Historically, both at work and in the family, there has been a tendency to focus on weakness and lack rather than strengths and talent. So, the child who gets an "A" in Maths and a "D" in History is given extra tuition in the subject they are poor at, instead of being encouraged to do even better in their best subject. The star salesperson is told they must become a sales manager if they want to progress in their career, and sent on endless management courses in an attempt to supply their undoubted managerial defects - instead of being allowed to shine ever brighter in sales.

Furthermore, the language of "Human Resources" only makes the problem worse. In a famous Dilbert cartoon, the pointy-haired boss announces that the company has realised that they were wrong to say that "people are our most valuable resource", when in fact people come in at number seven, immediately after carbon paper in the rankings. The serious point is that people are not resources, in the sense that you can claim ownership of them, buy or sell them; nor are they interchangeable items, so that with an appropriate upgrade (a management course!) a human resource can be turned from one thing into another.

Marcus Buckingham and others have done us all a great service by popularising the notion that the proper role of managers in organisations is to discover the unique strengths of each person in their team, and then allow those people to play to those strengths and leverage them to the nth degree. That of course begs some significant questions, one of which is, "how do you recruit people whose strengths are actually the right ones for what you are wanting to achieve"? Another is how do you do more than simply create a stable of talented prima donnas (unless of course "prima donnas" works for you - perhaps you run a ballet company!), all playing to their strengths at each others expense. In other words, how do you build high performance teams? (Building teams is not enough by itself - the evidence is mounting that teams who really appreciate one another and work well together can be lacking in the external focus necessary to deliver desired results, hence our emphasis on high performance teams.) And finally, how do you retain people to your mutual benefit; and how do you help people take the next step in their career, even where that may mean they leave you? (Surprisingly, that can be to your mutual benefit as well.)

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