Go Put Your Strengths to Work

1. Identify your strengths to unlock your full potential

Your strengths are those activities that make you feel strong.

Strength identification is critical. Your strengths are not just what you're good at, but activities that energize and fulfill you. Look for four key signs of a strength:

• Success: You perform consistently well
• Instinct: You feel drawn to the activity
• Growth: You learn quickly and stay focused
• Needs: You feel authentic and energized afterward

To identify your strengths:

1. Capture activities that make you feel strong over a week
2. Clarify the essence of these activities
3. Confirm by testing against the four signs

Write strength statements that vividly describe activities making you feel strong. For example: "I feel strong when I interview someone who excels at their job and explore why they excel."

2. Focus on developing strengths, not fixing weaknesses

You will succeed in putting your strengths to work only if you believe that capitalizing on your strengths is the best way to compete.

Reject the myths that hold you back from focusing on strengths:

• Myth: As you grow, your personality changes
• Myth: You will grow the most in your areas of greatest weakness
• Myth: A good team member does whatever it takes to help the team

Embrace the truth:

• As you grow, you become more of who you already are
• You will grow the most in your areas of greatest strength
• A good team member volunteers their strengths to the team most of the time

Focusing on strengths leads to greater success. Research shows that people who use their strengths daily are:

• 50% more likely to work in high-performing teams
• 38% more likely to be productive
• 44% more likely to earn high customer satisfaction scores

3. Your personality becomes more defined as you grow

As you grow, you don't change into someone else. You don't change your personality.

Personality stability is real. Research shows that:

• 45-50% of your personality is inherited
• The remaining 50-55% is influenced by peers and chance events, not parenting or birth order
• Your personality becomes more defined as you age, not fundamentally different

Implications for personal development:

• Focus on leveraging your innate strengths rather than trying to transform yourself
• Seek out situations that allow you to express your natural talents
• Understand that your core personality traits will remain consistent over time

Accept and build on who you are. Instead of trying to become a different person, aim to:

• Deepen your self-awareness
• Find roles and environments that suit your natural inclinations
• Develop skills that complement your innate strengths

4. Create a Strong Week Plan to leverage your strengths

From this day on, devise a plan each week to push toward two specific activities and away from two others. Do this each week, every week, year upon year, and the changes you want to make in your life will both work and last.

The power of weekly planning. A week is the perfect unit of time for practical planning and psychological motivation. To create your Strong Week Plan:

1. Assess last week: What percentage did you spend on activities you enjoy?
2. Project for this week: What percentage will you spend on enjoyable activities?
3. FREE your strengths: List two actions to leverage your strengths
4. STOP your weaknesses: List two actions to minimize your weaknesses

Commit to consistency. Make this a weekly ritual to gradually reshape your work around your strengths. Over time, small changes compound into significant shifts in how you spend your time and energy.

5. Use the FREE strategy to put your strengths to work

To free your strengths will require you to do more of precisely those things that do come naturally to you.

FREE stands for:

• Focus: Identify how your strength helps in your current role
• Release: Find missed opportunities to use your strength
• Educate: Learn new skills to build on your strength
• Expand: Build your job around your strength

Practical application:

1. Choose one strength to focus on
2. Answer the FREE interview questions for that strength
3. Identify specific actions you can take this week
4. Implement and track your progress

Example: Heidi, a brand director, used her strength of "helping hotel managers excel" to transform her role. She shifted from chasing underperforming hotels to consulting with high-potential properties, dramatically increasing her job satisfaction and impact.

6. Minimize weaknesses using the STOP approach

To keep on it for our entire career, we need to stay clearheaded. We need to build the right habits, so that week in, week out, and year upon year, we stay in control, always pushing toward activities that strengthen us, ever watchful for those that drag us down.

STOP stands for:

• Stop: Can you simply stop doing the activity?
• Team up: Can someone else who enjoys it take it on?
• Offer up: Can you trade it for a strength-based activity?
• Perceive: Can you change your perspective on it?

Identifying weaknesses:

• Look for activities that consistently drain or frustrate you
• Pay attention to procrastination and dread
• Notice when time seems to slow down during a task

Strategies for managing weaknesses:

• Delegate or eliminate where possible
• Batch similar tasks to minimize context switching
• Schedule weakness-related activities when you have the most energy
• Reframe the activity in terms of a strength or larger goal

7. Have crucial conversations about your strengths and weaknesses

To reach outstanding levels of performance, you must stop tiptoeing. You must learn how to express—using unambiguous words and examples—what strengthens you and what weakens you.

Four key conversations:

1. Strengths Chat: Practice describing your strengths with a trusted friend
2. "How I Can Help You": Volunteer your strengths to your manager
3. Weakness Chat: Practice discussing weaknesses with a friend
4. "How You Can Help Me": Ask your manager for support in managing weaknesses

Tips for effective conversations:

• Use specific examples and vivid language
• Frame discussions in terms of increasing productivity and value
• Be prepared to offer solutions, not just identify problems
• Listen actively and be open to feedback

Overcoming fears: Address common concerns like being seen as selfish or incompetent by focusing on your desire to contribute more effectively to the team and organization.

8. Build strong teams by aligning roles with individual strengths

True teamwork occurs only when a complementary set of strengths comes together in a coordinated whole.

Strengths-based team building:

• Identify each team member's unique strengths
• Align roles and responsibilities with individual strengths
• Encourage open communication about strengths and weaknesses
• Create opportunities for strengths to complement each other

Benefits of strengths-based teams:

• Increased engagement and job satisfaction
• Higher productivity and performance
• Greater innovation and problem-solving capacity
• Improved team dynamics and collaboration

Case study: Team Georgia
Georgia, a senior director at Hampton hotels, reorganized her team based on individual strengths:

• Divided brand director roles into specialized functions
• Allowed team members to choose roles aligned with their strengths
• Resulted in increased initiative, faster problem-solving, and improved overall performance

Last updated: September 13, 2024