Research indicates that one of the most important things employees want when accepting a new job offer is a job that plays to their strengths. So how do you create jobs that play to an employee’s strengths?
Understand Human Wiring
Understanding human wiring is useful for recognizing how you lead, process thought, manage (and align) your work environment, and how others make decisions. It is also helpful so that you can be highly effective in improving your outcomes and leading your team.
Several years ago, I worked with a client who was frustrated with a lackluster career. Throughout her work life, she had taken a number of personal development courses to get to the source of why she pursued so many career and entrepreneurial opportunities but didn’t thrive to the level she thought she was capable.
She had a lot of opportunities but would get stopped on tasks requiring follow through. Through her personal development work, she realized that she would often use the excuse that she got confused or overwhelmed on the steps necessary to achieve an outcome.
She felt like something was wrong with her that she didn’t understand the steps like many of her counterparts did. She would start things and not finish them. She would always question where she fit in. While she is intelligent and had a lot of skills to offer as well as had many opportunities, she was constantly failing to follow through. She garnered a reputation for being fickle and not someone who could be trusted to complete tasks. She was disempowered that is until she dove into her human wiring. She finally got to the root understanding of her natural self and how to align her environment with how she naturally executed.
An understanding of her human wiring would give her insights on the ideal career move. Her natural wiring showed that she:
- Is a natural team player who values the ideas and suggestions of others and wants a team-oriented environment where interactions are primarily cooperative.
- Wants an environment where there are high degrees of face-to-face interactions. She is a natural at providing and receiving positive feedback and empathetic in reading people.
- Likes an environment where she can complete activities in a sequential manner and completing tasks before switching gears to the next one.
- Prefers a minimally structured environment that is not overly controlled with rules and procedures and prefers her information in summary sheet form.
It’s important to note that her human wiring has all social elements (versus a combination of social and task or all task elements). This is why she naturally gravitated toward talking about ideas and had difficulty figuring out the tasks associated with following through without specific and detailed instructions.
What Is The Best Career and Work Environment for An All Social Human Wiring?
When encountering someone with all social human wiring elements, the tendency is to recommend sales or customer service professions. There’s a lot of sound reasoning to make those suggestions.
And, it’s important to look at the environment in which she would be selling or working with the clients. From a sales perspective, she will naturally gravitate toward the elements of face-to-face interaction. She possesses the natural ability to cultivate leads (versus drive leads) and does best with warm introductions or by generating additional business (upselling) from existing customer accounts.
She would also be well suited as a customer service driven sales person especially if the position involves providing helpful items or services to people. She would be naturally good at selling intangible services.
Whenever she had to drive sales and new leads, she resisted. She now understands what’s underneath the reason she resisted work where she was responsible for driving sales. She was simply better suited for a position to respond to warm leads.
While she likes to talk about different ideas, she can easily get into a situation where she piles more on her plate and gets overwhelmed. Without awareness training, she can use the overwhelm as an excuse or make other excuses for not achieving her goals. If she wants to pursue a number of opportunities, she would need to create a team or assistant with strong follow through skills.
How Does an All Social Profile Lead or Manage Others?
As a specialist (versus a generalist) in decision making who is focused on results, she places an even higher importance on how those results are achieved by the team. She builds team consensus by actively seeking out options and ideas from team members and will be flexible in accepting changes to plans. She will also proactively connect with others on the team and is empathetic and understanding of people issues of team members. As a leader or manager who is empathic and understands, she would need to set and keep strong boundaries as she may be easily influenced to change her decisions.
Once you create awareness around your own human wiring and align it with the ideal position and environment, you are able to:
• Be more focused and effective
• Work outside of your natural human wiring comfort zone
• Recognize when opportunities are not a fit and put distinctions or tools in place to work through them
Whenever you can align the person and the position, there will be fulfillment for the individual, for the employer, and for the customer that is served.
Invitation
Inspired to learn how to align your work environment? Join us for Wired to Win 101? How Are You Hardwired at:
Wired to Win 101: How Are You Hardwired?
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
8:30 am – 1 pm Eastern Time (onsite or online)
Registration/Information at: https://www.excellerateassociates.com/wired-to-win-101/
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