A strengths-based leadership approach can significantly benefit your team and organization
Kitty Schaap MA, MSc
People & Culture * Strengths-Based Coaching & Assessments * Leiderschapscoaching * SHRM * Employee Engagement
A strengths-based leadership approach can significantly benefit your team and organization in various ways:
?? Optimizing Team Abilities: By practicing strengths-based leadership, leaders can identify each team member's unique strengths and leverage them to enhance the collective group's performance
?? Enhanced Team Satisfaction and Motivation: When leaders allow team members to utilize their strengths, it boosts motivation, self-confidence, and job satisfaction, leading to improved performance, more ownership/personal leadership and a more positive work environment
?? Improved Trust and Confidence: Leaders who understand and encourage employees to apply their strengths create trust and confidence within the team. This fosters open communication, innovation, and a more cohesive work environment
?? Faster Growth in Learning New Skills: Focusing on improving employees' strengths enables them to learn new skills and adapt to new roles or other tasks more efficiently. Assigning tasks based on strengths enhances performance and job satisfaction, people are more likely to obtain their goals.
?? Building Stronger Team Bonds: Strengths-based leadership encourages team members to rely on each other's strengths, fostering collaboration, momentum, and shared success. This approach strengthens relationships within the team.
?? Increased Productivity: By aligning tasks with individual strengths, leaders can enhance productivity as employees are more engaged, motivated, and effective in roles that capitalize on their natural abilities.
Embracing a strengths-based leadership approach not only benefits leaders, individual team members and collective teams, but also contributes to the overall success of the organization by creating a positive work culture, enhancing performance and engagement, fostering innovation, and building strong relationships within the team. Embrace strengths-based leadership in your organization today to unlock the full potential of your leadership and team members, foster a positive work environment, enhance engagement and performance.
Employee Engagement
Being a great place to work is not about providing free fitness memberships, ping pong tables, colorful furniture, etcetera. Ineffective leaders are leading people out the door, too many employees leave their jobs because of their managers. Leaders account for as much as 70 percent of variance in employee engagement scores. Employees who have highly engaged managers are also 59 percent more likely to be engaged.
Improving personal performance, team performance, leadership behavior and employee engagement, organizational outcomes
We all have certain talents, strengths that make us unique but often we tend to focus on our weaknesses, on non-strengths that need to be fixed. When we are aware of our strengths and use them, we can unlock our potential and start to build our self-esteem, we literally feel stronger. When we focus on our ‘weaknesses’ we don’t feel energised or good about ourselves. Many successful organizations, are now embracing a strengths-based development approach.
Leadership Effectiveness
“There is significant evidence for the link between strengths-based approaches and enhanced leadership effectiveness. And there are multiple benefits to strengths-based approaches beyond enhanced leadership, including engagement, positivity, well-being and goal attainment.” (Strengths -based Leadership Coaching in organizations. An evidence -based guide to positive leadership development (Doug MacKie).
People perform best when they are doing what they are good at and they love doing. And employees who use their strengths are more engaged, perform better, are less likely to leave and will boost your bottom line. The best way for employers to optimise employees’ strengths is through their managers.
Why focus on strengths?
Our brains are wired with a negativity bias which makes us fabulous at spotting all the things that are not going well and feeling an evolutionary tug of survival to fix them, but it’s not generally as adept at spotting the true, the good and the possible, and finding ways to build upon what’s working. As a result researchers estimate that we spend about 80% of our time trying to fix what’s not working and only 20% of our time trying to build on our strengths.
The challenge with this approach is that it’s your strengths – the things you’re good at and enjoy doing – which are being found to provide your best opportunities for growth and success. A strength is a strength because over time you’ve practiced these thoughts, feelings and actions so often they’ve become well-developed neural pathways through your brain. As a result when you draw on your strengths to tackle a challenge you feel more confident, engaged and happy, making it easier to stick with the changes you’re creating.
Over the last decade books instructing managers on developing strengths have become best-sellers, more than 15 million people have completed strengths assessment tools and the body of scientific-data exploring the benefits of strengths grows steadily around the globe.
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
A different approach
The majority of development programs focus on closing deficits and gaps, and concentrate on improving performance through the development of weaker areas. We offer a different approach – we focus on strengths to develop ways of working that energise and inspire people.
Identifying strengths
We start with the measurement of strengths, and the extent to which these are productively applied at work. To identify these strengths we use the leading online strengths assessment system, Strengthscope?.
To ensure you are aware of your natural strengths or underlying sources of positive energy that lead to productive outcomes for you and the organisation. Being aware of and making best use of your strengths will enable you to perform at your best and approach dilemmas and challenges with a greater level of resourcefulness, resilience and confidence.
Leadership Paradigms are typically formulaic, packed with best-practice models and generic programs.
Ultimately, each leader leads differently.
‘The true challenge for leadership development lies in creating sustainable and feasible ways of developing leaders in a personalized way, accommodating variations of style and individual strengths profiles. To do that, organizations need to move away from the one-size-fits-all approach that tries to create allrounders, and help new leaders understand that leadership is primarily a stretch assignment, far more demanding than they had anticipated.
You can teach key concepts to aspiring leaders, such as the concept that employee engagement drives business results; or the concept that focusing on strengths leads to more positive and ultimately more productive workplaces – but each individual leader must turn each concept into a practice, through a set of behaviours and techniques that feel authentic to them, that fit their strengths.
Ultimately, each leader leads differently.
??Do you know what motivates and energizes you?
??To what extent are you aware of and focused on your strengths?
??Can you explain them to others, including the value they bring?
??Are you living them every day at work?
??Do you optimise them in the service of the team and organisation?
??Can you clearly identify what intrinsically motivates you?
Creating A Strengths-based culture is key to engaging employees and boosting productivity
James Brook, Co-Founder of Strengthscope, says that in order to stretch your employees to work at the upper ranges of their potential, while maintaining morale, traditional people management approaches won’t work.
Brook says: “Human Resources experts and business psychologists are increasingly aligning around creating more meaningful workplaces and harnessing the full power of employee’s diverse ideas and strengths at work.
“This involves helping to create the conditions that enable people to bring the best of themselves to work each day – to understand and fully leverage their unique strengths that energise them and help them to do their best work.”
Engagement scores increase significantly (73%) when people are allowed to focus on their strengths. Furthermore, where employee groups feel they have the opportunity to play to their strengths every day, customer loyalty is, on average, 44% higher than groups unable to play to their strengths.
In order to foster a culture where employees can play to their strengths, Brook identifies a number of steps that can be taken. The first is: “Ensuring candidates’ strengths are assessed during the hiring process.”
He also suggests: “Focusing performance and coaching conversations with good and great performers around what they are doing well and how they can optimise their strengths to create more value for the organisation in future.”
And finally; “Ensuring managers are trained to be ‘strengths coaches’ and release the energy and full potential of their people, rather than undermining people’s ideas and contribution through micromanaging and overly controlling the way work is done.”
What sets the most successful managers apart?
Successful managers don’t lead from a position of command and control, they bring out the best of their people, they know what their own and what their employee’s strengths are. People thrive when their strengths are recognized, appreciated and utilized, when they are able to do their best every day and when they are being coached by their leader and get ample opportunities to develop.
Reflection and self-awareness
Strengths-based leadership requires you to be fully aware of your own unique strengths. Makes sense doesn’t it… but I’ve often experienced that leaders don’t take time for (self)reflection, they’re just way too busy for that. Busy moving from task to task and from meeting to meeting, checking their phone/email messages continuously and putting out fires. In the meantime, they may feel inadequate, frustrated, stressed out and tired.
Self-awareness is the key for emotional intelligence and truly effective leaders are distinguished by a high degree of emotional intelligence, which includes self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill (Daniel Goleman).
Develop leadership strengths by building around them
Knowledge and understanding of your strengths, including your emotional intelligence is critical for professional and organizational success. Knowing and applying your strengths can lead to sustained high performance, confidence and more engagement.
But once you have identified and named your strengths, where do you go from there? It is not so easy to know when you have the ‘right strength, in the right amount, in the right situation for the right outcome’.
Finding out what your leadership strengths are is inspiring and powerful, but after you have done that how do you take them to the next level? It is important to understand that your leadership strengths don’t operate in isolation, they cluster around and reinforce one another. Getting insights that will help you to build around strengths with complementary skills is crucial.
What are Strengths?
There are many definitions, I work with Strengthscope and this is their definition:
‘Strengths are underlying qualities that energise you, contribute to your personal growth and lead to peak performance’.
Understanding and applying your strengths will help you to improve your performance, confidence and engagement.
Improve your management and leadership skills
?? If you are a leader or looking to move into a leadership role, identify ways to use your strengths to improve your leadership effectiveness
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?? It is also important you understand the strengths and performance risks of people you manage and/ or lead. This will enable you to coach and support them to perform at their best, whilst also helping them to reduce any risk areas that could result in performance shortfalls.
What are the keys to effective leadership?
In their book ‘Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and why people follow’ Tom Rath and Barry Conchie reviewed a culmination of 30 years of research by Gallup Corporation. Gallup held over 40.000 personal interviews with leaders from around the world and 20.000 interviews with followers to ask Why the follow a leader. Based on their research the authors concluded that the 3 keys to effective leadership are:
THE MOST EFFECTIVE LEADERS ARE ALWAYS INVESTING IN STRENGTHS
Each person has got unique strengths, there is no such thing as ‘one best leadership style’, leaders/managers should leverage their unique strengths to meet leadership challenges. Effective leaders know their strengths and they optimize these, they continually expand and enhance their strengths.
‘If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything. While our society encourages us to be well-rounded, this approach inadvertently breeds mediocrity. Perhaps the greatest misconception of all is that of the well-rounded leader.’ Tom Rath and Barry Conchie
‘A leader needs to know his strengths as a carpenter knows his tools, or as a physician knows the instruments at her disposal. What great leaders have in common is that each truly knows his or her strengths – and can call on the right strength at the right time. This explains why there is no definitive list of characteristics that describes all leaders.’
Donald O. Clifton
THE MOST EFFECTIVE LEADERS SURROUND THEMSELVES WITH THE RIGHT PEOPLE AND THEN MAXIMISE THEIR TEAM
Whilst well-rounded individuals don’t make the best leaders the best teams should be well-rounded. Effective leaders ensure that each member of their team has a complementary set of strengths. Effective leaders know their strengths. They also know their weaknesses and recognize that unless they get support in these areas, they will be ineffective. Given this, effective leaders surround themselves with people who’s strengths compensate for their non-strengths.
Leaders that build their teams based on technical expertise or specialist knowledge are less effective because these teams are ineffective. The (leadership) strengths of each team member should complement the strengths of the other team members. Once that is recognized and established, they give consideration to expertise and specialist knowledge.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE LEADERS UNDERSTAND THEIR FOLLOWERS’ NEEDS
Trust Nothing happens without a sense of trust between leaders and followers.
Compassion Followers want to know that their leaders care about them.
Stability Followers want leaders that they can depend upon.
Hope Followers want to feel positive about their future prospects.
??
?? Do you have a good understanding of your personal strengths and weaknesses?
?? What are your top three strengths and are you using them on a daily basis?
?? Are you deliberately investing in your strengths?
?? Are you building a team that compensates for your weaknesses?
?? Do you select team members for their leadership strengths as opposed to their knowledge and technical expertise?
?? Are you developing your team members strengths?
?? What is the level of trust between you and your team?
?? Does your team feel that you care for them on a personal level?
?? Does your team know what to expect from you?
Research from Harter, Schmidt and Hayes shows that by focusing on Strengths there’s a 38% higher probability of greater productivity and 44% higher probability of customer loyalty when focused on strengths as opposed to weaknesses.
Also the Corporate Leadership Council found that when managers focused on Strengths during appraisals this lead to a 36% jump in performance as opposed to a 26.8% decline when focused on weaknesses.
Sources: Rath 2008, Gallup 2002, CLC 2005
Understanding and applying your strengths will help you to improve your performance, confidence and engagement.
It also enhances your understanding of:
? Your work-related strengths as a source of energy, personal growth and peak performance
? The consequences of not using your strengths in the right way, to the right degree and with the right people
? How your strengths are perceived by co-workers
? Where there are opportunities to use your strengths more often and more effectively
? How you can harness your strengths to reduce performance risks
Increasingly, executives understand that focussing on strengths is a successful route to enabling themselves and their teams to flourish. A Strengths-based Leader ensures high performance by facilitating a positive work environment where they and their team are able to play to their strengths.
Authentic Leadership, the strengths way
This e-book is for authentic leaders and for those leaders who aspire to be.
Strengthsbased leadership helps to boost employee engagement and in turn employee task performance. Focusing on employee strengths is not something that may come natural to leaders, because managers may be focused on preventing performance problems, and may therefore focus on remediating employee deficits (van Woerkom, Oerlemans, & Bakker, 2016). Organizations should therefore invest in developing strengths-based leaders by offering training and coaching and by implementing strengths-based HR practices related to recruitment, performance appraisal, and development that provide guidance to their leaders (van Woerkom & Meyers, 2015)′.
Leaders who focus on their strengths are more confident, authentic, positive and resilient. Here are some reasons why strengths-based leadership coaching can be a positive game-changer:
?? Enhanced Self-Awareness: By identifying and harnessing their unique strengths, leaders gain a deeper understanding of themselves. This self-awareness allows them to leverage their strengths more effectively while acknowledging areas for growth.
?? Self Confidence: Emphasizing strengths boosts leaders’ confidence in their abilities. When you have a clear sense of what you excel at, you’re more likely to take risks (positive stretch) and lead with impact.
?? Improved & Positive Team Dynamics: Strengths-based leadership encourages leaders to build diverse teams by recognizing and appreciating individual strengths and collective strengths. Team members can complement one another’s strengths. This synergy can lead to enhanced innovation, problem-solving, and overall better cooperation and team performance.
?? Resilience and Adaptability: Leaders who focus on their strengths are better equipped to navigate change and uncertainty. They can adapt to new challenges more quickly and help their teams do the same.
?? Employee Engagement: When leaders recognize and appreciate their team members’ strengths, it fosters a culture of appreciation, growth and thriving. This, in turn, leads to higher commitment and employee engagement.
?? High Performance: Leaders who invest in their strengths can optimize their performance in areas that matter most. This leads to improved decision-making and goal attainment.
?? Leadership is about more than just a title, more than just hard skills and expertise, embracing strengths-based leadership coaching can help leaders reach their full potential while positively impacting their teams and organizations. By focusing more on strengths instead of weaknesses, leaders can tap into their own unique leadership style and drive better results for their team and organization.
Strengths-based leadership development is not a one-time fix but a sustainable and holistic approach to leadership development. It equips leaders with lifelong skills that continue to evolve with their career.
Leaders need a lot of self-insight and that is sometimes lacking in practice. Do you know what effect your behavior and leadership style have on others? What helps you and what hinders you from leading well? What your strengths and weaknesses are? Awareness of your leadership style and the effect of your behavior on employees is of great importance.
A common problem is that there is often is a big difference between how leaders perceive their own qualities and leadership style and how their employees experience and value this. Many leaders have an incomplete picture of themselves, often exaggerating or underestimating their strengths and having little knowledge of their pitfalls and other performance risks. Therefore, 360-degree strengths-based feedback is a valuable tool, as it provides insight into how others see the leader’s strengths and which qualities and behaviors they value and find most effective.
I take pride in coaching managers, teamleaders who exhibit a commendable openness to feedback from their stakeholders, leveraging it as a tool for continuous development and improvement. I use a strengths-based approach, complemented by a StrengthscopeLeader assessment, it is the only strengths report that captures not only how effective you think you are as a leader (self-assessment) but also how effective other people think you are as a leader (360degreesfeedback). The tangible benefits of this approach are evident in both the leaders and their teams.
Self-awareness is so important but numerous leaders harbor blind spots concerning their skills, values, strengths, weaknesses, potential and the impact of their behavior. Therefore, apart from introspection, embracing feedback from others is crucial for leaders, as they often lack insight into how their qualities and leadership style are perceived by their stakeholders. It takes courage to look at your own behavior and what you need to change to improve your leadership.
Engaging in a conversation where you openly acknowledge to your team that you are actively working on improving your leadership, even though you haven’t fully figured it out yet, is powerful and a display of strength. I am proud of the managers that have embarked on this leadership journey with me.