Focus Question: What strengths have your teams been leaning into this year?

Description
What are the strengths you can leverage?
 
Teams which get results are often complimentary in skills. What are the skills each team member brings to the table?
 
In times of disruption and/or change, it’s even more important for us to be focusing on our strengths. Strengths and what we are good are often the things that we tend to rely on, or lean into, first.

• As a team what do you notice about your strengths?
• The overlap between different members of the team?
• The gaps between different members of the team?

 
Over an extended period of time, especially when under pressure or stress, we may tend to over leverage our strengths.
Consider dialogue around this question:

• Where, and how, the team is overleveraging their strengths?
• What impact is it having?

​Check out this great March 2020 podcast from Gallup .

Activity 

This week spark a dialogue around strengths. If you have done some strengths-based work (see the earlier focus in Week 8 of the Remote Pathways 52 weeks guide), spend time exploring it…

Possible avenues to explore are StrengthsFinder 2.0 OR VIA Strengths.

What do you notice about your strengths? What’s working? What blindspots have you created? What’s not working?
 
For more on this topic check out: Section 1 and 2 of Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack.

Enjoy!
Jennifer

Focus Question: What are the things that you do really well?

Description
Strengths based leadership asserts that each individual has innate talents and things they can do exceptionally well. Our top strengths are a unique fingerprint and in combination create “unique superpowers”.
 
As a remote worker we may find ourselves leaning into work that is more aligned with our strengths. A challenge can be finding others to collaborate with who we can work with to round out of weaknesses.  Research continues to show that it’s easier to grow our strengths than our weaknesses. As a remote worker the reality may be that we have tasks we HAVE TO DO and can’t delegate or defer. What can we do overtime to possibly rebalance our work focus?

Activity
Complete a strengths assessment so you can learn more about what you are innately talented in. You might consider completing online assessments including VIA Strengths from Positive Psychology OR StrengthsFinder 2.0. Use your browser to see if these would be of interest.

Need to Know
Consider your strengths in light of what you do every day.
How are your strengths helping you? Hindering you?
As you consider the work you do with others, what do you know of notice about their strengths and preferences?
What might you need to magnify or minimize in order to relate with them better?

So what? – What’s important about this topic?
Understanding our strengths and how we might overleverage them is an important part of remote worker’s self-awareness. When things are busy, uncertain or stressful, it’s likely that we may lean into our strengths. Sometimes strengths become over leveraged and create a blindspot. Consider where you might be overleveraging or over utilizing your strengths.

For more on this:
Check out section 1 and section 4 of PlanDoTrack and Coaching Business Builder. Section 4 asks you to consider the strengths that you bring, also in combination with your values and opportunities.

This is a rich body of work you will want to explore as a leader of a team. Be sure to check out some of these books:
Go, Put Your Strengths to Work – Marcus Buckingham
Strengths-Based Leadership
StrengthsFinder2.0

All the best, 
Jennifer

​Check out the most recent Remote Pathways Podcast Episode which covers the topic of Vision. You can listen to Episode 4 here, or on your favorite podcast player.