Today, I spoke to Chuck Martin, who is a New York Times business best-selling author, noted researcher, speaker and business strategist. He is the author of seven business books, including most recently, Work Your Strengths. In this interview, Chuck talks about working your strengths, what executives skills are and how they can make you more successful, and more.
Would you tell us a bit about the groundbreaking research and original survey at the foundation of WORK YOUR STRENGTHS?
We spent two years contacting organizations of all types and sizes to participate in our study to determine the cognitive characteristics of high performing people in business. We wanted to see if there were any common characteristics of high performers based on the types of jobs they held and departments and industries in which they worked. We used an instrument, called the Executive Skills Profile, which is a series of questions that determines the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of individuals. The instrument has now been used by thousands of high performers in hundreds of companies globally. More than 100 researchers worked on the project over the course of the two years, contacting executives and managers who identified their high performers and sending, tabulating and analyzing the research results.
Would you clarify the meaning of the term “Executive Skills”? How can Executive Skills profiling help any individual not only choose the right career path, but also fulfill his or her potential for success?
“Executive Skills, a term that dates back decades in neuropsychology, are cognitive functions hardwired into the brain from birth.”
They are how the frontal lobes and associated brain areas manage information and behavior. There is no connection between Executive Skills and skills of executives and they are not skills that can be learned. (Psychologists refer to the brain as the central executive, hence the name.) There are 12 Executive Skills and they are developed by early adulthood. People typically have two or three of these skills that are their strongest and two or three that are their weakest.
These are the 12 Executive Skills: Response Inhibition, the ability to think before you act; Working Memory, the ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks;
Emotional Control, the ability to manage emotions to achieve a goal or complete tasks; Sustained Attention, the capacity to maintain attention to a task in spite of distractibility;
Task Initiation, the ability to start projects with undue procrastination; Planning/Prioritization, the capacity to develop a roadmap to arrive at a destination or goal; Organization, the ability to arrange or place according to a system; Time Management, the capacity to estimate how much time one has and allocate it well; Goal-Directed Persistence, the capacity to have a goal and follow through to completion; Flexibility, ability to revise plans in face of setbacks; Metacognition, capacity to stand back and take a bird’s-eye view of yourself to make changes in how you solve problems; and Stress Tolerance, the ability to thrive in stressful situations.
Once a person recognizes their Executive Skills strengths, it becomes much easier to strive to get into positions that play to those inherent strengths, which makes the job or task much more natural for how the person’s brain is ‘wired.’
Based on what you learned from business leaders, what characteristics set high-performing people in all fields apart?
It really depends on the area in which people work, since we found similarities in strengths across each industry as well as by job function. For example, the most commonly found strengths of high performers in financial services were Metacognition, Goal-Directed Persistence and Working Memory. People with those strengths would tend to step back to see how to do things better, remain focused on long-term goal and remember critical details even when extremely busy. In healthcare, the most commonly found strengths were Working Memory, Organization and Planning/Prioritization. And in Information Technology, Planning/Prioritization is key.
By title, we found that CEOs commonly were strong in Goal-Directed Persistence while managers were strong in Planning/Prioritization. In Sales, the most commonly found strength by employee, manager and executive was Working Memory.
Interestingly, a commonly found Executive Skills weakness is Task Initiation, which can mean either that the cognitive function is not needed to be a high performer or that someone else around that high performer either takes the initiative or has the responsibility to get things started right away.
Why is it important for aspiring high performers to identify their weaknesses as well as their strengths?
There is an advantage to being aware of weaknesses since those are areas that can cause issues and present situations a person should try to avoid. Also, when a situation that requires a person’s weakness is required, at least the person will know that the task will be more challenging for them than those that play to their strengths. For example, if a person is weak in Planning/Prioritization, it will be difficult for them to easily sequence events in a complex project. It is not that they can’t do it, it just will be difficult since it is not natural for them.
The solution is to allow more time for the task and do it while fresh. An alternative solution is to ask someone strong in that Executive Skill to give a hand, since it will be much easier for them.
Under stress, a person’s weakest Executive Skills fail first, which often is noticeable to those around the person.
Would you shed light on how certain strengths work together and how certain strengths balance certain weaknesses? What are the practical workplace applications of these insights?
Some strengths and weaknesses can balance out each other. For example, one person may be strong in Goal-Directed Persistence and weak in Task Initiation. In a situation that requires execution, that person is likely to start a project late but finish it on time. This is because their Executive Skills strength of Goal-Directed Persistence keeps them focused on doing whatever it takes to get the job done. This does not necessarily mean starting it on time, just finishing on time. A person with the exact opposite combination of strengths and weaknesses would likely start the project right away but not finish when due.
While there is great value for a person to understand their own strengths and weaknesses so they can leverage their strengths, there is perhaps even greater benefit in seeing these skills in action in interactions with others.
The ultimate benefit in recognizing Executive Skills is in interactions with others, especially in the workplace. If a manager is weak in Sustained Attention, you know that when meeting with that person you should make your key points right away.
If you are dealing with someone strong in Flexibility and Metacognition, you can expect that they would be more open to new and innovative ways of doing something.
Another benefit of understanding Executive Skills strengths and weaknesses in others in the workplace is it helps eliminate conflict because a specific action or behavior can be better understood.
——-
Chuck Martin is a New York Times business best-selling author, noted researcher, speaker and business strategist. He is the author of seven business books, including most recently, Work Your Strengths. As the Chairman and CEO of NFI Research, Martin is at the nexus of a global idea exchange and the leader of a research engine that regularly samples the mood and intentions of 2,000 senior executives and managers from more than 1,000 organizations in multiple countries, including many of the Fortune 500. Martin was a former Vice President with IBM. Martin writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column on management and business issues and regularly appears on television business shows. He also teaches Marketing Research and Consumer Buying Behavior at the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire.
