It’s amazing how productive a person can be when they are performing tasks that they are naturally skilled at. I’m a big fan of the StrengthsFinder 2.0 book by Tom Roth. I’ve used this to help identify my own skill set as well as those who work with me.

The benefits have been amazing. When we match employees with their natural talents we save time and resources and get equally happy employees.

As an example, some organizations are big advocates of Sales training, even going as far as spending thousands of dollars training technical introverts on sales presentation methods.  Sure, these efforts may improve a persons ability to sell, but they will never become as effective as someone who already has natural talents in the sales area.

Would we ever expect a Sales person to be able to code and output a statistical algorithm for predictive analytics? For some reason this one seems more obvious to companies, no, Sales people don’t code, and that’s OK.

So let’s respect our employees strengths and limitations, but first let’s spend some time finding out what they are.

Happy Coding…and Managing…