6. Strengths Based Mentoring

The session on Encouraging made brief mention of the “strengths approach,” which has its origins in the social sciences.   A strength is something we consistently do well, a combination of talents,  knowledge and skills, that are enduring and unique. A person's greatest potential for growth is in the area of their greatest strength, and mentoring can help to identify and affirm these. When look to match our strengths to our roles at work, home and in the community,we enjoy what we are doing because we are using our true talents. 

Today the strengths movement is found everywhere: in the corporate world, the public service, in economics, education, and faith. Why? Because it works  It has proved far more effective to build organizations around what works rather than try and fix what doesn't. This approach has direct relevance to the mentor relationship, so I will offer a basic summary here, and suggest if the paradigm appeals to you, you can read some of the books by writers like Charles Rapp and Marcus Buckingham. 

A definition to start with:

A strength is a unique configuration of Talent + Knowledge + Skills. Strengths allow us to produce consistent competent performance in a certain activity.. 

• Talents are naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied. Talents come easily to us and we often don’t recognize them as such. For example, I have always been able to sing in tune. It comes naturally. But it's a talent my brother doesn't have. On the other hand, he is much better at connecting with strangers than I am. Each person's talents are enduring and unique; not everyone can do the same things.
• Knowledge comprises facts and lessons learned. This includes factual knowledge such as the models of iPhone, or where to buy peastraw, and experiential knowledge such as what will help a baby get to sleep. 
• Skills, on the other hand, are the steps of an activity, such as how to drive a  car or make a lasagne. Skills bring structure to experiential knowledge. 

The Gallup research organisation has identified 34 dominant "themes" of talent with thousands of possible combinations. You can find a list of these at strengthstest.com. 33 million combinations of the top 5 themes are possible and each is interwoven and modified by association. Themes have little to say about what field you should be in, and only offer some directional guidance on what role you should play within your chosen field. The undergirding premise is that within an organisation or as an individual, we reach our best potential by matching our strengths to our roles and enjoying putting our true talents to work. Many people however do not know what their strengths are, or how to describe them. This makes it hard to build one's life around them.  Our society (made up of parents, teachers, employers and therapists)  is fixated, says this paradigm,  with trying to repair our weaknesses, leaving our strengths lying dormant. An individual development plan for an employee or student will often focus on these areas of weakness or work to minimize them. But capitalising on our strengths is a better use of energy.  Certainly "fatal" weaknesses must be addressed; delusion, or not realizing you are failing, and denial, or finding reasons why your failures have nothing to do with you, are dangerous flaws, especially in combination. And there are basic areas (communicating, listening, organization) where you need some level of ability or they will undermine your real strengths. In general, though, we are better to manage ourselves around our weaknesses by say, employing a person or practice that mitigates against them. Ask yourself if the weakness is a skills weakness, a knowledge weakness or a talent weakness. If  you can't decide, acquire by training or practice, the skills and knowledge you need in a certain area, and if your performance is still deficient, you probably lack the talent. Find a coworker or partner with complementary  themes, and tell your team you are going stop doing things you aren't good at.

A person cannot have a strength without having the requisite talent. Skills will help them perform but not necessarily excel. For example, we may learn the basic steps of public speaking and even become a better public speaker than we were before. But without the natural talent, we will never be great at it. This means a mentoring relationship will be more successful if we help out mentoree identify their talents,  refine them with knowledge and skills and build them into strengths. Talents not only come naturally to us, but are also accompanied by an “it feels good” quality. So it not only feels natural to use them, it feels good too. "When we exploit our natural abilities, we can't help but succeed". 

Mentorees can be coached to monitor their reactions to life situations they encounter in order to identify their talents. The 2001 book "Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton suggests we notice: 

• Yearnings – activities you are drawn to naturally, particularly at a young age. You may not heed the desire to cultivate them because you are busy doing other things, but they will keep “calling out” to you.
• Rapid Learning – an ability to rapidly learn a new skill will give us clues to a talent’s presence.
• Satisfactions – since it “feels good” to use a talent, if doing something makes you feel really good or satisfied, it may be a natural talent. This shouldn’t be confused with the idea that “if it feels good, do it”. Obviously this applies to productive behaviors only, as the definition of talent implies.

Each person's greatest potential for growth is in the area of his or her strengths. Encouragement, which we agreed is the core of good mentoring, can be enriched by an understanding of the strengths-based approach. 

Quote of the Day: 

"Conventional wisdom tells us that we learn from our mistakes. The strengths movement says that all we learn from mistakes are the characteristics of mistakes. 

If we want to learn about our successes, we must study successes." 

(Marcus Buckingham).

Can you name some of your talents, knowledge and skills?

Which of the 34 themes can you identify as your constellation of strengths? 

Godshaped Mentoring is the site where Rev Viv records material shared in the Mentor Training events held in a partnership between two Baptist Churches in Auckland New Zealand in 2012 and 2013. The blog has been set up to ensure people who missed some aspect of of the training can catch up on the themes covered and skills taught, and so we can add insights and feedback as the programme takes shape.