Will Your Career Make You One of the “Creative Class”?
We’d like to think that our work improves not only our personal financial picture, but has a positive impact on our region’s economy as well. Blogger Jason Keeling notes a group in West Virginia whose efforts to strengthen the state’s economy are directed toward developing its “Creative Class”. Coined by Author Richard Florida, this term refers to workers in areas like engineering, the arts, biotechnology, education, architecure and even small business ownership. Workers like these are going to drive our nation’s economy in the 21st century.
It’s an interesting point when considering what career to enter. Do you want to belong to the Creative Class and be one of the 40 million Americans who will, according to Florida, determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither? West Virginia hopes you will!
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More About Strengths-Free Sessions With Marcus Buckingham
Hilda Carroll, a life coach and fellow blogger, has done a wonderful job of summarizing and commenting on Marcus Buckingham’s, Go Put Your Strengths to Work. Check out her post if you want to know more about this great book.
Better yet, join Buckingham’s Summer of Development teleclasses, six free sessions in which the author himself will take you through the step-by-step process to growing your strengths. The 30 minute weekly July 12 through August 16 telephone conferences will walk you through a different core concept of the book until, as he says ”you are ready to unleash your strengths on the world!” Registrants who can’t attend will still be able to download the free recordings of the class. What better way to learn about your strengths! Hope to “see” you there!
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The Only Way to Build Your Career
While I continue on th subject of finding your strengths, I would like to say that your strengths are the only thing you can really build on when trying to enhance your career assets. Common wisdom dictatesthat the way to improve professionally is by shoring up personal weaknesses. That is so wrong!
You cannot improve a weakness.
Why can I say this with such conviction? There is a whole ’strengths movement’ out there, initiated by venerable experts who say you can’t. As I pointed out in the previous post Peter F. Drucker can be considered the father of this movement. He probably ignited the whole thing with his 1966 book, The Effective Executive, in which he wrote: “The effective executive builds on strengths-their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates…”. In 1987 David Cooperrider fanned the flickering flame with his premise that we must “build organizations around what works rather than fix what doesn’t.”
Marcus Buckingham made it personal in 2001, however, with his book, Now Discover Your Strengths and has furthered this thinking with his latest directive, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, in which he calls for a “personal strengths revolution” where we shed our societal preoccupation with improving through studying failure. He challenges us to investigate the unique and intricate patterns of our strengths, becoming an expert at ”finding, describing, applying, practicing and refining your strengths.”
Having helped many find greater career and life satisfaction by doing this very thing, I wholeheartedly agree! So don’t spend time trying to gain imperceptible improvement in your shortcomings when that same time applied to your natural strengths can pay off exponentially.
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