Numbers Never Lie
It's great to be back on the blog after a summer hiatus. It's busy season in career counseling with new college students seeking majors and soon-to-be graduates starting the job search. In the midst of sharing resources and encouraging these students, I have come across a very thought-provoking article from Business Week on a data collection/curation project at IBM: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_36/b4098032904806.htm
The article from Business Week is related to a book called The Numerati by Stephen Baker. According to the Business Week article, one of the chapters focuses on IBM's project of tracking employee activities to optimize workplace deployment. Their goal is to be able to analyze an employee's communications and movements and extract the employee's strengths -- and best areas of deployment -- from that data. Whether or not it will actually work in a positive, team-building manner or in a negative, punitive manner is anyone's guess. Think about human nature, after all. The basic premise of helping managers and employees discover the employees key strengths and best ways to use them, though, is right on the money.
Do you know what your core strengths are? Are you using them? Does time fly by when you're working -- or doing anything -- so that you feel "in the zone" and unconscious of yourself? If so, terrific. If not, you may want to take steps to see where your strengths lie. Martin Seligmann's Authentic Happiness website may be useful: http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx
Start with the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire (or the brief strengths questionnaire, if you're short on time) and see what results you get back. These questionnaires are similar to Strengths Quest, if you've ever done that exercise. You will learn about yourself, from a strengths viewpoint. Developing our strengths in work and play is one of the best moves we can make towards a fulfilled, pleasurable life.
Although conventional wisdom says "numbers never lie" -- they don't always tell the whole story. Get started today on improving your quality of work life by assessing and thinking about your strengths and where you can best contribute to the world.
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