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Strengths
Do you know what your strengths are?
We’re not talking about your industry knowledge or your years of experience in your field. We’re talking about your innate talents that set you apart from your colleagues and make you unique.
Focusing on strengths gets better results for individuals, teams and whole organisations. It sounds simple, but the evidence is overwhelming. Once people can map the route from their talents to their specific strengths, they can use them to create success.
It’s natural for you to be unaware of your strengths—we don’t notice what comes to us naturally. That’s why using a tool like the CliftonStrengths assessment by Gallup is a great place to start. Our accredited CliftonStrengths team will help you achieve more.
The CliftonStrengths assessment helps you discover your talents—what you’re naturally good at. And once you’ve completed your strengths assessment, follow-up workshops and coaching helps identify areas for development—taking a talent to a strength.
For teams, Strengths is great for helping recognise each other’s unique contribution.
Strengths for individuals
Discover your innate talents and then apply them. Find out what makes you unique and why it matters for your success and wellbeing. All too often we focus on our shortcomings. But we perform best when we work to our strengths.
A strengths-based approach is valuable for you personally and for teams. Great things happen when you focus on what’s right with people, instead of what’s wrong.
A key principle of the strengths mindset is to leverage who you are, and stop trying to be someone you’re not. In short, be authentic.
We work with you to understand your talents, translate them into strengths and put them to work for you.
Strengths for teams
For teams, Strengths is great for helping recognise each other’s unique contribution. Teams can participate in facilitated workshops solely for strengths or have strengths integrated into operational or team development workshops.
An initial Discover Your Strengths workshop is 3-3.5 hours long, where team members:
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become familiar with their own reports
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practice articulating their strengths
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identify areas for development
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delve into where the team strengths sit.
Following an initial introduction to Strengths, some teams find benefit building on their Strengths base to:
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create their ways of working
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identify collaboration opportunities
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allocate work or
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undergo business planning.
Weaknesses
Recognising and focusing on people’s strengths is not an excuse to ignore weaknesses. In fact, the strengths approach says the opposite. It highlights that everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
A weakness is defined as something actively stopping you or others from reaching a goal. If you’re doing this, you need to address it. The Strengths model helps you identify any weaknesses, and their impact. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to develop strategies to manage, mitigate, or master that weakness.
Strengths-based leadership
Gallup research has found that the most effective leaders are always investing in strengths. In a study measuring engagement, they saw that when leadership did not focus on strengths, there was only a 9% chance that the employee would be engaged in the organisation or the work. When leaders focused on and invested in employees strengths, the engagement rates went up eightfold - to 73%.
Strengths-based leaders are ones who recognise and lead with their strengths. They bring out the best of themselves when they focus on their core strengths.
They also extend this to their teams. They focus on strengths because they know your strengths give insight into your greatest opportunities for success.
Don’t lead with imitation. Good leaders bring their authenticity to the role. Lead with your own strengths and maximise the strengths of your team.
These leaders recognise the unique value and contribution team members have and allocate work accordingly. As the old saying goes, if you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you’ll never be great at everything.
Think about what makes you, and your team members great. Then, create opportunities for everyone in your team to maximise how they use their strengths at work.
Our latest thinking on strengths
Kristen Gyorgak
Read blog
5 March 2023
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