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Adapted from by Chuck Martin

You may be a smart person but still feel you’re in the wrong position at work or even the wrong career. And you may be right. Your brain is hardwired to function a specific way. If you’re not in a position where your strongest skills are vital, you’re not likely to excel. Worse, if you’re in a position where your weakest skills are vital, you’re going to feel it and are likely to fail. You won’t look forward to going to work because what you do doesn’t fit how your brain is wired. Your job will be unnatural and highly challenging.

While the idea of finding the job most suited to you seems simple enough, there are many instances when it doesn’t happen. Someone may convince you that you’re the right person for a particular job or promotion, you accept it, and over time it doesn’t work out as planned. Or you may get promoted because you’ve performed well in your current position, only to find out you’re not suited for the new role. When this happens, nobody wins.

What if you could predetermine which position or career is the right one for you to increase your probability of success? Imagine if you could take years away from trial and error in jobs along your career path by scientifically determining in advance how well a particular position would suit you?

The idea is to navigate yourself into positions that play to your innate strengths. It’s about matching how your brain is wired to the job or task based on how the brains of those already successful in those jobs are wired. Though this isn’t always possible from a practical standpoint in business, you’d still know when a certain task or function you’re required to perform would be a good or a bad fit for your strengths and weaknesses and plan accordingly. You’d know in advance what kind of help you need to enlist.

If you’ve held several positions in your career, you may recall that one was either a lot easier or a lot harder than others. This could have been an Executive Skills match or mismatch, where your strengths were those that were required for the job¬¬—or not.

When your strengths match those required for a task, it’s called a goodness-of-fit situation. The main objective in understanding and utilizing Executive Skills profiling is to strive for positions that cause goodness-of-fit situations. This can help explain why a person isn’t successful in one position and then changes positions or companies and becomes successful. While it may appear to observers that the person changed and improved, the reality is that the situation changed and better suited the person’s Executive Skills strengths.

And when your strengths match what you do, you’re more likely to be successful and even look forward to work because what you’re doing there feels natural. This can lead to rewards, including compensation, bonuses, and promotions. As a successful person—a high performer—you will likely stand out among your peers and generally be acknowledged by management. And consistently using this knowledge can help you throughout your entire career.
If you’re a manager, this knowledge can also make you a star, because you’ll consistently place the right people in the right positions and can bask in the halo effects of their success.

The Executive Skills

Although researchers have various ways of labeling, defining, and organizing Executive Skills, our model encompasses 12 separate skills that are most relevant to the way people function in a work environment.

Despite the term Executive Skills, whose use in neuropsychology dates back decades, there’s no connection to executives at work and no connection to the traditional meaning of skills. Executive Skills should not be confused with functions or skills of executives, because Executive Skills are how the frontal lobes and associated brain areas manage information and behavior. And these are not skills that can be learned; they are cognitive functions that are hardwired into the brain from birth.

Each person has a set of strongest and weakest of these cognitive functions in their makeup. Generally, they have two or three that are their strongest and two of three that are their weakest. Those in the middle are not likely to get you in trouble, though they can’t be dramatically improved either. Throughout the book, we focus on the three strongest and the three weakest of the Executive Skills across all high performers.

Everyone has this personal combination of strengths and weaknesses, and the mix varies from person to person.
There are 12 Executive Skills, and certain ones are prevalent in high-performing individuals in business.

1. Response Inhibition: The ability to think before you act
2. Working Memory: The ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks.
3. Emotional Control: The ability to manage emotions in order to achieve goals, complete tasks, or control and direct behavior.
4. Sustained Attention: The capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility.
5. Task Initiation: The ability to begin projects or tasks without undue procrastination.
6. Planning/Prioritization: The capacity to develop a road map to arrive at a destination or goal.
7. Organization: The ability to arrange or place according to a system.
8. Time Management: The capacity to estimate how much time one has, to allocate it effectively.
9. Goal-Directed Persistence: The capacity to have a goal, follow through to the completion of the goal.
10. Flexibility: The ability to revise plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks, new information, or mistakes.
11. Metacognition: The capacity to stand back and take a bird’s-eye view of yourself.
12. Stress Tolerance: The ability to thrive in stressful situations.

The key to Executive Skills is to strive to get into positions that play to your natural strengths, which will make those jobs easier and more natural for you.

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Adapted from Work Your Strengths: A Scientific Process to identify Your Skills and Match Them to the Best Career for You by Chuck Martin, Richard Guare, Ph.D., and Peg Dawson, Ed.D. Copyright © 2010 Chuck Martin, Richard Guare, Ph.D., and Peg Dawson, Ed.D. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.

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