The Truth About Building On People's Strengths - with Ashley Goodall

Ashley Goodall is a senior executive, talent expert, and author who spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside. Ashley currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco, a new organization that is built to focus entirely on serving teams and team leaders. He is also the coauthor with Marcus Buckingham of the wonderful new book Nine Lies About Work: A Free Thinking Leader's Guide to the Real World, and they've recently published two cover stories in the Harvard Business Review, The Feedback Fallacy and Reinventing Performance Management. In today's episode, Ashley Goodall shares the common mistakes most workplaces make when it comes to giving people feedback and the simple steps leaders and workplaces can take to build strengths-focused teams. Connect with Ashley Goodall:  Connect with Ashley on LinkedIn You’ll Learn: [02:18] - Ashley explains what his research with Marcus Buckingham found were the defining characteristics of the best teams at Deloitte’s [03:54] - Ashley shares how he applied these insights to build a new organization at Cisco focused on serving teams and team leaders [07:10] - Ashley offers tips for helping teach team leaders how to develop their own strengths and their people’s strengths [08:53] - Ashley explains why leaders are rarely reliable raters of their people’s performance and what they can do instead. [11:00] - Ashley provides an example of what a strengths-based conversation might sound like between a leader and a team member [15:00] - Ashley explains how leaders can still address people’s weaknesses and areas for improvement whilst still being strengths-focused [16:48] - Ashley shares why the approach most people take to developing people’s potential at work is a lie. [20:25] - Ashley provides suggestions for leaders who may have employees who are disengaged and have no interest in developing their strengths [22:49] - Ashley offers advice to help align people’s strengths to their work, even when the opportunities are challenging. [25:28] - Ashley completes the Lightning Round. Your Resources: MPPW Podcast on Facebook Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall The Halo Effect by Phil Rozenzweig Thanks for listening!  Thanks so much for joining me again this week.  If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this post. Please leave an honest review of the Making Positive Psychology Work Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. They do matter in the rankings of the show, and I read each and every one of them.  And don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes to get automatic updates. It’s free! You can also listen to all the episodes of Making Positive Psychology Work streamed directly to your smartphone or iPad through stitcher. No need for downloading or syncing. Until next time, take care!  Thank you Ashley!