CHAPTER 6

Strategy 4: Activate Employee Superpowers

Fun fact: I come most alive working 14-hour days in 110-degree heat on a desolate piece of dusty land in the middle of nowhere.

Each year, for the decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a couple dozen campmates and I arrived from cities all across the globe five days before the gates opened to Burning Man, an art festival for 80,000 people and an experiment in temporary community in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Our job was to build Pink Heart, a theme camp that hosted thousands of people over the course of a week with extensive shade, pink furry couches, and an unimpeded front-row view of the Man himself. We gave away a couple thousand gallons of refreshing cucumber water and over 1,500 servings of coconut milk ice cream to our guests. We were also tasked with creating a comfortable place for my 100 campmates to live, complete with kitchen, power, shower, dining area, and chill space to connect and support one another.

Building camp was the culmination of six months of planning, but it was also a precarious time. Many other camps imploded during the building process, undone by the heat and unpredictable wind, the time pressure to be ready before the masses arrived, and—for most camps—a team composed of fiercely independent people who didn’t regularly work together and were never shy about sharing their opinions.

It turned out that this pressure-cooker situation was custom tailored to my unique combination of strengths. I tapped into my strength of connecting with others to reach out months before we arrived to understand each person’s hopes for Burning Man and the build time as well as their skills, knowledge, and experience. I used my strength of harmony to unearth the strong opinions during our planning, so we arrived with consensus about the designs and how to do the work. I tapped into my strength of efficiency and adaptability to both develop detailed plans and to adapt when essential items were left at home or destroyed by a surprise 70-mile-an-hour gust of wind. And finally, I was constantly leaning into my strength of positivity, finding progress to celebrate along the way and keeping the team’s energy up and focused in the heat and inevitable challenges we faced. Feeling those strengths come together to turn a blank piece of flat land into a magical space for creating life-changing experiences was one of the most energizing and fulfilling things I have done in my life.

Besides this, though, I understand the power of building on others’ strengths. I let those who loved to see progress and didn’t mind hot sweaty work lead the structural build. Those who were meticulous and careful worked on getting our 40,000-watt generator hooked up so power could be distributed. Those who loved hosting were in charge of the kitchen. Those who loved aesthetics took charge of decorating. And those strongest in empathy and caring walked among the work teams with snacks, spray bottles, and ice-cold water. Once everyone was focused on the tasks that used their strengths, my job was easy: I just cheered them on, adapted as necessary, and made sure everyone had plenty of tasks that fed them.

By capitalizing on each team member’s strengths, we always opened on time, having built bonds that acted as a nucleus for the rest of our campmates as they arrived. And what could have been a physically uncomfortable and psychically draining nightmare instead became one of the most fulfilling and fun weeks of my year: all because I know how to tap into the energy of my own and other people’s signature strengths.

DEFINING SIGNATURE STRENGTHS

Just like my campmates in the desert, every one of your team members has a unique set of energizing strengths that helps motivate them to perform when used properly. I refer to this combination of talent, skill, expertise, and enthusiasm as signature strengths.^*1

There are two essential elements you must be aware of when it comes to signature strengths. The first is obvious: the strength must be something you are good at, either a natural talent or a skill that you have honed over time. The second is less obvious: the strength must give you energy when you use it. It is this energy piece that sets a signature strength apart from a simple talent or skill and makes it valuable in generating activated positive emotions and higher levels of engagement. This energy from using a signature strength taps into our team’s intrinsic motivation: they do the strengths-based task because they like doing it and because it is part of who they are.

Like many people (over 20 million at last count), I took Gallup’s CliftonStrengths® (previously called StrengthsFinder) assessment a few years ago. One of my identified strengths was harmony, defined as the ability to help people in disagreement find common ground and move forward together. This wasn’t a surprise. In my suburban Washington, DC, high school, I was deemed the “peacemaker” among the class officers, always finding a way forward among several opinionated personalities. It gives me energy to find a way to address a problem together rather than waste precious effort on fighting and disagreeing in a group with clear common goals. Reading the description of harmony on my results sheet, I nodded and smiled: not only is this something I am good at but I get energized when I do it, feel great, and often can’t help but use it wherever there are differing opinions on how to get something done. This is what I mean by “signature strength.” Take a look at the list of CliftonStrengths® in Table 6.1, and find one that you consider a signature strength according to this definition.

TABLE 6.1 CliftonStrengths^® List

Source: Adapted from Gallup CliftonStrengths Quick Reference Card. The Gallup Organization, CliftonStrengths Quick Reference Card, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/245090/cliftonstrengths-themes-quick-reference-card.aspx, accessed October 30, 2020. Copyright © 2000, 2019 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved. Gallup®, CliftonStrengths® and each of the 34 CliftonStrengths theme names are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.

Contrast harmony to another of my CliftonStrengths® results: analytical. My 15-year biotech and venture capital career was spent deeply embedded in science, data, and complex business modeling. I was highly skilled at using extensive data sets to find trends and determine trade-offs to feed difficult decisions. But at the point in my career when I took the assessment, I had to drag myself to open the spreadsheets. In-depth analytical work drained me of energy. I call these decoy strengths: things you may be good at but that suck the energy out of you when you use them. These are the strengths that you can tap when absolutely needed, but if happiness and engagement are your goals, you should design your work and your life away from using them. Look at Table 6.1 again and see if you can find a decoy strength of yours listed there.

This idea of focusing on what we are good at and enjoy is deeply countercultural. Most of us were socialized through our schooling to value being “well-rounded.” By setting success as getting As across a variety of subjects, traditional schooling forces teachers and parents to ignore subjects children are doing well in, to focus their efforts on “getting their grades up” in subjects where the children are struggling. This creates a mindset that being well-rounded is the primary goal, that to be successful we need to be good at everything. But the workplace doesn’t reward being well-rounded because most jobs don’t require people who can do everything reasonably well. Instead, they require people who can do certain jobs consistently and nearly perfectly.

Signature strengths are easier to build on than decoy strengths, or (obviously) skills we are neither good at nor like. When we work to improve a signature strength, we have natural energy and excitement that serve as multipliers for any training or learning we do. Even a small investment in a signature strength can turn it into a superpower, whereas hours of focus on something of little natural talent or interest usually result in very little progress, particularly among adult learners.

HOW USING STRENGTHS DRIVES HAPPINESS

When faced with a situation in which to use a signature strength, most of us can’t help but apply it: it just feels good. And the research backs this up.

A comprehensive 2019 meta-analysis of 30 controlled strengths studies showed significant improvement in the amount and frequency of positive emotions for people who learned about their strengths and found new ways to apply them in their lives. It also showed a significant increase in their evaluation of their overall life satisfaction.²

Gallup, one of the leading research groups in applying strengths at work, found that “people who focus on strengths are three times more likely to report a high quality of life than those who do not. Focusing on our strengths makes us happier than focusing on our weaknesses.”³ That seems so obvious, but the narrative that being well-rounded is core to success often distracts us from our efforts to build on our strengths.

Another set of studies from the Center for Applied Positive Psychology (the creators of another assessment called the StrengthsProfile) showed that people who reported greater use of their strengths developed greater levels of well-being over time. And those benefits were long lasting and included showing increases in self-esteem, vitality, and positive emotions at both three and six months after the “intervention” during which they initially learned and started applying their strengths.⁴

Identifying and utilizing our signature strengths boosts feelings of empowerment, self-efficacy, and confidence. We feel good when we see our talents and energy contribute to making a difference on our projects and for our teams.

HOW USING STRENGTHS DRIVES ENGAGEMENT

The benefits of understanding and applying strengths in the workplace and their ties to engagement are one of the positive psychology research areas that has received the most research attention. Gallup has been evaluating strengths for nearly 20 years. In a massive study of nearly 50,000 business units and over 1.2 million employees, the researchers found that work groups using strengths-based interventions saw a 9 to 15 percent increase in the number of engaged employees, which in turn helped those organizations increase profits by 14 to 29 percent versus control groups.⁵ And a lot of this engagement benefit comes down to your role as manager: 67 percent of employees who strongly agreed that their manager focused on their strengths were engaged at work versus only 2 percent of those who strongly disagreed.⁶ Gallup is so convinced of the power of strengths that one of its 12 engagement survey questions is, “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.”

These results are not just in Gallup’s hands. A Corporate Leadership Council study of more than 19,000 managers across 34 organizations and 29 countries evaluating dozens of different performance approaches found that focusing on strengths had one of the largest impacts, improving performance by more than 36 percent on average. In contrast, too much emphasis on weaknesses reduced performance by 27 percent.⁷

As a manager, knowing your team members’ signature strengths means you can allocate roles and tasks to maximize use of individuals’ talents, skills, and knowledge and what energizes them. This creates more energized, engaged teams that better reach their goals. In fact, another Gallup study of over 8,000 employees looked at this directly and found that “engaged employees spent four times as much of their day focusing on their strengths compared with what they don’t do well. Actively disengaged employees spent about equal time focusing on their strengths versus what they don’t do well.”⁸

Think about what would shift if you knew each of your team member’s signature strengths. What if you knew exactly who would be most excited to step up when a new project came in? What if everyone on the team knew whom to go to when specific problems arose? Imagine your team being proactive about their development because of the energy they get with certain tasks and responsibilities. That’s what’s possible if you can roll this program out to your team in a positive supportive way.

WHY WORKPLACES AREN’T TAPPING THEIR STRENGTHS ENOUGH

Although focusing on strengths has been talked about for over two decades, most workplaces’ theoretical knowledge about strengths isn’t being applied in the day-to-day work of teams. Leaders typically aren’t attuned to their team members’ signature strengths, leaving out the important component of what strengths energize each individual, and they don’t actively seek opportunities to tap into these signature strengths. There are three main reasons why.

Lack of ownership. Often, people take an assessment or hear what others think are their strengths but then don’t take the time to self-reflect on what gives them energy; this energy is the difference between the useful, activating signature strengths and the low-energy, draining decoy strengths. This is the key differentiator and prime focus of this chapter: to help people find and rank their strengths by how much energy they generate when deployed and to reduce the amount of time they need to use decoy strengths that drain them of energy.

Lack of practical application. How many of us have taken a strengths assessment and thought, “Huh, that’s interesting,” and chucked the results into a file somewhere, never to be thought of again? To be of value, strengths need to be applied in daily work. As leaders, we need to help our team members find more ways to use and rely on those strengths as we allocate the hundreds of discretionary tasks that make up the team’s overall work.

The still-pervasive expectation that everyone needs to be well-rounded. This idea, that all team members need to be able to play every role well, still dominates people’s thinking. This is the “straight-A” philosophy—that good students must excel in all their classes to prove their academic chops—applied in an irrelevant setting. And sometimes this focus on being well-rounded morphs into a poorly defined sense of fairness: everyone should take their turn at the discretionary tasks of the team (from facilitating the weekly staff meeting to handling difficult customers to planning the holiday party) regardless of individual team members’ strengths and interests.

Of course there is no question that some weaknesses can be derailing, especially interpersonal and emotional intelligence weaknesses like lack of self-understanding or empathy. These are worth addressing to the point that they are no longer derailing. But once you can get by with them, stop working on them. Or find a way to compensate for that weakness by leaning into a complementary strength, or find a team member who excels in that strength. Not everyone on a team needs to be a star public speaker or skilled at meeting facilitation.

PUT STRENGTHS TO WORK

A large part of this chapter covers how to identify and prioritize your own individual strengths through exercises that you can do on your own and take your team through. The advantage to going deeper yourself before introducing this with your team is that you will be in a better position to share your experiences, tailor the process to your team, and help them through it as they go. But you can also go through the process simultaneously with your team, discovering more about your own strengths as your team does the same.

Throughout this self-reflective part of the exercise, I will lay out some specific suggestions for “bringing the team along.” I will also outline a suggested order for going through the whole process together in a boxed section called “Two Months of Strengths” on page 127. Either way, the initial steps are the same for any person going through this process. And a quick reminder: I lay out a thorough process below, so as you read, remember this is an action buffet. You do not need to do all the steps to find value in this process for you and your team. Pick what sounds most intriguing to you and start there.

Uncover Your Strengths

At the heart of understanding signature strengths are four important goals:

1.   To fully define the strengths we already know we have. This allows us to recognize when we utilize that strength and find more opportunities to do so.

2.   To open our eyes to any strengths we may not realize we have. Because our strengths come so easily for us, we often don’t recognize them. These latent or unrealized strengths offer huge potential for us to shift or adjust our work to find more happiness and engagement.

3.   To get a more nuanced insight into visible strengths. For instance, people who have always heard they are “good listeners” might uncover that it’s the strength of their empathy, their insightfulness, or their positivity that drives those valuable interactions. The power is in further defining the specific strengths that are useful in overcoming challenges or supporting team members.

4.   To understand that our strengths may uncover some activities we are good at but that drain us of energy: our decoy strengths. Once identified, we can shift our work away from energy-draining activities by either leaning into other strengths or collaborating with others who have complementary strengths.

Here are three main sources to tap for our strengths.

Uncover Your Strengths 1: Take a Strengths Assessment

There are a number of broadly available strengths assessments on the market. CliftonStrengths® (formerly called StrengthsFinder 2.0) by Gallup is the most widely used, is inexpensive, has strong workplace validation, and has helped establish language around specific strengths that is widely disseminated in the workplace. It’s very helpful to purchase a copy of the book StrengthsFinder 2.0, which gives you access to the assessment and is a handy resource as you and your team implement your strengths at work. Another well-validated option is the Strengths Profile, which has the benefit of integrating how energizing the strength is to you in the assessment. For this exercise, I do not recommend you use the Values in Action (VIA) Character Strengths assessment. It is a more powerful assessment when used in the next chapter supporting our efforts to find our personal values and meaning.

Once you get the results of your strengths assessment, take some time to carefully read each description. Notice what you are feeling as you do. I’ve worked through this process with dozens of coaching clients, and for the vast majority of people, two or three of their strengths are exactly what they expected them to be. These are often strengths that you already consider to be your own superpowers. When you get your results, take some time to affirm that these really are your strengths and savor that feeling of validation.

For many of my clients, there are usually one or two strengths that are a surprise. Spend particular time on these “unexpected” strengths. We all have strengths that come so naturally to us that we don’t even notice when we are utilizing them. Think through your life at and outside work, and see if you can identify where and how you use these strengths when you aren’t meaning to. And of course no assessment is perfect. If something comes up that doesn’t fit for you, feel free to eliminate it from your list.

For some people, a strengths assessment gives them all the data they need. For others who want to dive deeper into their strengths, or if they don’t feel the assessment captured them accurately, the next step can help.

Uncover Your Strengths 2: Solicit Outside Perspectives

Many of our strengths are visible to others, so a powerful way to learn your own strengths is to ask a group of people who know you well for stories of you at your best. A group of top researchers out of the University of Michigan have developed a process called the Reflected Best Self Exercise that is a much more structured version of this exercise where the data is managed for you, and it can be found at reflectedbestselfexercise.com.

Here is the basic process:

1.   Identify about 10 people who know you well either professionally (include a mix of bosses, peers, and direct reports from your current and previous roles) or in other areas of your life (family members, community project peers, or former teachers). Anyone who has seen you at your best.

2.   Ask each of them to share what they see as your strengths along with specific stories of your using those strengths in ways that were meaningful to them—that is, examples of a specific time when they saw you at your best. If it feels easier to ask, you can also give them the option to share the story in a recording or a conversation with you. If it’s told to you, just be sure to capture as many of those details in notes as you can.⁹

3.   Give yourself some time to savor those positive stories as they come in. Bask in that glow of positive feedback for a while. When you are ready, read through them again to identify common themes about your personal strengths, and compare them to the results of your strengths assessment. Are the results less surprising with this context? Have you identified additional strengths? People are often surprised by the similarity in responses from people from very different parts of their life. Getting these stories can sometimes provide a broader context for how different strengths build on one another or synergize to create truly exceptional results.

Team tips: When doing this as a larger team, encourage everyone to get a majority of their feedback and stories from outside the immediate team so that no single person on the team is overwhelmed with too many requests all at once. Everyone will have opportunities to comment and share stories of each other’s strengths throughout this process. You can decide how best to limit internal quests, but capping it at a maximum of three requests from one person is a reasonable place to start.

Uncover Your Strengths 3: Check in with Your “Weaknesses”

Another way to learn your strengths is to dig into what others may call a “weakness,” which can sometimes point you to strengths you may be overutilizing. If you sometimes run over or ignore other people’s opinions to get a project moving, this could point to what CliftonStrengths® calls “activator.” If you sometimes burn out because you are helping others to the point of ignoring your own needs, perhaps it’s because your strength of empathy or being a fixer (“restorative” in CliftonStrengths® language) pushes you to always step in and help someone in trouble. Take a minute now and see if something you perceive as a weakness, when looked at from a different point of view, might actually be a strength.

Prioritize Your Strengths by Energy

These sources of potential strengths from assessments, others’ stories, or your flipped weaknesses tell you what you may be good at (normal strengths), but they don’t evaluate your intrinsic motivation around this strength— whether utilizing these strengths gives you energy. So you need to add that essential requirement for signature strengths into your prioritization. Do this by eliminating any decoy strengths from your list. These might be things you are good at, but the idea of applying them makes you sigh, procrastinate, or feel drained.

Your goal is to get the remaining list down to your top five signature strengths: those things that you are good at and that most energize you when you utilize them. Put this list in priority order by the energy they provide you. Take your time measuring the relative importance of each one. For those of you with analytical as a strength, you might create an algorithm where you rate each strength from 1 to 5 on “I’m good at this” and a second time on “Utilizing this strength gives me energy.” You can use Table 6.2 to record these strengths and ratings, then add the two together, put your list in rank order, and cut it to five strengths. If analytical is not one of your strengths, just use your gut.

TABLE 6.2 My Top Five Signature Strengths

One word of caution: It is easy when prioritizing to give higher ratings to those strengths that are socially desirable or are valued in your job. Try to bring awareness of that potential bias as you prioritize. When you hear yourself thinking phrases like “should,” “supposed to,” or “would like,” check if that indicates external influence rather than one of your true signature strengths. As you do this comparative analysis, some other strengths might occur to you. Feel free to add these strengths in for consideration, even if they didn’t come up in the above exercises. Just be sure they are current strengths with clear evidence from your life, not strengths you wish you had or are aspiring to develop.

Take the time to do this right. After you have a draft, step away for a couple of hours or days, and come back and see if the priority still stands. Adapt as necessary.

Here’s the test: When reviewing this list of your five signature strengths, do you feel excited? Do you want to find more ways to use these? If so, move onto the next step. If not, spend some more time uncovering other potential signature strengths by expanding the “Solicit Outside Perspectives” exercise on page 117 or reviewing the full CliftonStrengths® list starting on page 108. Edit your top five list as necessary.

Team tips: Strengths brainstorming meeting. Once your team has a first draft of their strengths list, have a first “signature strengths brainstorming” meeting to start to introduce team strengths and to help brainstorm more stories to use. Have everyone be prepared to talk about two of their most powerful signature strengths. After a reminder introduction about the value of strengths and a quick check-in, break into groups of three, and give everyone five minutes in the hot seat:

•   Two minutes to share one strength and a story or two of when they have used it. Institute deep-listening rules (that is, no interrupting or offering advice).

•   Three minutes to brainstorm other stories of that strength being used and ideas for how that strength could be used more going forward. Prime the activity with good brainstorming rules (that is, there are no bad ideas).

Each person goes in the hot seat once in each group. Then change the groups to new sets of three, and do it again for a different strength in the new group. This exercise can get your team to start talking about each of their strengths and help define exactly what they mean by it. And it will help you understand how it’s going so far, and you’ll know if any adjustments need to be made. It will also help generate more ideas for the rest of this strengths prioritization process.

Create a “My Strengths” Document

Once you’ve got your top five list, it’s time to get explicit about what you mean by each signature strength. If the source was Gallup and its description defining the strength (see page 108) hit the nail on the head, great. If not, edit Gallup’s words to better conform to how that strength most energizes you. If your strength came from others’ stories or your own experiences, start with the dictionary definition or a similar strength from Gallup, and then adapt it as you see fit. It’s important to customize the definition to capture what this strength means to you and the components that most energize you.

One thing that has helped many of my clients better understand and build support for learning about their strengths is to create a document called “My Strengths” or “My Superpowers List” that has three components:

•   Define your strengths. Have your first page be this list of your top five signature strengths and their definitions. (This is the process you just went through.)

•   Own your signature strengths. This is a repository for stories and data supporting your signature strengths. (More information describing this process is immediately below.)

•   Apply your strengths. The final section will be ideas for how to use these strengths more and develop them further. (More information describing this process can be found in “Apply Your Strengths” on page 124.)

But if this single-document approach seems overly prescriptive to you, feel free to organize this information in whatever way feels comfortable. Just make sure you have access to it along the way.

As you go through the rest of the tools in this chapter, there may be other strengths that come up. Don’t feel locked into the prioritization and definitions as they stand right now. If some powerful energizing strength shows up later, come back and reprioritize this list as needed.

Own Your Signature Strengths with Stories and Data

Once you’ve got your prioritized list, you need to build evidence that supports these as your signature strengths. This can be a valuable asset to review in times when you aren’t feeling particularly strong or to prime you before a big meeting or stressful activity. There are three primary sources of this data.

Source 1. Your own stories. In a 15-minute free-writing session, write down as many stories as you can about where you applied a strength and where it energized you, allowed you to stand out, or helped you get something done more efficiently or effectively. No judging or filtering. Focus first on work, but also include activities you do with your family or community or during hobbies or leisure activities.

These don’t need to be well-crafted stories, just highlights that trigger the memory for you. Repeat the writing process as necessary, adding additional stories to the “own your strengths” section of your My Strengths document.

Source 2. Capture others’ stories. If you did the outside-perspectives exercise described earlier in the chapter, you will likely have several good stories from others that support some of your strengths. Pull these into your My Strengths document. And if you didn’t do it, then go back now but with a twist—give people a copy of your strengths list and ask for stories they’ve seen of you using those particular strengths (the original exercise is in the section “Solicit Outside Perspectives”on page 117).

Source 3. Other data. Add in evidence supporting your signature strengths from any of the following: previous performance reviews, complimentary letters from friends or colleagues, personality assessments you’ve done (like Myers-Briggs, DISC, emotional intelligence, and so on), or anything else that might provide some evidence of your strengths.

Differentiate Visible from Latent Strengths

Is there a strength that came up in your prioritization that didn’t have a lot of stories to show how and why it is a strength? This may be a latent or so-far-unrealized strength. Tapping such strengths can be one of the most powerful outcomes of going through this process because this is an area of high potential that you are not currently using to help you reach your goals.

One of my CliftonStrengths® was “woo,” or winning others over. When I first read the description, lightbulbs went off. I had never recognized this as a strength before, but upon reflection I realized how good I am at meeting new people, that I naturally focus on putting them at ease, engaging with them, and finding overlapping areas of interest. This was a powerful unrealized signature strength, and I started getting a lot of energy as I found new opportunities to expand this natural talent and put it into practice. I began proactively reaching out to more people and learning ways to better connect, and it had huge benefits in my professional and social lives.

As you look for opportunities to put your signature strengths to work, pay special attention to any of these latent strengths because these may be your greatest areas of untapped potential.

Recognize Blind Spots, Overuse, and Arrogance

While the point of this strategy is to find more ways to put your strengths to work, it is possible that we lean into our strengths too much. Any strength taken to an extreme can turn into weakness. Here are some examples:

•   Discipline is a powerful strength for self-management. Structure and routine work really well for some people. But expecting everyone else to be as organized and methodical as you are can cause resistance, and people without this strength can get the sense that they are being micromanaged. While their processes may frustrate you, focusing on the outcomes rather than their process is key to successfully using this strength.

•   Analytical is a potent strength that drives a desire to seek out more information, to look at a problem from different perspectives, and to get as much data as you can to properly make a decision. But being too analytical can make decision-making difficult because there is always more information we could get and more analysis we could do before making a decision. No decisions are risk free. Find someone for your team who has a good strength in moving things along (an activator in CliftonStrengths® language) to balance that potential for “analysis paralysis.”

•   Too much focus on harmony (including finding common ground or resisting conflict) can lead to indecisiveness if people do not put forward their opinion for fear of creating conflict. Or it can lead to groupthink if there is only one person willing to state an opinion and everyone else just goes along because that’s easier. We need creative tension and differing opinions to be shared.

Check in from time to time to make sure overexpressing a strength doesn’t become a liability.

Apply Your Strengths

The core benefit of knowing your strengths is putting that knowledge to work in new ways. It doesn’t take a wholesale redesign of your job to find little ways to use these strengths more. Once you start down the path of making a few small changes, the extra energy you feel in your work will help to drive you to automatically find more opportunities to apply them. This is another virtuous cycle where a little effort can have big payoffs down the line.

So with your signature strengths in hand, let’s explore some ways to put them to work.

Apply Your Strengths 1: Look at How You Spend Your Time Right Now

Take a look at your job description, your calendar for this week, or your goals for this month and/or year. What are some ways you might be able to tap into these strengths in your work more often? To prime the pump, do a quick read-through of your supporting stories for each strength from your strengths list document and the “Ideas for Action” section of the relevant strengths from your CliftonStrengths® results.

Try a 15-minute free-writing session (that is, writing without judgment or filtering). Write as many ideas as you can for how you can use each strength more often in your current job and role. Be sure to include those that are very practical and some that are totally off the wall. After the session, note the ideas that appeal to you and capture these in the “applying your strengths” portion of the strengths list. Pick one or two of the easiest ideas, and start changing it now.

Apply Your Strengths 2: Take the 21-Day Strengths Challenge

Print out a copy of your strengths list, and post it somewhere you can see it when you plan your day. Each day for the next 21 days, take five minutes before you begin working to look at the last 24 hours, and write down examples of how you used one of your strengths; a couple of bullets to capture the situation, time, and place is fine. Then look at your plan for the day and find at least one more way that you can apply one of your strengths to help get one of your tasks done.

Take the 21-day strengths challenge as a team. Doing the 21-day strengths challenge as a team can be a great way to help people lock down their own strength priorities and create more informal conversations about strengths. You can increase the impact by asking people about how the challenge is going and for a story or two about what they are learning. Create a five-minute strengths check-in at the beginning of your meetings to ask team members to name one strength they used that day.

Have another hour-long team strengths-focused meeting in the latter half of the 21 days similar to the strengths brainstorming meeting on page 120 with breakout groups of three people with hot seat rotations. Knowing that this meeting is coming ahead of time can also be a great motivation for people to stick with the strengths challenge during this time. Use those groups of three to help confirm the strengths people have chosen, add more stories to the “own your strengths” section of their My Strengths list, and look for other less obvious ways that strengths can be tapped.

Apply Your Strengths 3: Find Task-Swapping Experiments to Try

As you learn about your signature strengths and those of your colleagues, you may find there are parts of your job that others might enjoy taking over and parts of their job you might have a particular strength in or enjoy. If you find these golden opportunities and both parties are willing, experiment with task swapping for a week or two, and see how it works. Start small, and adapt as necessary. If the two of you can spend an hour or two of your workweek doing tasks that feed you in exchange for a couple hours of tasks that drain you, think of the positive difference in terms of the quality and enjoyment of your work.

Apply Your Strengths 4: Create Development Goals

The 21-day strengths challenge helped us experiment and try out some smaller changes to both our current work and our perspectives on that work. But understanding strengths also allows for longer-term and larger changes. Here are some strategies:

•   Create a training and development plan. Pick one or two of your strengths that you want to make even stronger. Search for books, podcasts, or videos that might be able to help you. Find some trainings or conferences that link to this strength. Which of these books, trainings, or conferences excite you when you think about participating? Put together a proposal for how and why this would be important for you and your work. What’s feasible for you to step up to? Get them onto your strengths list in the “action steps” section.

•   Change your job role. Get a little more creative. What do you want to do more of in your work? What would you like to do less of? What are some components of your work that tap only your decoy strengths? Can you change how those components are accomplished?

Give yourself some freedom to think big and explore changes that might not seem feasible. You can bring it back to reality later as necessary. Finish by creating two to three long-term development goals in both your own training and development and in how things might change for you at work.

Team tips. Encourage your team to think about creating long-term development goals around their strengths too. Have them bring these ideas to you for discussion in one-on-one meetings. Be clear that all of the work still needs to get done, but you’d love to hear any ideas they have for how tasks can be reallocated to better utilize everyone’s signature strengths.

Implement Strengths-Focused Leadership

Certain activities within this strengths process will likely seem most appropriate for your team. Dive in as you see fit. There is very little risk in learning about strengths and sharing the strengths we see in others.

If you want to take a more comprehensive approach to this strategy with your team, I lay out a two-month process in the box that follows. Implement this strategy at a time apart from your performance review process so it doesn’t get conflated with that process.

Learn Team Members’ Strengths One-on-One

To make these efforts successful, it is essential to have a one-on-one strengths conversation with each member of your team. Holding these meetings within a few weeks of each other will make it easier to find connections and areas for synergy between team members.

The goal of these one-on-ones is to help each team member explore their signature strengths—confirming any strengths you’ve already seen and opening your eyes to strengths you may have overlooked in the past. Here are some conversation prompts to get you started:

•   Which two to three strengths do you feel are most relevant to your job and goals today?” Be as encouraging as you can, and offer other stories of how you’ve seen them utilize these signature strengths.

•   Which strengths on your list most surprised you?” These can be particularly valuable places to push their development because there is likely more untapped potential in these latent or unrealized strengths. Help them brainstorm how they might put these “surprise” strengths to work.

•   What are a couple of development goals you would like to set around your strengths?” Encourage them to set goals for improving their strengths on their own or through formal training opportunities or conferences they might attend.

•   How might you change your responsibilities or workload to focus more time on signature strengths and less time on decoy strengths?” As they get to know their colleagues’ strengths, ask them for their suggestions on how you might be able to rearrange some of the work or projects that are going on to better utilize their (and their colleagues’) strengths. Brainstorm ideas of how they might explore task swapping with colleagues who might be interested in complementary changes to their job responsibilities. Make sure you both listen with an open mind (some of their crazier ideas might work).

These discussions start to overlap a lot with Strategy 7, Approach as a Coach, as strengths discussions can be a very powerful way to kick off and integrate with any coaching you do with them.

Prior to your one-on-one meeting, make sure they have completed the full analysis of their strengths. Ask them to send their signature strengths list to you ahead of time. Decide which topics from the conversation prompts list above you are going to cover, and give them explicit instructions on what to come prepared to discuss.

As you listen to your team members, do the following:

•   Encourage them to try out any strengths-building ideas they have that don’t affect others, particularly finding new ways to do their own work and looking at their responsibilities.

•   Encourage training in signature strength areas.

•   Create an ongoing list of suggestions that might affect other people’s work flows. Look for synergies across team members.

•   There may be some strengths that neither of you can figure out how to utilize at work. Encourage them to explore ways to bring those strengths into other parts of their life with their families or in community activities outside work.

•   If any of their suggestions are impossible, clearly explain why.

Depending on your team structure, these conversations can take place individually or as part of subteams within the larger group, but be mindful of team members’ privacy. Conversations about strengths can feel personal and thus make people feel vulnerable, so make sure you are clear about what can be shared.

Redistribute Work Based on Strengths

Once you’ve got a handle on each team member’s signature strengths, evaluate the work roles on your team. Are there ways to reassign roles and specific tasks that could better reflect your team members’ signature strengths?

You may have received some great suggestions from your one-on-one strengths discussions. Encourage experimentation among team members to try out some of those ideas. And you may see synergies they don’t see. Talk to them about task swapping and different development paths that might be helpful for them.

Look at your own work too: are there roles or activities that you currently do that are not areas of strength for you but might better play to one of your team members’ strengths? For example, someone with a strength in consistency and follow-through could run your core team meeting agenda and free you up to facilitate rather than being the taskmaster. Just be careful that you aren’t “dumping” unsavory tasks on your team under the guise of this strengths work. Everyone should end up happier with the redistribution of roles.

Assign New Work by Strengths

As new projects and responsibilities come to your team, assign them to team members based on those signature strengths, especially ones you may not have been aware of before. And look for opportunities to volunteer your team for special projects that will allow them to fully utilize their signature strengths.

Train to Build an Effective, Well-Rounded Team, Not Well-Rounded Individuals

The energy that our signature strengths provide pushes us to learn skills and knowledge and gain experience more quickly in those areas. This means we can increase the performance of the team much more efficiently by developing and training in areas of strength.

The most powerful part of knowing your team members’ strengths is that you can build on them to make a truly winning team. Here’s a hypothetical example. Let’s say you lead a team of three people, and there are six strengths that are essential to your team’s performance. Right now, the three people (members 1, 2, and 3 in Figure 6.1) bring a variety of base level of strength in each of those areas—these are the solid line arms in Figure 6.1.

FIGURE 6.1 Development Focused on Weaknesses

If you default to the straight-As–well-rounded narrative, you might acknowledge each individual’s strengths but then tailor a development program to work on their weaknesses to bring them up to par. The problem is that as a species, we are terrible at working on our weaknesses. These are activities that drain us. Addressing weaknesses is slow and painful, and we have to drag ourselves, force ourselves to work on them. So if we spend 20 hours over a quarter working on those two areas of weakness, we might be able to bring each up a little bit—the post-development strength add-on represented by the dotted-line arm extensions in Figure 6.1. This might allow a better distribution of work or make a few things a little more efficient, but when we consider the full skill set of our team, this effort doesn’t significantly change the team’s abilities and performance (the combined team strengths profile in Figure 6.1), with team strengths staying capped at a level of 6 to 7 out of 10 and the postdevelopment strength add-on subsumed by other team members’ strengths.

However, if we focus those development hours (and dollars) instead on helping each team member develop in their areas of strength, we are able to tap into our team’s natural talents and intrinsic motivation to get better. Our strengths are areas in our brain that already have lots of neurons that are well connected, so it’s easy to grow more synapses (connections) and neurons in those areas more quickly, adding more to that strength. That same 20 hours spent over a quarter can cause a greater leap in skills, knowledge, or experience (the postdevelopment strength add-on represented by the larger dotted-line arm extensions in Figure 6.2).

FIGURE 6.2 Development Focused on Strengths

And if each of your three team members focuses on their strengths, the combined team strengths profile is more robust (see Figure 6.2), making the team much more effective (at a level of 9 to 10 out of 10) across the spectrum of strengths you most need as a group versus the combined team strengths profile achieved in Figure 6.1 by focusing development on weaknesses (at a level of 6 to 7 out of 10).

Hardwire a Strengths Perspective

Once you’ve taken your team members through a good process of uncovering and applying their strengths, it is critical to keep those strengths alive in your discussions going forward. Here are some suggestions:

•   Have signature strengths cards created for each employee to post somewhere visible near their work space. Some teams put these immediately below each employee’s nameplate to keep these strengths top of mind for themselves and for others.

•   Have team members’ signature strengths lists handy for all development, performance, and coaching conversations.

•   At the beginning of a meeting, break the team into pairs in which they discuss how they have used a signature strength in a new way in the last week.

•   Encourage everyone to name signature strengths when they recognize or appreciate their colleagues.

•   Open meetings with a five-minute strengths-spotting exercise. Ask each team member to give quick recognition of something awesome a teammate did using one of their signature strengths. You can also choose themes and ask for positive feedback within specific strength families: influencing, relationship building, strategic thinking, executing, and so on.

•   Use signature strengths presentations. Have each team member prepare a five-minute presentation showcasing one or two of their strengths, with a focus on what kind of problems they can help solve, how they can help others, and questions and tasks they love to engage in. This can open in-team collaboration opportunities, create possible Five-Minute Favors (see Strategy 2), and give team members permission to reach out to each other.

•   Make sure to find a few changes to implement. Putting your team through this process and then ignoring the results would hurt your credibility, and it is one of the few risks of pursuing a strengths path.

CONNECTING STRATEGIES

* In his book Character Strengths and Virtues, Martin Seligman coined the term “signature strengths” to mean strengths “that a person owns, celebrates, and frequently exercises.” I build on that definition, adding the critical component of providing energy whenexpressed.