Leverage Employee Strengths to Capture Untapped Resources

Today’s work environment can be stressful. Higher employee turnover, a lack of qualified candidates, supply issues and increased business demand cause stress for management to deliver on promises.

Given this situation, organizations are trying to find ways to do more with the same (or even fewer) number of people.

Traditional management styles may fall back to piling more work on existing employees – who may already be:

1. Burnt out and without capacity to receive more work
   
   
2. Receiving calls from recruiters regarding jobs offering more compensation or other alluring benefits

What to do in this situation? The answer is hidden in the strengths your employees bring to the job.

What is a Strength?

Gallup defines strengths as things that someone is naturally good at AND enjoys doing. It’s where natural talent and developed skills meet.

A simple way to identify strengths is to pay attention to when you are working on something, are engrossed in it and time flies as you are working on it.

Employees who know and use their strengths at work are:

• Six times more likely to be engaged at work
• Three times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life

Sounds like a nice positive balance of
work and life satisfaction, doesn’t it?

Three Ways to Identify Individual Strengths

Discover Your Strengths by Don Clifton provides a solid background on strengths methodology and how to implement using strengths at work – from an individual and manager perspective.

1. Take a strengths-based assessment. It is the fastest and most reliable way to identify strengths. Gallup offers a multitude of options for strengths assessments for individual contributors, managers and teams. Their StrengthsFinder assessment provides individuals with feedback on their top strengths.
   
   
2. Maintain an activities log. Keep a log for a week of your tasks at home and work. Identify which ones:
   • Get you motivated and give you energy – those times when time just flies.
   • Leave you feeling exhausted and depleted.
     
     
3. Survey Yourself and Others. Ask a sampling of people who know you well for their opinion on your strengths. Include family members, friends and coworkers … maybe even a customer or two … that you know well and trust.
   
   Ask those individuals if they would be willing to provide you with feedback and schedule time to meet with them.
   
   
   • Conduct interviews. Clarify that your intent is to learn how others see you. Elizabeth Houghton provides 25 questions to help you get started on questions to ask yourself or others during this process.
     
     
   • Review the results. The answers received may vary by your audience – and what strengths they see in different environments. If there are areas that are unclear, it’s okay to go back and ask for clarification to help identify what areas are truly strengths.
     
     
   • Look for trends. Consider the following examples.
     • You heard from family members that you do a great job of balancing the family’s calendar and schedule of activities and heard from coworkers that you keep projects on schedule and remind them of upcoming customer deliverables. This is a clear message that you are good at planning and/or organization.
       
       
     • You heard from your significant other that you always fix things and your team members all joke about your ability to fix any building issues at work. It may be safe to assume that you are good at understanding how things work and fixing mechanical issues.
       
       

How to Leverage Strengths as a Manager

Identifying strengths is the first step. Be careful not to make assumptions regarding someone’s strengths. There are plenty of people who have natural talent for something – yet they hate doing it. That isn’t a strength.

Understanding how to leverage strengths for the betterment of the team can be tricky – but that is where the value lies for managers and organizations.

There are full books on this subject. Gallup has two books on this topic – Strengths Based Leadership and It’s the Manager – that offer practical information to help managers lead from a strengths perspective. It takes time, inquiry and conversations. Taking the information and applying it to your team is critical. Having discussions about why you are making changes helps employees understand that you value them, their strengths and want to make work better for everyone.

For example, if you have one person who loves to work on their own and not interact with customers or coworkers, they may be very happy performing computer work in an office away from customers. You may have another team member who gets energized by talking with farmers who come in to discuss their business and the latest news on commodity and input prices. It makes sense to have the customer-focused person spend more time interacting with customers, and the introvert will take the non-customer focused work.

However, you may also have a team where everyone wants to be customer facing and no one wants to do the data input into the computer which is a core responsibility for your team. In that case, it is important to remind employees that no job is perfect, but that you will try to maximize the time they spend doing what they love – giving them the energy to be more effective doing those tasks they find monotonous or hard.

Leveraging Strengths
Benefits Your Organization

Employees who are happy at work will be more productive and provide better customer service. Leveraging strengths is about strategically distributing work in a way that maximizes the potential of each of your employees.

Managers that take time to learn the strengths of their employees and utilize that knowledge will be awarded with higher engagement and better results.

Take time to learn your employees’ strengths. You may know what they are good at – but are those the same things that give them energy and motivate them to work harder? You will only know if you ask.