Energizing Employees at Alliant

Pam Wegner is thankful she avoided the emergency room.

Wegner is now an executive vice president at Alliant Energy, a medium-sized gas and electric utility in the Midwest -- but her undergraduate and master's degrees are in a very different field: nursing. She instinctively avoided working in an urgent-care setting, and now she understands why.

A natural strategist, Wegner's approach to any problem is first to consider the big picture. "I could never work in an environment like an emergency room," she says, "because I'm not thinking about closing up that wound. I'm thinking, 'Why are people having so many car accidents?' That's not helpful!"

Wegner's strength in mapping and implementing broad strategies is a far better fit in her current role as the head of a department of more than 500 Alliant employees. Her group provides a range of services to internal clients, from IT to human resources to facilities and outsourcing.

Such a diverse group might seem especially complex to manage, but Wegner is very good at it. Workgroup scores from her direct reports on Gallup's Q¹² -- a 12-item survey that links to important business outcomes such as retention and productivity -- depict a happy and engaged group. After posting an outstanding score on her first Q¹² administration in November 2002, Wegner's workgroup scores rose to the 95^th percentile in July 2003.

In November 2002, Wegner and her core team of eight Alliant managers participated in Gallup's Great Manager Program together. They learned how to better relate to one another and their direct reports through an understanding of each other's innate talents, rather than their weaknesses. It was a shared experience that Wegner describes as very useful. "Shifting from [a focus on] weaknesses to strengths -- it's one of those paradigm shifts that once you see it, you can't not see it," she says.

Speaking the strengths language

Gallup's taxonomy of 34 talent themes gives people a language to use in creating that new paradigm. The ability to articulate one's individuality in positive terms like "Ideation," "Relator," and "Competition" helps re-orient employees' patterns of thought about what they naturally do well.

Wegner now finds herself using "strengths talk" on a number of different levels. Perhaps most fundamentally, she says it helps friends and associates appreciate her point of view in everyday interactions.

"It's been helpful to be able to build 'word bridges' in conversations back to other people who don't have Strategic [in their top five]," Wegner says. "Otherwise, they sometimes think, 'Where is this person coming from?'" Wegner also mentioned that before acquiring a strengths-based language, she might have hesitated to express her opinion when she saw things differently from the rest of the group. Now, however, she's more comfortable expressing her thoughts -- and the perspective on which they are based.

More broadly, Wegner has promoted strengths dialogue within her management team at every opportunity. Participants in monthly team meetings sit behind table tents that list their top five themes, and the exchange of ideas is enriched by insights into one another's talents. The group has also identified the themes that team members commonly have among their top five, as well as those unique to the top five of only one or two members. "At that point we ask, 'Okay, how are you going to bring [those talents] into the group?" Wegner says.

The exercises have helped elevate the level of teamwork among Wegner's direct reports. "We now take more advantage of bouncing ideas off of each other, asking for input, seeking advice, and getting multiple perspectives, particularly on knotty problems," says Suzette Mullooly, director of Alliant's Office of Project Management. "This has led to better problem solving and helped us be a stronger team."

Thinking about assignments from a strengths perspective, Wegner believes, has broadened opportunities for team members who might not otherwise have been considered for a particular role. The strengths approach has also freed employees from feeling obligated to take on tasks that others are better suited for.

"People really notice how different a deficiencies-based approach is from a strengths-based approach -- and how much better the strengths-based approach feels," Wegner says. "And they're a lot more comfortable saying, 'You know what, I'm never going to be good at that; I'm only good at finding people who are good at that.'"

Wegner's team has also applied innovative approaches to looking at its Q¹² employee engagement results. Using Edward DeBono's "six hats" thinking technique, they deliberately try to adopt different viewpoints -- for example, a logical perspective or an emotional perspective -- from which to think about their scores. The result is the kind of thorough consideration that ensures those scores result in positive change.

Maximizing their talents

Once it gets started, such change tends to spread organically through Alliant's organization. Wegner says she's already seen signs of "strengths talk" filtering outside of her group as other managers take notice of its benefits and as members of her group move to other parts of the organization. As more of Alliant's employees come to know the combination of talents that makes them unique, they may also gain insights about the organization's needs and goals from the talents they have in common.

Wegner has already done so. "We have a huge number of people with Maximizer [in their top five] here," she says, referring to a talent theme that leads individuals to develop good into great. "That makes sense, because the regulated part of the utility business is confined to a geographic area, which limits the amount that you can influence development. So what you're really looking for people internally to do is maximize what you've got."

Certainly, Wegner's Q¹² results suggest that her own team members feel they're able to maximize their talents on a daily basis. But it takes more than individual talents for a workgroup to continually develop and grow. It also takes a gifted manager -- and a focused effort.

"A lot of people think change is magic," Wegner says. "It isn't. You identify what you want to do, get a strategy and work on it, measure it periodically, keep talking about it -- and voilà! It works!"