Build the Strengths of Your Team Members & How To Leverage

Offer training opportunities for employees who show strength in particular areas. Choosing the right team members not only affects the atmosphere of your workplace, but it significantly impacts employee productivity – which determines the long-term profitability of the company. By keeping a positive attitude and persevering even when things aren’t going your way, this rubs off on your colleagues and creates a wonderfully productive workplace atmosphere.

What’s more, you can use it to target tasks with strengths. In reality, you will likely only have expertise in one or two areas. This is what it takes to make an incredible athlete today. Selecting those specific traits you can overdevelop and win a margin. In fact, there’s no way to become the most decorated Olympian of all time like Michael Phelps without playing your strengths. In similar fashion, others are the bodies of high performing athletes.

If you’re looking to make a mark on the world by 2023, there are some key strengths you’ll need to learn first. While leadership can come in many different forms, these eight traits are essential if you want to be successful in any field. Employee engagement experts have said that individuals must focus on building strengths because that is more effective than attempting to improve weaknesses. Hold team strengths meetings designed to get team members to recognise each other’s strengths and skills. Its content and flow depends on the culture of each organisation or even preferences of the manager , but here’s a rough guide.

Micromanaging never produces good results for the company, but it can help certain managers to feel special temporarily. In the field of sales, the “Law of State Transfer” can be leveraged in order to make prospects feel happier and excited, which improves their chances of purchasing. Put simply, whatever emotional state you’re feeling will https://forexaggregator.com/ rub off on whomever you’re talking to. This law applies to interacting with colleagues as well as sales prospects. The best team players are honest about their achievements as well as their shortcomings. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, but when people try to shift the blame and weave false narratives, disasters can occur.

strengths of a team

The annoying colleague who spends extra time going around the room to get feedback is making sure everyone’s opinion is heard. These are just a few examples of diverse strengths being applied in the workplace. We all think and Regression vs Classification in Machine Learning for Beginners act differently, and although certain actions may be frustrating to you, they are not necessarily bad. This is how others utilize their strengths to benefit their work, and they should not be thought of as right or wrong.

Meredith Belbin | Team Roles at Work

Technical competency makes you a valuable asset to a team, but an understanding of the wider industry makes you irreplaceable. Keeping tabs on the industry shouldn’t just be a responsibility for the leadership team – everyone should have a keen interest in marketplace trends. Adaptability also means being flexible to the working habits and personalities of your colleagues. If you’re collaborating with teammates who prefer to work remotely, you may need to learn how to use tools like Zoom for video conferencing and Asana for managing projects. In the modern era, employees rarely have the chance to focus on one project at a time.

Let’s see which are the most essential employee strengths and why. Bear in mind that these strengths are important for every person in your team, regardless of their role, seniority level, or field. The ten tips below will help you identify your own and your team members’ strengths, then combine these insights to empower and lead your strengths-baseddream team.

Leveraging Individual Strengths for the Team

Workplace Solutions Learn how to develop and engage employees to create an exceptional workplace and boost your business outcomes. It won’t solve major workplace problems, like the lack of intrinsic motivation, employees poorly matched to jobs or confusion about the larger business context. However, with bigger concerns out of the way, go ahead and use competition to get people to focus on the task at hand. Over 3 million Belbin® reports have been generated worldwide for individuals, managers, teams and organisations. Contact us to start your Belbin® journey, or purchase your own Belbin Individual report directly here. We then recommend that you ask for feedback from people you work with, using the Observer Assessment.

  • Every team has members who truly wish to go above and beyond.
  • However, you cannot grow and better yourself without correcting your weaknesses.
  • Below, is a guide on how to conduct a personal SWOT Analysis.
  • So, employees are motivated to contribute their fair share of feedback, skills, work, and mentorship not just for their own sake, but also for the team.

This can ultimately lead to relationships souring and place barriers between you, and your teams which can inhibit success. Strength-based leadership is how a leader knows to use team strengths to maximize team outputs. But it also offers insight into the right people for your team. While team dynamics come in play here, there’s more to strength-based leadership. Your people make everyday operations run smoothly and bring results to your company.

Managers should make an extra effort to consider each employee as objectively as possible and within a wider context. Jotting down quick notes to describe how your employees are acting every day can be a good way to look for patterns. Before you can analyse your teams, you need to look at each individual’s contribution. So, the first thing you will need to do is to generate a Belbin Individual report for each member of the team.

In many ways, it’s hard to tell what you’re missing out when you’re focusing on strengths only. For example, imagine having hired only employees with impeccable penmanship. Amazing calligraphers, capable of writing beautiful letters. 10 years later, your team is mostly excelling at something obsolete. The likelihood of something like this happening today is very low. Working with people has a lot to do with developing their talents.

The frequency of team feedback should follow project deadlines. Consider combining monthly team meetings with a celebration when a long-standing goal has been achieved. Job craftinginvolves individuals tailoring their jobs in ways that get the work done while also providing greater fulfillment.

Situational awareness

Skills visualisation tool MuchSkills makes it easy for team members and managers to map and view everyone’s skills in three categories – Job Focus, Soft Skills and Technical Skills. Upgrade to the Pro Version and add and manage skill categories exclusive to your organisation or team like ‘Domain Expertise’, ‘Functional Expertise’, ‘Hardware Expertise’ and more. Take notes and over the course of the year see if they have developed their strengths further or overcome their weaknesses. Opportunities and Threats are external factors that individuals cannot really control.

strengths of a team

It’s no surprise then that developing a strengths-based organisational culture is seen as key to the future of work. Help your team understand each other’s unique personalities and strengths and how these talents unite to create a powerful picture and improve teamwork skills. Speak to the strengths of individual team members in the presence of project compatriots. Suggest how the team might take advantage of others’ strengths and listen to what the team has to say. Look beyond your projects to the wider organization to see whether demonstrated strengths can be used in neglected areas of the broader business.

Understanding team member strengths and weaknesses provides a solid foundation for developing individual competencies. This has obvious benefits to productivity and team culture, but watching team members grow into their roles and develop their skills can be one of the most rewarding experiences in a career. Not to mention a huge step toward being tabbed a top-performing project manager yourself. Facilitate opportunity for learning team members to apply their strengths productively. Often people do not recognize the strengths they possess until they have seen themselves using that strength and had a successful outcome. While this happens naturally over time, if you recognize a team member has a strength, you can set him up to use it within the team environment.

Ways to Effectively Determine Employee Strengths and Weaknesses

Employees do not perform as well when they are given tasks that are not based on both their hard skills and soft skills. Effective managers look for ways to find these skills and help employees utilize them daily. Also, consider viewing your team member’s social media profiles. Profiles may reveal lots of information on their interests and potential strengths, as well as their dislikes. To find these qualities, you must remember to be direct and honest. In interviews, employees may downplay their strengths or lie about them to get the job.

To be an effective leader, you must be able to communicate effectively. Your success, and that of your organization is reliant on it. Encourage employees to set career goals that are aligned with their strengths and passions and follow up with them during one-on-ones held to discuss their professional growth. Assign employees with complementary strengths to teams so that they can learn from each other. Assign one goal to each group and ask participants to pick the skills needed to achieve these goals from the list of strengths and skills on the white board. A SWOT Analysis is traditionally used to gain insights about an organisation’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

If you aren’t sure about what your weaknesses are, think about things you avoid at work, or look for hints in feedback from your boss or colleagues. Are you always the butt of jokes for always being late or disorganised? Even the most successful team members hit plateaus and flatline for a while.

How to Identify Team Strengths and Weaknesses

Holding contests within teams and across organizations can be a fun and effective way to see who is a natural leader and who excels in certain areas. Using the Belbin reports can give people a greater understanding of their strengths, which leads to more effective communication in the team. Managers can put together great teams, enhance the performance of existing ones, and ensure that everyone feels that they are making a difference in the workplace. If you can master these leadership traits, you will be prepared to face any situation, even ones that are new to you.