5 Tools to Maximize Teams Around Strengths-based Leadership

I'm a huge fan of self-assessments. If there's a test out there to help me unearth myself and my strengths or for me to better understand how I tick, sign me up! (Yes. I'm a Maximizer.) In fact, I had students work on a "Personality CV" of many different self-assessments this fall in The Nontraditional Healthcare Professional at Butler University COPHS. Just on strengths alone, there's of course, StrengthsQuest, Strengthsfinder and High5, among many.

"Knowing thyself" is always the first step. But then, as one of my law professors used to say - So what? Why do we care? Said specifically to strengths tests and all the leaders and managers out there - How do these individual results work in the workplace on teams? How can the head or senior manager of a team maximize these individual results to leverage into an even greater team, achieving even better results?

I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here. Here are a few resources I've recommended to leaders who want to maximize their teams' strengths after they've done the individual assessments in the past year or so. There's so many great resources already built - it's just a matter of the leader making it a priority to give the team space to share their strengths and how they can optimize how to work together.

Ready?

Tools to Maximize Teams and Individual Strengths' Data:

1. Using Strengths for Team Building - Jason Yip here lays out 5 simple steps to lay out how to use the strengths based tools to show your team what's up! Brilliant.
2. Using Strengthsfinder on Your Team - by Logan Leadership - The most relevant info on this article for me is how I fit into the majority/minority when assessing everyone's strengths on a team.
3. How the Strengthsfinder Team Grid Can Help You Work Together - Part 7 - Servestrong - I particularly like that this tool identifies gaps on the team. I also like the visual representation of pockets of excellence too.
4. West Texas A&M has an entire webpage focused on how to leverage and maximize your strengths for students (and the rest of us).
5. Using Strengthsfinder in the Real World - U of Wisc - this slide deck, activity #2, slide 20. Mic drop. ?? Game changer. ??

I've written before that everyone should come with an operator's manual. Unfortunately, they don't really hand them out at the hospital when you're born with your birth certificate. So all of us need to guess - but we shouldn't have to! Smart leaders and managers want to identify how to maximize their teams, and by identifying how their individual players operate best, get that data in front of the entire team, only then can they accelerate and maximize working together.

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Erin L. Albert is a writer and career coach, with the top 5 strengths of: futuristic, maximizer (obvious from this post), intellection, ideation, and input. Opinions are her own, unless cited by others above.