This weekend’s church service opened with a song by Henry F. Lyte entitled “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven.”
One line within this song is “Slow to chide, and swift to bless.” I was struck by that lyric from a personal standpoint and wanted to look into it more. I started with the definition of “chide” online:
chide /chīd/
intransitive verb
- To scold mildly so as to correct or improve; reprimand.
“chided the boy for his sloppiness.”
2. To express disapproval.
What if everyone was slow to chide and swift to bless? How would our world look different? How would your daily interactions feel? How would relationships blossom, and trust build within a team?
We need to focus more on people’s strengths and less on their weaknesses, especially in a team setting. We need to do less chiding and more blessing. If you are a leader, take notice. If you are setting a personal goal, here’s your chance to adopt Henry’s lyrics as your mantra. I will also be adding this to my list of improvement initiatives.
Back at ya, Rich. Your colleagues are lucky to have you. Knowing a colleague’s or direct report’s strengths and weaknesses calls for the leader to know them as people and not just cogs. Unfortunately, a discussion of these usually occurs once a year during an employee’s annual performance review. I’m a big advocate of personality assessments such as DISC or WPI because they provide a window into how employees are likely to behave, including how they’ll support or not support a team and culture. Thanks for dialoguing.
Rich, I appreciate this idea a lot. Years ago, when I was still in the corporate world, I mentioned that we should be relying on people’s strengths and ease off the gas pedal of trying to correct “weaknesses.” Given some of my colleague’s reactions, you would have thought I had two heads.
I’m not arguing that we ignore areas of improvement, but I spent years beating myself up because I didn’t have this or that. As a people, we seem to have this insatiable need for perfection. We need, as you argue, to bless the goodness that people have. Maybe that is their “perfection.”
Jeff, you and I want to lead in the same way. It’s one reason I love you so much! (I would have been thrilled to work for you too).
This idea of leading through strengths is not my original thought of course. We’ve covered this topic at NLV with Sarah Elkins, and there are many studies touting strengths-based leadership and leading others.
In their book, Strengths-Based Leadership, Tom Rath and Barry Conchie (2009) outlined key findings that emerged. The most effective leaders:
> Invest in employees’ strengths
> Gather together the right people to ensure the best team
> Understand the needs of their followers
Through this model, if you have a team of people responsible for a set of tasks, letting each of them focus on their strengths totally makes sense. Their weaknesses are irrelevant in this case. If you have a situation where one person needs to do many tasks, sometimes you cannot avoid their weaknesses, but this might be a place to look for process improvements, outsourcing, etc. as a solution.
When I spend time and effort working on someone’s weaknesses at the print shop where I supervise a production team, I only get small gains in output. When we focus on people’s strengths, we see huge leaps in productivity, work satisfaction, and retention.
More on this idea can be found at this article: https://positivepsychology.com/strength-based-leadership/
Thanks again for your comment and for reading! I am blessed to have you in my network.