How can you help a supervisee develop their strengths?

1 What are strengths?

Strengths are the positive qualities, skills, talents, values, and interests that your supervisees have. They are the resources that they can use to cope with challenges, overcome obstacles, and pursue their goals. Strengths can be innate or learned, and they can vary depending on the context and situation. For example, some strengths may be more relevant for certain tasks, roles, or domains than others.

3 How to identify strengths?

Helping your supervisees develop their strengths begins by helping them identify them. You can do this by asking open-ended questions such as "What are some of the things that you are good at or enjoy doing in your work?" or "What are some of the values or beliefs that guide your work?". Additionally, using affirmations, reflective listening, scaling questions, and feedback can all be effective in acknowledging and praising their strengths. For example, you could use affirmations such as "You have a great sense of humor that helps you connect with your clients" or "You are very creative and resourceful in finding solutions to problems". Or you could use reflective listening like "So you are very passionate about helping others and making a difference" or "You have a lot of experience and knowledge in this field". Scaling questions also provide insight into their strengths. Ask questions like "On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you in your communication skills?" or "How often do you use your critical thinking skills in your work?". Finally, providing specific and constructive feedback is key. You could say something like "I noticed that you handled that difficult situation very calmly and professionally" or "I really liked how you used your empathy and active listening skills in that session".

4 How to build on strengths?

Once you have helped your supervisees identify their strengths, you can help them build on them and use them more effectively in their work. You can do this by asking permission to offer suggestions or advice, using evocative questions to stimulate their thinking and creativity, setting goals to plan and prioritize how they can use their strengths, creating action plans to implement and evaluate how they use their strengths, and following up to review and reflect on how they use their strengths. For example, you could ask: "Would you be interested in hearing some ideas on how you can use your humor more in your work?" or "What are some steps that you can take to use your empathy skills more in your work?" By doing this, you can provide valuable insights for your supervisees on how they can use their strengths.