Traditional, corrective feedback has its place, of course; every organisation must filter out failing employees and ensure that everyone performs at an expected level of competence. Unfortunately, feedback that ferrets out flaws can lead otherwise talented managers to overinvest in shoring up or papering over their perceived weaknesses, or forcing themselves onto an ill-fitting template.

Ironically, such a focus on problem areas prevents companies from reaping the best performance from its people. After all, it’s a rare baseball player who is equally good at every position. Why should a natural third baseman labour to develop his skills as a right fielder?

Managers who build up their strengths can reach their highest potential. This positive approach does not pretend to ignore or deny the problems that traditional feedback mechanisms identify. Rather, it offers a separate and unique feedback experience that counterbalances negative input. It allows managers to tap into strengths they may or may not be aware of and so contribute more to their organisations.

Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise

During the past few years, we have developed a powerful tool to help people understand and leverage their individual talents. Called the Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise, our method allows managers to develop a sense of their “personal best” in order to increase their future potential.

The RBS exercise is but one example of new approaches springing from an area of research called positive organisational scholarship (POS). Just as psychologists know that people respond better to praise than to criticism, organisational behaviour scholars are finding that when companies focus on positive attributes such as resilience and trust, they can reap impressive bottom-line returns. (For more on this research, see the sidebar “The Positive Organisation.”) Thousands of executives as well as tomorrow’s leaders enrolled in business schools around the world have completed the RBS exercise.

In this article, we will walk you through the RBS exercise step by step and describe the insights and results it can yield. Before we proceed, however, a few caveats are in order.

Step 1: Identify respondents and ask for feedback

The first task in the exercise is to collect feedback from a variety of people inside and outside work. By gathering input from a variety of sources - family members, past and present colleagues, friends, teachers and so on - you can develop a much broader and richer understanding of yourself than you can from a standard performance evaluation.

As we describe the process of the Reflected Best Self exercise, we will highlight the experience of Robert Duggan (not his real name), whose self-discovery process is typical of the managers we’ve observed. Having retired from a successful career in the military at a fairly young age and earned an MBA from a top business school, Robert accepted a mid-level management position at an IT services firm.

Seeking to improve his performance, Robert enrolled in an executive education programme and took the RBS exercise. As part of the exercise, Robert gathered feedback from 11 individuals from his past and present who knew him well. He selected a diverse but balanced group—his wife and two other family members, two friends from his MBA programme, two colleagues from his time in the army and four current colleagues.

Accustomed to hearing about their strengths and weaknesses simultaneously, many executives imagine any positive feedback will be unrealistic, even false. Some also worry that respondents might construe the request as presumptuous or egotistical. But once managers accept that the exercise will help them improve their performance, they tend to dive in.

A critical step in the Reflected Best Self exercise involves soliciting feedback from family, friends, teachers and colleagues. E-mail is an effective way of doing this, not only because it’s comfortable and fast but also because it’s easy to cut and paste responses into an analysis table such as the one in the main body of this article.

Step 2: Recognise patterns

In this step, Robert searched for common themes among the feedback, adding to the examples with observations of his own, then organising all the input into a table. (To view parts of Robert’s table, see the exhibit “Finding Common Themes.”) Like many who participate in the RBS exercise, Robert expected that given the diversity of respondents, the comments he received would be inconsistent or even competing. Instead, he was struck by their uniformity.

The comments from his wife and family members were similar to those from his army buddies and work colleagues. Everyone took note of Robert’s courage under pressure, high ethical standards, perseverance, curiosity, adaptability, respect for diversity, and team-building skills.

Robert suddenly realised that even his small, unconscious behaviours had made a huge impression on others. In many cases, he had forgotten about the specific examples cited until he read the feedback, because his behaviour in those situations had felt like second nature to him.

The RBS exercise confirmed Robert’s sense of himself, but for those who are unaware of their strengths, the exercise can be truly illuminating. Edward, for example, was a recently minted MBA executive in an automotive firm.

His colleagues and subordinates were older and more experienced than he was, and he felt uncomfortable disagreeing with them. But he learned through the RBS exercise that his peers appreciated his candid alternative views and respected the diplomatic and respectful manner with which he made his assertions.

Step 3: Compose your self-portrait

The next step is to write a description of yourself that summarises and distills the accumulated information. The description should weave themes from the feedback together with your self-observations into a composite of who you are at your best.

The self-portrait is not designed to be a complete psychological and cognitive profile. Rather, it should be an insightful image that you can use as a reminder of your previous contributions and as a guide for future action. The portrait itself should not be a set of bullet points but rather a prose composition beginning with the phrase, “When I am at my best, I…” The process of writing out a two to four-paragraph narrative cements the image of your best self in your consciousness. The narrative form also helps you draw connections between the themes in your life that may previously have seemed disjointed or unrelated. Composing the portrait takes time and demands careful consideration, but at the end of this process, you should come away with a rejuvenated image of who you are.

Step 4: Redesign your job

Having pinpointed his strengths, Robert’s next step was to redesign his personal job description to build on what he was good at. Robert’s challenge was to create a better fit between his work and his best self. Like most RBS participants, Robert found that the strengths the exercise identified could be put into play in his current position.

This involved making small changes in the way he worked, in the composition of his team and in the way he spent his time (Most jobs have degrees of freedom in all three of these areas; the trick is operating within the fixed constraints of your job to redesign work at the margins, allowing you to better play to your strengths).

Robert began by scheduling meetings with systems designers and engineers who told him they were having trouble getting timely information flowing between their groups and Robert’s maintenance team. If communication improved, Robert believed, new products would not continue to be saddled with the serious and costly maintenance issues seen in the past.

Armed with a carefully documented history of those maintenance problems as well as a new understanding of his naturally analytical and creative team-building skills, Robert began meeting regularly with the designers and engineers to brainstorm better ways to prevent problems with new products.

The meetings satisfied two of Robert’s deepest best-self needs: he was interacting with more people at work and he was actively learning about systems design and engineering.

Beyond good enough

We have noted that while people remember criticism, awareness of faults doesn’t necessarily translate into better performance. Based on that understanding, the RBS exercise helps you remember your strengths—and construct a plan to build on them.

Knowing your strengths also offers you a better understanding of how to deal with your weaknesses and helps you gain the confidence you need to address them. It allows you to say: “I’m great at leading but lousy at numbers. So rather than teach me remedial math, get me a good finance partner.” It also allows you to be clearer in addressing your areas of weakness as a manager.

In the end, the strength-based orientation of the RBS exercise helps you get past the “good enough” bar. Once you discover who you are at the top of your game, you can use your strengths to better shape the positions you choose to play—both now and in the next phase of your career.