I attended a board meeting of the Start-Up Loans Company this morning. It's always an invigorating experience and today was no exception. The scheme has now issued over 5,000 loans and recently been extended to Northern Ireland. Work to test the feasibility of extending loans to those aged over 30 is progressing, and I'm hugely proud to be involved with a project that is delivering opportunities to create businesses by providing access to funding that wouldn't otherwise be available.
One of the discussions today reminded me of a book I read some years ago - 'Now, discover your strengths' by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. It made a big impression on me at the time and the board meeting debate, although in a different context, reaffirmed the principles.
I'm sure I'll get some of the details wrong so apologies in advance to Messrs Buckingham and Clifton but the central theme of their book is that we all have innate strengths which we should cultivate and on which we should focus rather than spending too much time on areas in which we are inherently weak. It proposes this approach from a personal perspective and when recruiting and managing staff. Organisations spend too much time (through appraisals and such like) in identifying weaknesses in people and trying to improve them. Surely, the book argues, it makes more sense to identify what we (or people) are best at and devote time to getting even better than to invest that time in moving from poor to mediocre in something. Using a football analogy, you wouldn't coach a good goalkeeper to become better at scoring goals, you simply drive him to become a better and better goalkeeper. Yet how often do we fall into the trap of wanting a square pin to fit better into a round hole?
Why, continuing this theme, do we focus our energies on the poorer performing organisations and want them to deliver more, when we should be devoting our energies to the best. If we did, then so much more could be achieved: 10% improvement from the best is always going to be more, by definition, than a 10% improvement from the worst.
Someone said this morning - and it was a timely reminder - that we should commit our resources to the biggest opportunities that will deliver the greatest benefits, not always be driven by numbers and absolutes. Time is a limited resource and we all have to make choices about how we use it. Where it can deliver the most and move us closest towards our goals seems a good guiding principle to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment