Are you unhappy in your job? You're not alone if you are. More than four out of five (84% to be exact) people surveyed by CareerBuilder.com are unhappy at work! That's an incredible number.

What’s causing all the angst? A growing number of people believe the reason is our culture’s preoccupation on weaknesses. Think about your last performance review, it was probably low on praise and high on finger pointing. Who treats teammates that way? Professional athletes sure as heck don’t and the people who have joined the Strengths Movement don’t either.

The goal of the Strengths Movement is to end the angst. Dr. Donald Clifton (1924-2003) of the Gallup Organization began studying human strengths over 40 years ago. To formalize the study the StrengthsFinder assessment tool was created. To date it has been translated into more than 20 languages, used in more than 100 countries, and competed by more than 3 million people. That data is the foundation of the Movement.

Several excellent books have been written around the StrengthFinder data and most of them provide a way for you to take the test online at no additional cost. Many bestsellers such as StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath, First Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, and Go Put Your Strengths to Work, also by Marcus Buckingham, have gained national acclaim and were featured in venues ranging from the Harvard Business Review to Oprah.

There are common threads in each book. Following are my thoughts on a few.

1. Too many resources are spent making us better generalists and not enough are spent identifying and building up our strengths. A fifth-grade math wiz may not be able to find a challenge equal to his potential, yet tutors and extra assignments are readily available to boost his English proficiency if the system rated him as Needs Improvement.
2. Focusing on our weaknesses does not build self-confidence, which is crucial to success at work and, some would say, in life. Successful people tend to have real confidence in at least one area of expertise. From that confidence-well they can draw the strength they need to succeed in other areas.
3. The reality is if you are not innately good with numbers you will not become a great statistician, period. As Tom Rath said so precisely in, Strengthsfinder 2.0, “You cannot be anything you want to be – but you can be a lot more of who you are.” Stated more positively, when we concentrate on developing our naturally steel-like talents and passions, our upside is far higher than when we ignore them and try to wedge our skills into some more conventional mushy-middle. Our great talents have leverage. Our average talents do not.
4. A plethora of leadership books list attributes as if once mastered we would, in effect, then become Winston Churchill or Mahatma Ghandi, for example. That seems odd. All great leaders have a grand vision, but most have far more differences than similarities. In the above example, the differences are dramatic; one is brash and aggressive while the other is polite and patient. The Movement’s focus is on accentuating the person on the inside and not the actor on the outside, no matter how good the actor.

I’ll never be Ernest Hemmingway, but now that I’m writing this blog twice each week, I’m going to go take that CareerBuilder.com test again. I may be able to bump the minority number up (those who are happy at work) to 17%.

Steve