Why focusing on strengths enables you to build teams with tactical agility

Imagine your organisation releases a new strategic plan. It’s full of objectives that require cross-team collaboration. Unfortunately, the teams in your organisation tend to be competitive and work in silos. The last time you tried to get teams from different areas to work together produced lacklustre results.

How will you get them to work together and commit to the transformation? You could throw your hands up in frustration or intentionally design and implement an approach that will foster agility, develop your internal talent pool and put those strategic objectives within reach.

We've previously talked about how tactical agility is about more than reacting quickly; it is also about thoughtfully adapting to change, thriving through ambiguity, and embracing uncertainty while turning these into opportunities for growth.

Instead of lamenting what’s missing, you should help people to identify and share their individual strengths so you can build cross-functional teams of people with complementary strengths. This will enable you to develop a culture that knows, values and leverages each person’s strengths.

Rather than letting people wallow in feelings of powerlessness, try focusing on how you enable and build their confidence so that they feel empowered to contribute to the objective they share.

In A Better Way to Unlock Innovation and Drive Change, Linda Hill and her co-authors explain the power of letting people experience the value of other people’s strengths and listening to their diverse perspectives to achieve challenging changes.

Hill says, ‘It’s not about getting people to follow you to the future – it’s about getting them to co-create it with you’.

We all know that learning by doing is more effective than being told. Remember when you were a child, and your mother told you not to touch that hot surface? You probably ignored her warnings until the first time you burnt yourself, but then you began to heed her warnings because you understood how hot the surface was.

If you think focusing on strengths and ignoring weaknesses is the same as the old saying, ‘Spare the rod, and ruin the child,’ it’s time to think again.

Leadership development experts Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman reviewed the 360° feedback information of 16,428 leaders with an average of 10 assessments from their direct reports, peers, and boss regarding their leadership skills. The results showed that 93% of people with fatal leadership flaws (competency scored below the 10th percentile) had no strengths.

However, the more strengths a person has, the less likely they are to have a fatal flaw. Their data showed that there is only a 2% likelihood of a leader having towering strengths and fatal flaws – Steve Jobs is often identified as the classic example.

The risk associated with focusing on strengths is low.

You get the leadership payoff when team members are motivated to contribute and listen to each other’s perspectives because they understand the value of their strengths and those of their team members. This happens when individual strengths are explicit and visible to everyone in the team.

However, as a leader, avoid valuing one type of strength over another. Favouring specific strengths can make some team members feel less than others and impact team dynamics.

Linda Hill and her co-authors found that motivating teams to value each other's strengths can create positive conflict or ‘creative abrasion’, leading to more agile and higher quality decisions and outcomes. They point out that ‘to make progress on solving problems together, it is not enough to create conditions where everyone feels safe to speak; one also needs to create conditions where everyone listens to what others have to say’.

Remember, any truly transformational change takes time. You do need to persevere, but you also need to do more than hope for the best.

Be intentional and be strategic. You don’t have to start by making every cross-functional team strengths-based. However, if you want to achieve impact, build commitment to doing things differently by experimenting with and measuring the effect of a strengths-based team compared to traditionally formed cross-functional teams.

Hill and Co. found it helpful to evaluate progress by assessing and comparing:

• The decisions made by teams
• The allocated resources spent by each team and
• What the teams de-risked collectively?

Which of your strategic objectives that require a greater level of tactical agility will you start with?

#TacticalAgility #TeamDynamics #OrganizationalTransformation

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