At best, identifying and overcoming weaknesses creates a path to mediocrity with not much fun along the way. With fun, there is creative energy that lightens the load and brings out the best in us. A more productive use of your time and energy is to leverage your strengths to achieve your personal and professional goals… and have fun doing it. Here are five questions* to get you started on a strength-based approach to performance assessment.

What’s working?
Take a look over the past year and identify your successes, small and large. What have you accomplished? Write them down. Identify things that you feel good about. Don’t let any words drift in that minimize your successes. Embrace the strengths that have emerged. How does that make you think and feel?

Why is it working?
Review your list of successes. Identify what you have done to generate these successes. Be an honest and detached observer of yourself. The answer to this question analyzes the reasons and supports a deeper understanding for what you are doing well.

What are you trying to achieve?
Describe your purpose and objectives, the things that are important and bring out the best in you. As you write, just let it flow. You can organize your thoughts later. The vision you create will act like a magnet. It will help you find the right path and the resources necessary for achievement. If it doesn’t ignite something in you, rewrite it until it does. When you have passion for your goals you find the energy to overcome obstacles and keep moving forward.

What will be the impact of achieving these objectives?
Describe the impact/benefits of achieving these objectives to you and to others that are important to you. For a work-related assessment the others may be the organization, its customers or your internal teammates. For a personal assessment they may be family or friends. This makes for strong teams and healthy supportive relationships. The impact for you will be high performance and fun.

What do you need to do more of, better or differently to move you towards your objectives?
Forget the useless “not working” question that looks at the past and reinforces your limitations. That approach doesn’t work. Ask yourself: “How can I use my strengths to move closer to my goals?” This will feed your passions and most importantly, lead your actions closer to your goals.

Next Steps
Answer and review the five questions. Identify one thing you can do in the next 24 hours to move you forward to move towards an important goal. One successful action, no matter how small, will create the next action and you will be on your way. Let me know how it works at dr.mjcolburn@gmail.com and I’ll share some additional thoughts with you!

These questions were inspired by and adapted from the book Enlightened Leadership: Getting to the Heart of Change (Oakley and Krug, 1991).

Dr. Michael Colburn has built his career on performance improvement at the organization, team and individual levels for a broad range of clients in the private and public sectors for more than 30 years. He recently retired as an Associate Professor of Management at Ashland University where he taught Organization Development, Operations Management, Strategic Management and Self-Management & Accountability. Michael has authored numerous papers in academic, professional and trade publications. His first book, Own Your Job: Five Tools for Self-management and Accountability in the Workplace will help you think more entrepreneurial, teach you self-management skills and increase your performance and influence. You can also check out Michael’s webpage (www.michaelcolburnphd).