Strengths-focused coaching boosts leaders’ productivity, resilience, energy and performance. Little wonder Tesco is using this refreshing approach, says James Brook
Tesco Stores is one of a number of businesses focusing on strengths in their coaching. It’s a more affirming alternative than those approaches grounded in weakness fixing.
The UK’s largest retailer, it is also one of the largest in the world, with shops in Asia, Europe and North America. During the past decade it has expanded into new markets.
Tesco saw the strengths-focused approach as the ideal way to help it cope with the challenges of this diversification and rapid growth.
It wanted to develop strong, inspirational leaders and general managers with the awareness, techniques and mindset not only to capitalise on their own strengths but on the strengths and positive energy of those they lead.
It needed to ensure the agility and resilience to deal with increased work demands. It also wanted to ensure the availability, development and effective deployment of people to meet planned and new opportunities with confidence, resourcefulness and enthusiasm.
Tesco invited Strengths Partnership to partner with its HQ-based Leadership Academy. The aim was to deliver an international leadership development programme for its senior talent.
The programme has a strong emphasis on helping participants build strengths and take advantage of new business opportunities, so there was a natural fit with the strengths-focused approach of Strengths Partnership.
Participants were invited initially to undertake a Strengthscope multi-rater assessment tool1, which identifies a person’s ‘significant seven’ strengths from a total of 24 commonly found work-related strengths. These are classified into distinct cluster areas: Emotional, Relational, Thinking and Execution.
A unique feature of the tool is that it provides feedback from up to eight co-workers on the extent to which the person’s significant strengths are visible and how they can use them more effectively.
Strengths Partnership consultants supported Leadership Academy personnel trained in Strengthscope to deliver the coaching. Phone sessions were used for those based outside the UK.
One-to-ones helped participants:
- understand the benefits of strengths-based development
- identify their ‘standout strengths’ (three to four most important strengths from their significant seven)
- ‘stretch’ their strengths to the next level through new opportunities within or outside their role, training or coaching others in the area of strength, building new skills and knowledge, and building agility through practising using strengths in different situations and ways
- develop innovative ways to overcome work challenges and performance blockages by fully engaging their natural strengths and productive energy
- identify their performance risk factors, including overdone strengths and limiting weaknesses.
Reducing risk
Rather than helping participants find ways to fix weaknesses, the emphasis was on helping people reduce the negative impact of their risk factors through one or more of three strategies: finding workarounds based on their own strengths, identifying partnership opportunities with others whose strengths were complementary to their own and building new habits and work patterns to minimise the impact of overdone strengths and limiting weaknesses.
During a five-day intensive development programme, participants were able to explore their Strengthscope profiles and learn from the initial session with strengths coaches and with peers in small discussion groups. They were encouraged to put their learning and insights to the test during a team-based business simulation exercise, which is the backbone of the programme.
Several factors have contributed to the programme’s success:
- 1 Robust training and careful selection of coaches to ensure an appreciative, strengths-focused coaching approach.
- 2 Ensuring coaching conversations and insights from the Strengthscope profiler are pragmatic and relevant by closely linking these with leaders’ specific challenges, opportunities and business realities.
- 3 Recognising the legitimacy of limiting weaknesses and overdone strengths as an inevitable part of human nature, while helping people tackle these risk factors through leveraging their own and others’ natural strengths.
- 4 Ensuring participants understand the importance of building stretch and agility in the way they use their strengths to take advantage of opportunities outside their comfort zone.
- 5 Being sensitive to the different cultural backgrounds of participants, including how a strengths-focused development approach might be affected by different cultural frames of reference. Encouragingly, our experiences with Tesco and other multinationals to date reveal that this approach is equally effective and positively received, regardless of participants’ cultural background.
Positive feedback
Measurement is ongoing but feedback from participants has been extremely positive.
Alistair Elliott, leadership development manager with the Tesco Academy, and one of the internal coaches on the programme, said:
“The idea of focusing on strengths has really been embraced by our managers and directors. People are now working strengths into their personal development plans and are giving considered thought about how to integrate strengths in their daily work.”
James Brook is co-founder and director of the Strengths Partnership www.strengthspartnership.com
A STRONG framework
The starting point for many coaching assignments is typically a problem or ‘gap’ that threatens to derail the leader’s career
This is hardly surprising since most of us – including the coach and client – have been brought up in a society that favours problems, gaps and failure over strengths, successes and opportunities. Many coaches still collude with clients on “areas for improvement” or “development needs” rather than helping people optimise their natural strengths and fulfil their true passion and potential.
To shift from this convenient and unproductive deficit-based belief system, a coach needs first to reflect on and reset their underlying beliefs about human growth and excellence. Executive coaching is essentially about helping to optimise the client’s performance, development and personal success, but many coaches fail to appreciate the unique strengths, positive action routines and enabling relationships which have contributed to clients’ past and current successes.
Clients are rarely psychologically impaired or flawed. They are simply imbalanced in the characteristics they have been endowed with. Everyone has natural strengths and talent offering true opportunities for mastery and excellence, as well as weaknesses which present varying levels of risks to their performance. The most important to address are those we call ‘limiting weaknesses’, which undermine task performance and/or relationships and therefore need to be reduced or, in the words of the great management guru, Peter Drucker2, made “less relevant”.
A focus on strengths doesn’t mean the coach should ignore weaknesses. Our experience with companies like Tesco suggests that leaders who are more aware of their strengths are also more confident, creative and resilient when dealing with their weaknesses, overdone strengths and other performance risks.
Our strengths-focused coaching process, the STRONG Business Coaching framework seeks to overcome some of the limitations of more traditional coaching frameworks by emphasising the centrality of strengths and successes in facilitating growth in a client’s competence, confidence and general sense of wellbeing. Individuals also start seeing old problems and performance blockers in a new light – through an empowering and energy-enhancing ‘strengths lens’.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4