"Playing to strengths" is a concept which has grown in popularity over the last few years. Leaders in the know are discovering that the innate strengths of their team members have the potential to boost a company's performance many times over.

If history teaches us anything it’s that nothing lasts forever; this recession, too, will pass. But history, particularly the history of business, also shows that how you behave during your peaks will affect how well you are able to survive the valleys, and that what you do during the valleys will shape the height and nature of your future peaks (according to Spencer Johnston, of the Who Moved my Cheese? fame).

It’s an important point to remember. During difficult times it’s easy to lose sight of anything other than pure survival. Desperate to conserve cash and shrink costs, many companies take a reactive approach, cutting back on staff, systems and capital expenditure. Very often, this is absolutely necessary for survival, but smart managers and owners who have lived through previous downturns understand the importance of balancing these actions with an investment in what remains behind.

When you cut back on staff, it’s essential to consider two things. Firstly, how are you going to maintain the same kind of standards and productivity as you did previously, and secondly, how you are going to gear up when the good times come around again?

The South African business environment is full of examples of companies that took years to reap the rewards of the last upturn because they simply didn’t have the human resources to grasp opportunities fast enough. What many of them did was to simply employ more staff to fill the gaps created where they had previously retrenched. But the answer to the problem doesn’t necessarily rely in the number of people an organisation has.

Rather, it’s about the quality of the people you employ and, importantly, the ability of the business owner or manager to get the absolute maximum best out of them. One truly superb employee can be more valuable than three mediocre ones. This is good news for companies struggling to maintain productivity following recent retrenchments.

The trick is to get the most out of the people that you keep, and this relies on being able to recognise and use their inherent strengths. Everyone is born with particular strengths, things that come naturally to them. I’m not talking about skills, but rather about innate ability. Some people are good starters, some have a great eye for detail, while others might be outstanding ‘big picture’ strategic thinkers. We use these strengths every day to solve problems and take on challenges in both work and life. But because people don’t have to try to get these things right, they very often aren’t aware of the fact that they have something special, or that other people don’t necessarily operate in the same way.

When people realise their strengths and play to them, the results can be powerful. People are most energised and motivated when they are doing something they feel good at, something that we at Avo have noticed time and again when helping managers and staff to understand and use their strengths. Uncovering strengths can also help a team to realise that it has valuable assets of which it might previously have been unaware. After all, many people are in positions that don’t harness their full potential. Unless you find out what this potential is, you’ll never be able to use it to the benefit of the business.

When the strength discovery exercise is done as a team, we’ve also noticed an interesting increase in tolerance. For example, when a manager learns that an employee is particularly good at finishing, and then recognises and harnesses this value, they are less likely to get stuck on the fact that the person is not a particularly good starter. By the same token when team members know what their strengths (and therefore weaknesses) are, and when these strengths are celebrated and these weaknesses tolerated by management, they are more likely to take a tolerant approach to fellow team members.

It can be argued that during tough times you need your people to work harder, reach higher and strive to be better, but it’s also true that no one is good at everything. Accepting this truth and uncovering and using what people are good at can lead to greater team cohesion, increased staff morale, improved retention and enhanced performance. That’s powerful stuff if you want to get through tough times, but its value is also sustainable. When the good times roll around again, you’ll be in a better position than ever before to catch on quickly and reap the rewards.

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