How to Use Strengths-Based Management to Attract Top Performers

There has been a tradition of sorts when it comes to how businesses hire, and reward employees. Picture the following: Joe has just graduated from college and is looking for a job. He hears of a local firm that is hiring and he submits an application which shows that he graduated near the top of his class from a respected school. During the interview, Joe has all of the apparent qualities that one would associate with success including a strong interview and clean appearance.

After the initial hurdles are completed, Joe is offered a position with the company. Once he is hired, assuming Joe does reasonably well, he will be promoted into a position with higher prestige. There is an expectation that Joe, like all other employees, will want to climb and eventually rise to the top of the corporate ladder.

While this scenario is common, there are some problems with the approach. As in the case above, John McCarter and Ray Schreyer (2000) argue that many applicants are evaluated based on "qualities that on the surface appear to define success: a good interview, excellent appearance, degree from the right school, etc., but often fall short in recognizing and measuring a number of more defining prerequisites for success in their organization" (p. 3). Therefore, an organization ought to evaluate and adjust the criteria it uses so that it can regularly attract top performers.

The second flaw with this approach is that it awards promotions and prestige on the faulty assumption that anyone can learn competence in a given area. Buckingham and Clifton (2001) point out that this erroneous assumption results in the organization giving "the most prestige, the most respect, and the highest salaries to the most experienced well-rounded people" (p. 8). The assumption that an individual can learn competence in almost any area is misguided. These flaws necessitate the formation of a philosophy that will assist organizations in developing a recruiting and selection policy that will operate on a different paradigm. The concept of strengths based management is a great alternative to effectively recruiting and selecting top performers.