Strengths and Psychological Fitness at Work

Facilitators
Alan Beggs and Zorica Patel

Who should attend
This workshop is suitable for both professional psychologists and people with a very limited understanding of academic psychology. Delivered theoretical content plays a very minor part, as it is designed to create insights, personal understanding and awareness, and reveal knowledge. It will be highly interactive and participative, and delegates should come prepared to share information about their own strengths and the personal strategies they use to cope with life.

Workshop overview
The concept of strengths in an organisational context surfaced around four or five years ago, arising from the positive psychology movement. Unfortunately, the theory behind strengths is as yet confusing and largely unhelpful for any practical purposes. Existing psychological theories and practices are perfectly adequate to enable us to understand the concept of strengths, and understand their relevance for occupational psychology. The effective use of cognitive, metacognitive and behavioural skills and strategies across the spectrum of psychological functioning can be called psychological fitness. We will explore the idea that strengths are the outcome of psychological fitness.

While we will look at some of the theory behind these ideas, the workshop will be largely experiential, allowing delegates to gain insights into the nature and relevance of strengths and to develop their own action plan to create and maintain a valued strength for themselves. Considerable time will also be given to debating how the notion of strengths impacts on issues such as organisational culture, selection and assessment, and personal development and training.

Aims of the workshop
This workshop will explore the background and history of the emerging concept of strengths and their application to organisations. We will also critically consider current theoretical accounts of the concept. You will discover that by linking strengths with existing theory and practice in remedial and positive psychology, strengths can be seen as the outcome of optimal functioning at every level of the psychological domain - and as such, learnable. This has profound implications for selection, appraisal, training and other areas of concern to occupational psychologists. There will be opportunities to explore the role of strengths in various organisational contexts, and the personal implications. You will also develop a personal action plan to create and maintain your own strengths.

After this workshop, you will be better able to critically evaluate existing theory and practice in relation to strengths, and to understand more about the value and contribution of strengths in relation to, for example, selection, appraisal and personal development issues. You will recognise that strengths, and weaknesses, can be created and maintained by a familiar range of cognitive, metacognitive and behavioural strategies. This has profound implications for development and training, as well as deepening our understanding about issues such as employee engagement and job satisfaction. At a personal level you will take away an action plan to develop a valued personal strength.

Psychological theory underpinning the workshop
The concept of Dependable Strengths was introduced in 1945 by Dr Bernard Haldane to help military veterans make the transition to civilian life. More recently, Buckingham and Clifton (2001) concluded that strengths cluster under 34 main ‘themes of talent’, and opened a debate about their role in organisations. In contrast, Peterson and Seligman (2004) developed the Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths, classifying them under the core virtues of wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence, and there is much talk of ‘strengthening organisations’ by creating cultures modelled along these lines. Buckingham and Clifton also proposed that organisations should focus on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. We will explore a range of theoretical and practical work from clinical, health, education and sport psychology where cognitive skills, metacognitive awareness and skills, and behavioural skills have been shown to have valuable outcomes.

Pre/post work required
N/A

Date and venue
26^th July 2007, 9.30am - 17.00pm

Facilitator details

Alan is a Chartered Psychologist and for many years, worked in research at the University of Nottingham. A prolific writer during this part of his career, one of his books is now used by Britain’s medal-winning Olympic dinghy sailors; he spent fifteen years working as one of the first sport psychologists in the UK. He has been involved in management development for almost twenty-five years, and helped pioneer the movement to bring coaching to the workplaces of Britain. He is a founder member of the BPS Special Group in Coaching Psychology, and a member of the Association for Coaching. Since 1999, he has been a Director of The Human Dimension, where the ideas and processes that form the core of this workshop were developed.

Zorica was born in Serbia where she acquired her first degree in Economics from the University of Belgrade, before moving to the UK and gaining a psychology degree from the Open University. She now specialises in Occupational and Organisational Psychology, with a Masters, Level A and B certificates from UEL (2004) and is a Practitioner-in-Training working towards chartered status within the Division of Occupational Psychology. Her current post as a Visiting Lecturer at the Westminster University involves lecturing modules for ‘Interpersonal Skills for Business’ and HRM at undergraduate and ‘People Management and Development’ at postgraduate level. She is soon to complete her studies on Performance Coaching.