Think about what your employees and team members are doing right now.

Are they working in roles that let them use their strengths to their (and your) best advantage, or were they just slotted into that role simply because it was there, and you needed a body to fill it? If it’s the second one, chances are you’re not making the best of what your employees can do, and they won’t be achieving their full potential either.

I've always done everything I can to play to my strengths throughout my career. Sometimes, though, I've been so focused on using my own strengths that I've entirely overlooked possibly the biggest strength I have as a leader: the individual strengths of my team members.

Once you know your team member's strengths, you can use those strengths to help them become even better at what they do. They’ll be more productive and feel more fulfilled, and your business will reap the benefit.
When you know what all your team member’s strengths are, you’ll be able to combine their strengths most effectively and mould them into a unit that will truly be a force to be reckoned with.

Just because someone’s doing a job doesn’t mean they’re doing the right job.

I was recently talking to someone about CliftonStrengths, and why I’d been so impressed with it that I’d decided to become a CliftonStrengths coach. It was just a casual conversation – they’re an associate, not a client – but, during the course of it, they told me this story about somebody they managed that, I think, highlights my ‘find your employees strengths’ message perfectly.

Their employee worked in a call centre, making outbound calls to raise money for charities. He worked hard, met his targets, and was passionate about the charities he worked for, but he hated ‘selling’ to people. Of course, when you’re a call centre agent, selling to people is what your role is all about, but my associate found out he was only staying in the job because he believed in the value of what he was doing.

Still, despite the fact he was in the wrong job, he’d been performing the job well. Bearing that in mind, think how brilliantly he would perform in a job that didn’t involve selling to people and, instead, allowed him to concentrate on all his strengths.

His strengths lay in understanding what each charity needed to make their campaign a success; how they should refine their message to stand apart from the other charities in their field, so that calling up strangers all day to ask them to support the charity wouldn’t look like some soulless money grab. That’s why he’d been put in that role, because he knew each charity’s facts inside-out and when he cold-called a person it was clear he cared about what he was telling them. That’s why he almost always achieved his sales goals. But the problem was, because he wasn’t comfortable selling to people, he found building empathy over the telephone difficult and he was easily thrown off whenever someone argued back at him or hung the phone up. He was a planner and a strategist, not a salesman. So, all my associate needed to do was move him into a planning role where he could work with each charity on making their campaigns stronger and wasn’t a part of all the selling-to-strangers-over-the-phone stuff that was holding him back.

As a result, my associate moved him into client support and immediately saw a massive uptick in his performance, productivity, and morale. Now that he was using all his strengths and wasn’t being hampered by a critical weakness, he was achieving his potential and feeling more accomplished and fulfilled. As a result, a formerly talented but not outstanding employee was transformed into a superstar who’s dazzling their clients and adding maximum value to the business by helping each charity create more successful campaigns. As far as his former role as an agent was concerned, they replaced him with someone who loves being a salesperson so they’re excelling in that job too. Yes, there was the brief hassle of having to move everybody around, but because my associate’s put people with absolutely the right strengths in absolutely the right roles, it’s proved to be a win-win for everyone.

Now, you could argue that keeping the client-facing superstar in the sales role and giving him extra coaching to improve his selling and empathy-building skills would have been less headache. In the short term – maybe; in the long-term, I disagree. That’s because, no matter how much telephone sales coaching they’d have given him, selling to other people would never be one of his strengths. He didn’t enjoy it, and ultimately he would have left and transported his incredible campaign-building skills over to another employer. Instead, he’s now exactly where he wants to be, the company’s benefitting from his knowledge and expertise, and his replacement on the sales team has become a superstar as well.

What are the benefits of a strengths-based culture?

The American analytics company Gallup asked a random sample of over a thousand US employees:

Does your supervisor focus on your strengths and positive characteristics?
Or, does your supervisor focus on your weaknesses and characteristics?

37% agreed with the first statement. 45% agreed with the second statement. 25% ignored the question.

Of the 'ignored' employees, 40% were actively disengaged.

On the other hand, of the 37% of employees who agreed that their supervisor focused on their strengths, active disengagement fell to 1%. Gallup's findings were that 'if every company in America trained its managers to focus on their employee's strengths, the US could easily double the number of engaged employees in the workplace.' (Source: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231605/employees-strengths-company-stronger.aspx)

Here's the bottom line:

Focusing on an employee’s strengths gives them a better mindset and a greater sense of control and responsibility.
A strengths-based culture improves wellbeing and promotes a better work/life balance.
A strengths-based culture empowers employees to take ownership of their actions and performance.
A strengths-based culture empowers employees to find their own solutions and collaborate to find solutions as a team.
In a strengths-based culture, employees have shared goals and language. They are allowed to set their own expectations, and because they can see the value in themselves and each other, they don't consider anyone in their team to be weak or incapable.
A strengths-based culture builds confidence and self-esteem.
In a strengths-based culture, employees don’t avoid challenges because they know they have the strengths and resources to tackle whatever comes their way.

What’s the best way to identify your employees’ strengths?

The tool I use is CliftonStrengths. I’ve already talked pretty extensively about what CliftonStrengths can do in a previous post, so I won't go over it again, but if you'd like to know more, get in touch.

If you don’t want to use an in-depth tool like CliftonStrengths, there are a few common-sense tactics you can use to identify your employees’ strengths.

Ask them directly about their abilities and passions and what they think are their strengths and best traits.
Look closely at their past experience and the roles they've excelled in before. What skills did they use when they worked on those projects?
Listen and Observe: Pay close attention to how they interact in meetings, how they collaborate, how they present themselves. For example, if there’s someone who’s known for always being friendly and even-tempered, they could be an asset when you need someone on a project who’s a natural diplomat. Or, if one of your employees is always known for their wild ideas and thinking outside the box, you could have a valuable untapped Creative on your hands. Pair them up with someone who's more logistical and someone who enjoys getting things done instead of talking about it, and you’ve got the foundations of an innovative team.
Don’t assume that employees know their strengths, and
Don’t just see what you want to see. It’s easy to have a preconceived notion of who an employee might be and what they might bring to the table, and preconceptions can often be wrong. Stay neutral. Watch, listen, analyse, and properly assess where their strengths actually lie.

At the end of the day, not everyone can be an MD, board member, or product director. However, when you know how to identify and use your employees’ strengths, you’ll be giving them and your business the best opportunity for success. According to Gallup’s research, simply knowing what their strengths are can make an employee 7.8% more productive, and teams that use their strengths every day are 12.5% more productive. Investing in your employees’ talents increases performance, profitability and wellbeing. It also boosts morale and significantly improves staff retention.

If you don’t know what your employees’ strengths are, I’d highly recommend correcting that oversight right now.