saying, hey, I'm going to do it sometime. Because I think when we give ourselves time and it might be time that we're thinking, we feel like we're not productive. But thinking time and we're thinking how do we develop ourselves how do we apply strengths is very creative and we absolutely do need to make time for it. To final say my suggest is joining out a club. I have a colleague who is the most fabulous presenter and facilitator you will ever meet. She has communication as one of her top strengths. But she says, you know, I didn't just roll out of bed and get here and be this fantastic. I spend many years doing things like going to Toastmasters. So volunteer work joining a club doesn't have to be something expensive or necessarily time consuming. But once you know what your strengths are figure out a way where you can get to practice them in a safe environment and take them from a strength to something that makes you truly exceptional or unique. Perhaps one of the best in New Zealand or world class at what you do. Just four final points to summarise. Recognise your strengths. Build on them. Find the right opportunity and environment to use them in. So find a place where your strengths will be appreciated. And finally something that we don't do enough of in New Zealand. Be proud of your strengths. Your strengths are what makes you unique. You will never meet anybody in the world who has the same top five strengths in the same order as you. The chance is something like one in 33 million. So be proud of them. Own them. Understand them. Put them into action in your work life. And from there I will be very confident of success and fulfilment in your career. So with that I would say thank you for listening and for participating in my exercises. Thank you everyone for coming. We please give Ashley a round of applause.