Kashbox Coach Note: Leadership Development
Much has been documented on the advantages leaders have when they strive to discover their employees’ strengths and make the best use of them. According to Gallup surveys, 67% of employees who feel their strengths are used and appreciated by their leaders are engaged in their work. This compares to a general engagement rate of 15% in the workplace.
Employees permitted to use their strengths are more interested in what they’re doing and apply themselves more fully. They are more productive, inspired, and loyal. It has been long shown that when organizations lead people through their strengths, they benefit in many ways: higher sales and profits, lower turnover and absenteeism, and better customer reviews.
Maximizing your people’s strengths is to your advantage. The strength of the organization depends on the applied strength of its employees. But this is more than just assessing people’s skills. Leaders are developed to establish a strength-minded culture and instill a collective focus on and value in people’s strengths. It’s a focus that must be engrained into everything and everyone.
Discover People’s Strengths
To know your people’s strengths, you first need to know them. Focusing on strengths is inherently a focus on people: their abilities, interests, knowledge, and aspirations. Technical strengths are only a portion of the picture. Strengths are also measured in the softer skills: character, courage, confidence, and communication. Leaders who spend time with their people, getting to know them, have the greatest ability to assess these strengths and know how they can be applied in the workplace. Leadership development can aid these leaders with the soft skills to uncover individual staff strengths.
Many personal strengths are revealed through one-on-one conversations. Another way to discover character strengths is to observe how people handle themselves, behave, respond, and make decisions. Getting insights from coworkers or other leaders adds to collecting information on a person’s strengths.
Technical strengths are often more straightforward to judge by reviewing a person’s work: thoroughness, accuracy, and inventiveness. You can see people’s strengths by how well they tackle challenges and find solutions to problems. Their values are revealed in how they take on their responsibilities. Making a note of these things gives you a good sense of your people’s strengths.
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Channeling Skills into Teams
In today’s dynamic environment, leaders benefit greatly from grouping people into multidiscipline teams to maximize their strengths. Structuring teams with diverse skills and personalities feeds synergy and motivation. When paired with other skill sets, people inspire one another and learn from each other. The sense of unity reduces barriers and creates a collective drive to solve problems with creative solutions. Leaders are better able to forge a focus on goals rather than specific work assignments, leading to a higher rate of productivity.
Empowerment is more viable with teams, where authority is pushed down to the lowest level possible. People develop a greater spirit of self-sufficiency and decision-making, providing higher ownership, pride, and interest in their work. They share their strengths and develop new ones from their teammates. When given these freedoms, they use their strengths to embrace challenges and have a more positive outlook.
You can utilize peoples’ strengths even more by creating workplace layouts that maximize collaboration and communication within each team. Combining private and common spaces with appropriate noise reduction and elbow room yields maximum engagement. Team members are naturally led to combine strengths with their teammates’ different disciplines and backgrounds, letting them get to know, trust, and influence each other. The power of interaction can compensate for a lack of certain strengths.
Matching Projects to People
Leadership development helps leaders select projects that fit their people’s strengths. These projects have a greater success rate than those that simply dole work without considering their strengths. Intentionally crafting projects that challenge a person’s or team’s strengths is also more successful. People are more inspired and inventive when forced to use their strengths, especially when pushed to their limits.
Projects come in varying degrees of complexity and difficulty. Leaders who want to maximize their people’s strengths will assign projects toward the lowest level of capability that can produce results. This creates a challenge that causes people to lift their game, grow, and find fulfillment in ways they never thought they could.
Growing Peoples’ Strengths
Gallup and other survey takers have shown that one of the aspects people value in their jobs the most is the opportunity to learn and grow, specifically through additional learning and training. People want to get better at what they do, to be stronger contributors, and more qualified to advance to greater responsibilities. Leaders developed to provide their people with opportunities to see them advance their strengths and develop new ones. As a leader, you have no better ability to succeed than when your people continuously raise their capabilities and the desire to use them.
Another significant way people can grow is to take on the role of trainer or instructor and share what they know. Establishing in-house training programs is a great way to develop everyone’s strengths. It also raises people’s candidacy for potential advancement or involvement in more complex projects.
Developing the strengths of your people is beneficial through the reputation they develop, both within and outside your organization. Internal expertise benefits organizations that rely on winning projects from the business community. It also pays dividends internally when other employees seek out your team experts to learn and grow additional strengths. Forget the politics of keeping your people’s strengths to yourself. Everyone wins when you enhance your entire organization by sharing what you have.
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Leadership Development: The Strength-Based Philosophy
The most productive and effective organizations with the most engaged and creative people have a culture focused on their employees’ strengths. The emphasis is on what people can do, not what they can’t do. None of this happens alone, only through the primary leader’s living example and specific direction. These leaders believe that strengths are the primary focus of everything their organization attempts to do.
Such a culture invests heavily in its people, encouraging and rewarding the use of strengths. Create programs to discover and track the strengths of your employees. Offer continuous training and teaching experiences. Establishing a team structure allows people to maximize and share their strengths. Trusting people to apply themselves and be stretched beyond their comfort zone causes them to meet challenges and find new solutions.
Leaders in strength-based cultures assess their people’s performance based on quantifiable results and the effectiveness of their personal development. How well do they use their strengths, and how do they maximize them or develop new ones? Leaders developed to focus on strengths often coach their people directly, cultivating more talents and strengths. Setting up an internal corporate coaching system is also a powerful way to enhance and develop strengths, build networks, and increase collaboration.
Your strength-based culture must teach communication skills, where strengths are enhanced and used to connect people and forge a spirit of unity. Leaders who instill a mindset of helping one another reap the greatest benefits from their people’s strengths, where they feel fulfilled and valued. A collective focus on peoples’ strengths can fashion a culture that will boost your business better than any other approach.
Through corporate coaching or leadership development programs, leaders can gain the tools needed to develop the best in each team member.
Creator of the KASHBOX: Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, Habits
Helping You Realize Your Potential
I help people discover their potential, expand and develop the skills and attitudes necessary to achieve a higher degree of personal and professional success and create a plan that enables them to balance the profit motives of their business with the personal motives of their lives.
