Great leaders build great teams. Whether in the workplace, at home or in the professional sporting world, they recognise the unique talents of each team member and leverage their strengths. Their teams are greater than the sum of the individual parts. Understanding what your team does well and making a plan to fill any gaps can help increase your team’s productivity and engagement.
In our experience, there are five key steps to ensure your team are playing to their strengths:
- Get to know your team
It’s hard to take advantage of someone’s strengths if you don’t know what they are. For some team members their talents may be clear; but for others you’ll need to draw these out. Take time to get to know them and ask them directly what they see their strengths as. While you’re at it, consider finding out what they’re interested in doing – if they’re passionate about something they’ll approach it with enthusiasm.
There are numerous profiling assessments available today to get a better understanding of a person’s strengths, but at WorkBuzz we commonly use:
a) 16 Personalities – 16personalities.com
Over 124 million people have completed this free online assessment, which takes roughly ten minutes to complete. You’ll then be emailed a summary of your profile – one of 16 different personalities based on your level of introversion vs extroversion, thinking style and preferences.
What we love about this tool is how complex traits are summarised through different characters, which are easy to communicate. For example:
b) CliftonStrengths Assessment – https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/
Over 19 million people have taken this paid assessment, which helps identify your top 5 strengths from a potential list of 34.
- Develop a skills matrix
The next step is to capture what you’ve just learned in a comprehensive team skills matrix. This should spell out what each team member is good at, as well as their interests. A great way of doing this is to involve your team and conduct the exercise below:
- Talk through the results from any profiling assessments you’ve used
- Write down the top strengths for each team member – they should each have at least one thing!
- Ask all team members to share their thoughts for one individual at a time
The aim is to collate a very clear picture of the strengths across your team, as well as anything that is missing.
- Assign tasks based on strengths
Once you have an idea of a team member’s strengths, start assigning projects or tasks accordingly. Encourage the team to appoint ‘gurus’ for topics such as key processes, software packages or systems, and social secretaries. Giving people the title of ‘gurus’ will give them an opportunity to own that topic and ensure that the team self-seek answers before they come to you as their manager. Next time a task comes up, ask yourself whose strengths or interests would this best fit with? By regularly discussing roles you’ll help ensure strengths are being utilised.
- Help them grow strengths
As well as letting team members use their strengths, tell them you’re willing to support them to develop these further. Look for ways to challenge them – if the same person is always doing the same job, they’ll become complacent and their skills won’t grow. Assign them tasks that require a higher skill level, so they can rise to the challenge. Throughout this process provide feedback to help motivate and develop them.
- Start filling the gaps
Once you’ve completed your skills matrix, you’ll also have a clear picture of what’s missing. At this stage you’ll have two choices: you can train current team members or you can hire new team members. The goal is to ensure your team is well balanced – as well as ‘ideas people’ you need ‘completer-finishers’ to see things through.