What you do best

Monday, May 13, 2013

What do you do best? What skills come easily to you? What do you enjoy?

I recently read an interview with Cheryl Sandberg in the NY Times Book Review. She was asked to recommend the best business book that she's read recently. Here's a bit of what she said.

“Now, Discover Your Strengths,” by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton. This book has been instrumental in how we think about developing talent at Facebook. Like all organizations, we have a system for giving feedback to our employees. A few years ago, Lori Goler, Facebook’s head of human resources, brought Marcus to meet with our leadership team to help us improve this system. Marcus and his colleagues surveyed employees for 25 years to figure out what factors predict extraordinary performance. They found that the most important predictor of the success of a company or division was how many people answered yes to the question “Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” And this makes sense. Most performance reviews focus more on “development areas” (a k a weaknesses) than strengths. People are told to work harder and get better at those areas, but people don’t have to be good at everything. At Facebook, we try to be a strengths-based organization, which means we try to make jobs fit around people rather than make people fit around jobs. We focus on what people’s natural strengths are and spend our management time trying to find ways for them to use those strengths every day.

In addition to this review, I'm also deep into Cheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In. So far I have dogeared or underlined something on nearly every page. Not being in the corporate world, I've thought a lot about the lens through which I am reading the book and how it applies to my life as
 a work from home woman and a stay-at-home mom.





Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? 

Do you feel the weight of that question? That's one of those questions that makes you feel the power of seizing the moment and moving your world around to make things happen. But it's also a question that makes you think about what your strengths are and if you are owning them. 





Celebrating Mother's Day yesterday was beautiful. The girls showered me with homemade gifts in three languages, breakfast in bed, and a blissful sushi lunch. Then, I cleaned a bit of the house, supervised piano practice, broke up a few arguments, discussed Olivia's upcoming birthday party, and got everything ready for the upcoming week. You know, the typical mom stuff. The point is, we do a lot every day and it isn't always the things that we are best at or most excited to do. But the key is to try and carve out the opportunity to do what we do best everyday and apply our skills to the places that need them. 

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In light of Leaning In, empowering women's voices, and myself, here is what I do best:

• I am organized. I am a great list-maker, I keep track of things that need to be done. 
• I am good at envisioning. I love ideas, the big picture, and thinking about things.
• I am disciplined.
• I am creative and I love to create. 
• I am a good teacher of things. 
• I am great expresser of love. I love life, I love my family, I love people and I express it.
• I am a great debater and discusser of ideas, stories, and topics.
• I create a great space, set a good mood, decorate a beautiful home, and host a good gathering. 
• I am a seer. I see things that are sometimes overlooked. 
• I am a strong researcher and love an assignment.
• I am good at finding someone to do that at which I am not good at doing, but want done now. 

What do you do best? How does expressing your strengths make you feel? Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? It's a great discussion and I would love to hear what you think!

16 comments:

  1. what a great question and one most people probably do not ask themselves. becoming a stay at home mom was my decision the moment Lily came out and i held her. but, i struggled for a long time with the fact that i wasn't earning a pay check. something i had been doing since i was 15. a little more than three years into mothering, i can honestly say that being a mother and a stay at home mom is what i do best. i love being a mom, organizing and making a home and taking care of my family. even if there is no pat check at the end of it. great post Karina

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    1. to quote something on molly's blog: http://molly-ruth.blogspot.com/2013/05/empowerers.html "The planet does not need more 'successful people'. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture is the set. "
      ~The Dalai Lama
      Amen to this, right! And so happy to hear you are using your strengths in the place that feels right.

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  2. that is one of my (and ryan's) favorite books. it had a huge impact on us, both personally and professionally. i still reference it to this day, and just talked to a friend in which we share one of the same strengths, "input" (which i didn't get at first, when it showed up as one of my top 5 :)).

    having spent years in the corporate world, it is so tiring, draining, and de-motivating constantly trying to turn a weakness into a strength. once i started to see the difference between bringing my "areas of opportunity" (huge buzz words at starbucks) to an 'acceptable level' in order to either do our job effectively, or move to another level within the organization, vs. fixing/eliminating it altogether... i was incredibly empowered. for the first time, i saw things in myself that i have never seen. i saw areas that had formerly been blown off/overshadowed (mostly by myself) as areas of STRENGTH... qualities to be confident about... to utilize, appreciate, and build upon. it was literally life-changing (and career-changing)!

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    1. torrie, thanks so much for sharing this. sorry for my delay in replying. i have been thinking about your response since reading it. i don't have buckingham's book, but you make me want to get it. what is input? i would love to hear more about that. i think so much has to do with reframing, like you say it helps you see things about yourself in a totally different light. thanks for sharing this.

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  3. Interested to talk to you more about the book since up to this point, I've mostly discussed it with other women in more traditional work out of the home jobs (or in my case, in and out of the home!)

    After I get through my insane work week, I will have to sit down and think more deeply about my strengths. This week, I would have to say one is definitely the ability to juggle nine thousand things without dropping anything ;)

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    1. i am getting through it quickly. book club is on the 20th if you want to join. but yes, love to talk about it!

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  4. When I constructed the interview page for the women's group, I changed the question what are you best at to what comes easy to you. I thought it would be too hard for us to answer. Isn't that CRAZY? Thanks so much for writing this! for inspiring a lean in moment that will change the way I view myself/daughters/world!
    ps: I would add artist to your list :0)

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    1. That is crazy, but I get it. I have to say I had hesitation putting my strengths out there. But why shouldn't we know them and own them! Yes, let's lean in for each other and for our girls, the future women. xx

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  5. it is so refreshing to read a post that empowers women and makes me think differently about myself. i read this on monday and the ideas you presented have entered my mind many times over the course of the last two days. thank you, karina, for putting big ideas out there. it has enlightened me and i appreciate it:)

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    1. i love when things percolate. thanks for your sweet words. seriously. xo

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  6. This book sounds excellent and I know Erin enjoyed it very much. I will have to check it out. I don't think about these issues in my workplace often because I work with almost all women. My office is probably 90% women. My boss is a woman, my boss's boss is a woman and even higher up in the totem poll is Kathleen Sebelious (the ultimate boss of Health and Human Services). I am surrouded everyday by strong, intelligent women and most of them are mothers. They are nurturing, empathetic, compassionate and kind. I wish more work places could be this empowering to women.

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    1. Jen, what an inspiring place to work, wow. I agree, think how different the world would be if women could see this example and experience this kind of enlightenment in the workplace. The book is great, you would like it. I think as women, we just need to lean in whenever possible, show our strengths and help other to see theirs, at work and beyond.

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  7. I really loved this post. it has encouraged me much. My biggest question, though, is....what is that sundress you are wearing? It looks beautiful!

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    1. Thanks Amber. It's from target years ago, one of my go to summer pieces. super comfy. xo

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  8. hmmmm.... this is EXACTLY what i've been thinking about lately. i've pretty much always inadvertantly measured myself up against my uber-extrovert husband, me being an introvert, that didn't always work out well... but over the weekend, i've gotten almost all the way through Quiet, by susan cain. it's been a breath of fresh air to realized some of my unique strengths. yay! i think i might just try to list them. we'll see! ;)

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