Teaching Pigs to Sing

By Chris Trout | August 24, 2008

"Do not try to teach a pig to sing---it wastes your time and annoys the pig."

I recently was reminded of this little gem of advice.  It is clearly true. Why do we ignore it? We spend endless energy and resources to assure that kids are "well rounded," train employees to do their jobs in the same way (probably based on the last "flavor of the month" consulting advice), and get life partners to change their ways. We mostly end up wasting a lot of time and annoying a lot of people!

Fortunately, folks like you in the service sector, business and personal development are catching on. A project designed to assess the different techniques for teaching kids to speed read found that average readers increased their speed by about 67%, while above average readers increased their reading speed by 728%. (The actual technique used didn't matter much!) Research designed to measure levels of "active disengagement" from work (you know, not just bored, but completely disengaged, complaining and miserable), found that 40% of those who had managers who ignored them were actively disengaged, 22% of those whose managers focused on their weaknesses fell in this category and just 1% of those whose managers focused on their strengths were actively disengaged from their jobs. You can guess the impact this has on the bottom line.  The research continues to confirm that growing strengths results in exponentially happier, more productive and more engaged people.  

Focusing on strengths is not easy - we've been doing the opposite for a long time - but it sure is easier than teaching pigs to sing.