Now, we want to turn our attention to building organisational strength.
Imagine if all of your people were doing work they loved most of the time…
(And I need to emphasize ‘most of the time’. The expectation we can always be working in our strengths and doing things we love all of the time simply doesn’t match the reality of life.)
If an individual who works in their strengths is happier, engages in their work more deeply, sticks at tasks longer and produces better results, this would be a wonderful thing to manifest across your team and your organisation.
So how do we do this?
The obvious starting point is that you need to know what the strengths are of your people.
I suggest you stop second-guessing this and do the VIAcharacters.org test with all your people. It’s free and this way you’ll have a definite reference point.
By doing this across your entire team, you’ll get a sense of what preferences and strengths you have at your disposal – plus, what you might be missing.
This can expose an awkward reality. Do you have too many of the right preferences or the wrong preferences? And what is the right mix?
Plus, this is a wonderful bonding exercise for your teams. I’m sure they would all love to see and admire what their colleagues are great at – and share with pride their own.
This has the power to change how you and your team communicate… Imagine if your people started to say – I think you should do that piece of work because you’re great at that!
This would probably force you to rewrite your job descriptions – or even better throw them out – because it would change the way everyone interacted.
For you as the leader or manager, this would make you more effective with less effort.
At a practical level your regular team meetings might look more like this…
“We have to achieve this by the end of the week. What do we need done? Who is best suited to do what?”
Then, sit back and let your team engage, decide and take charge.
Take care,
Mike Allen