You Manage It! 5: Customer-Driven HR Build on Their Strengths

People bring different strengths and weaknesses to the workplace. Some of these strengths and weaknesses are the result of fairly fixed characteristics. For example, one person may be very methodical and follow steps in a project in a prescribed manner. However, another person might approach issues in a more free-form manner. The first person might excel at following detailed procedures, but not do well at finding novel and innovative approaches to work issues. Of course, the second person would be much stronger in terms of innovating, but struggle with detailed steps that need to be closely followed. To the extent that the weak areas for each person are due to weaknesses that the person might not be able to change, what good would it do to focus on these weak areas?

The strength-based approach to performance appraisal, discussed in the Manager’s Notebook, “Accentuate the Positive,” recognizes the above issue and encourages managers to focus on positive feedback. The core ideas of focusing on strengths are that people want to contribute and that receiving evaluations and feedback that recognize their positive contributions can motivate workers. On the other hand, providing negative assessments can lead a worker to become defensive and less motivated.

Critical Thinking Questions

  1. 7-38. Not everyone can be good at everything about a job. Providing only positive performance feedback can give workers inaccurate pictures off their performance. What are the disadvantages of this inaccuracy?

  2. 7-39. Motivating workers is an important goal for managers. Do you think that providing feedback on strengths helps accomplish this goal? Identify other purposes for performance appraisal. How well does a strength-based approach meet with those purposes?

  3. 7-40. If a worker has some weak areas that affect how well they perform aspects of a job, the traditional approach would be to provide evaluation and feedback to the worker to try to improve those deficiencies. How else could those deficiencies be improved?

Team Exercise

  1. 7-41. Workers often share the same formal job title and set of tasks that need to be done. The practical reality in many organizations is that workers gravitate to particular tasks that they perform well. What is one formal job that can informally be made up of people playing different roles?

    With your teammates, assess the practice of people taking on different roles. From the strengths-based performance appraisal approach, would people engaging in various roles—rather than one consistent job performed by all workers—be a positive or negative way of structuring work? Why or why not? Share your assessment and rationale with the rest of the class.

Experiential Exercise: Team

  1. 7-42. As a team, consider a retail store, Emery’s Cookies, that makes and sells cookies. The job basically requires people to make cookies, wash dishes and clean, and interact with customers.

    1. a. How could the set of tasks be approached as roles rather than a set of tasks that form one job for all workers?

    2. b. What could be a disadvantage of approaching the tasks as roles?

    3. c. If you can approach the tasks as roles, how would you appraise the workers in this retail situation? How would this fit with the strengths-based approach to performance appraisal?

    Each team should take on the role of consultants and provide a report based on these questions to the owner of Emery’s Cookies (your instructor).

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