Session: Truly Tapping your Strengths (and those of your team)
Speaker: Scott Crabtree, Engineering Manager, Intel
Leading video games projects is difficult, and we often make it harder by focusing on weaknesses rather than on our strengths.
Strengths movement – We can perform better by using our strengths more often. You’re in the flow, you feel engaged, energized – you’re doing things you love doing and at which you are talented.
Focus on your strengths – both on your own and on your team’s to be happier and more productive. You will find that your team is more engaged and produces work faster necessitating less crunch time.
3 steps to implement this way of Strengths-focused thinking:
- Have to acknowledge and change our own beliefs about strengths and weaknesses.
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- We need to fully discover our key strengths.
- We need to act on our own strengths and help others act on theirs.
- When we focus on what they’re not doing well, we ask them to focus on what they do the worst.
- Overcome the 3 myths:
. Myth: A good team member pitches in wherever necessary on a team. Truth: a good team member uses his strengths to help the team.
. Myth: Your personality with change significantly over time. Truth: Over time you become more of who you already are.
. Myth: You can grow the most in your areas of greatest weakness. Truth: We can improve the most by building on strengths. You can improve by working on your weaknesses, but you can grow MORE by acting on your strengths.
- We have to acknowledge and change our own beliefs about strength and weaknesses. We need to fully discover our key strengths.
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- Start by clarifying strengths you already know. Ask yourself does it matter: Who? When? What? Why? Help suss out what is a lasting strength v. what is circumstance-dependent.
- Track your strongest and weakest work over one month. Three things you loved doing and did well. Three things that you didn’t do well. In a group, this technique can be used to find out what people really wanted to do and encouraged teams to ask each other to do tasks that played to their strengths.
- Use surveys, assessment tools, and colleagues to get some additional input such as the Myers & Briggs instrument and the Values in Action survey.
- The Values in Action survey finds your 5 character strengths. Examples include creativity, persistence, social intelligence, leadership, and self-regulation.
- Strengths finder 2.0 identifies your top 5 of 24 strengths has been very effective on Scott’s team
- Reflective Best Self by Harvard Business Review suggests the following for finding your strengths:
. Gather input from friends, colleagues, etc. of their observations of your strengths.
. Get specific examples.
. Write a strengths self-portrait. This method gets beyond 1-word labels, which is a limitation of some of the other methods.
- We have to acknowledge and change our own beliefs about strengths.
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- Start now re-prioritizing your tasks and use your strengths more.
- Act within 72 hours – other wise the new information is lost and the habit will not be formed. Pick one thing you do excellently and do more of it. Practice.
- Start doing less of those things that don’t use your strengths.
. Drop things that you don’t do well that you put upon yourself.
. Delegate things that you don’t do well that others can and want to do better.
. Deal – either by making deals to swap strength-leaning tasks with someone else who has a weakness in one of your strengths or by just dealing with the weakness that must be accomplished because there is not a feasible way to either drop it or delegate it now. Look for opportunities (create where applicable) to find a way to drop it or delegate in the future.
Chat about strengths with your friends, colleagues, reports, and your boss. Tact is useful here. “When should I expect your best work?” is likely to elicit an honest strength-response you can use to find out what someone on your team really loves to do.
With your boss, an effective approach to this conversation would be to focus on getting something done for him/her that plays to your strengths and then after this has been done successfully, suggest taking on more things that fit your strengths.
In conclusion: Make conversations about strength a team conversation. Learn and act on other’s strengths. In reviews and performance feedback, focus on strengths. Sustain acting on strengths. Practicing it will make it more of a habit!
