Optimise your Team’s Strengths
Research shows that the most cohesive and successful teams have a diverse and complementary range of strengths. But team effectiveness is not just about the quality of its component parts; it’s also about how effectively these parts – particularly team members’ strengths – are combined (and optimized) to deliver planned results.
Enabling the best in our teams and unlocking collaboration is a journey of awareness and action, which starts with leaders finding their own leadership edge and understanding what drives them to perform at their best, so they can then inspire and motivate others to do the same.
Here are my top 3 tips for optimizing the strengths of your team:
What you focus on changes what you see.
And what you see impacts the direction you choose to take, for yourself and for your team. Focusing on what works rather than just what is broken is a key step in this journey; you embark on a path of possibilities that opens up your scope of thinking and feeling and leads to increased confidence and better results. Fostering a more appreciative and positive team climate, where team members acknowledge, recognize and celebrate what is already great is essential for optimal performance.
You set the tone.
This shift in focus starts from the top: the leader sets the tone. The more aware team leaders are of their own strengths – what drives and energizes them – the more they develop agility to use strengths more effectively, to stretch and to balance them to mitigate performance risks. This strengths-awareness is inspiring and contagious; it motivates others in the team to look for their own strengths and also to spot strengths in others around them, driving collaboration and productivity.
You need a toolkit!
You need the right tools to lead a winning team. With executive coaching you get access to leadership insights, tools and different perspectives to help you maximize your own strengths, develop your leadership edge and optimize the strengths of your team. Optimizing your team’s strengths involves not only understanding how to combine them together effectively but also creating mechanisms to ensure that the team has the right habits in place to translate team members’ strengths and efforts into achievement, engagement and innovation.