Are You Still Putting Square Pegs Into Round Holes?

My first job as a trainee accountant with a CPA firm in Brisbane, Australia, lasted just 4 months. My parents had moved away from the city to a country town midway through my final year of high school, so I decided to get a job and go to university part time to ensure that I had a decent income to live on. At that stage of my life I thought I wanted to be an accountant... mainly because maths, (yes the "s" is deliberate - an Aussie-ism), was my best subject, and accountants earned good money.

My next job was with an insurance company working towards becoming an actuary... I was still convinced that I should use my talent for maths in my career. That job lasted just eighteen months. I was very much a square peg in a round hole!

Even though I was talented mathematically, I did not have the strengths for accounting work or actuarial analysis. Looking back on my high school years with the awareness I now have, it's clear that my strengths were in building relationships. I made friends easily and was elected Class Captain by my peers almost every year.

Half Round, Half Square
I meet people my age today who are still pursuing careers that do not utilize their strengths. Yes they can do the job. Yes they have the qualifications and skills to do it... but they have strengths that the job just doesn't use. They are like a half-round-half-square peg in a round hole. Ultimately, both the individual and the organization lose out on the employee's best contribution.

I am not suggesting that people should only do those tasks or activities that match their strengths. There are parts of my job that I struggle with. But what does make sense to me is that people have the opportunity to use the strengths they have that can contribute to improving their own and their organization's performance.

Job Descriptions Can Be a Trap
For many years organizations have been using job descriptions as a tool to clarify what is expected of employees. The job description is the "round hole" we want to fill, so then we look for the person (the peg) who can best fill that position.

What are the chances that every person who fills that position has strengths that the position does not require, and that the job will require them to do things they are not particularly good at?

Maybe we just have this whole job/person fit absolutely backwards. What if the round hole was the person and the peg was the job?

If the peg doesn't fit we'll just knock off a few of the sharp edges, add a bit more here and there to round it out, and presto! We have a really good match between the person and the job.

Four Questions That Improve Job Fit
The main challenge to this idea is the concern that some work won't get done... as they say in the Marines: "Someone has to clean the latrines!" There are four questions your team can use to create jobs that better utilize the strengths of each team member, and ensure that everything that must get done, gets done:

  1. What aspects of my job that fit my strengths do I want to keep?
  2. What aspects of my job that drain me would I like to get rid of?
  3. What responsibilities that fit my strengths would I like to take on?
  4. What team responsibilities am I willing to share?
When done as a team exercise, there is almost always someone wanting to take on those tasks or activities other team members want to get rid of. On those rare occasions that no one else wants it, it is up to the team to take responsibility for ensuring those tasks are done - in most cases other team members are willing to share to ensure the team's outcomes are achieved.

The goal here is to get the team to take responsibility for increasing their performance by better capitalizing on the strengths of all team members. Use this link to download the questions for use as an exercise with your team.

How Often Should You Use Your Strengths
In his new book GO Put Your Strengths to Work, Marcus Buckingham said that 73% of employees claim to use their strengths "about once a week." He goes on to say:

    "But we can't win on once a week. We can't make our greatest and longest-lasting contribution on once a week. We can't achieve anything of significance on once a week."

    "So our challenge now is to increase dramatically how often we play to our strengths. On high-performance teams, people say they call upon their strengths more than 75 percent of the time."

This can much more easily be achieved by fitting jobs to people rather than people to jobs.

Next month I will introduce a tool my associates, like Dave and Laura Hauser, and I use to help teams identify the talents each team members brings to the table, and a team based process that capitalizes on the talents of all team members.

Click here to read our eMail Archive