Why you can't see what your team is best at

Let's start by being clear about what we mean by the word 'strengths' in this context.

What we are concerned with are not strengths as a synonym for skills, i.e. things people are good at or can learn to be good at. Instead, we are focusing on something much more fundamental to who we are: our character strengths.

The Centre for Applied Positive Psychology defines character strengths as:

"Pre-existing patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour that are authentic and energising and which lead to our best performance."

Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman classified 24 character strengths that turn up across cultures. These are things like curiosity, fairness, zest, perseverance, love of learning and kindness (Peterson and Seligman, 2004). The ones that are strongest in us are usually called our signature strengths.

There are three important points here for us as leaders.

The research on what happens when a leader works this way is pretty convincing.

That second finding is worth thinking about, because it tells us that strengths use is not a technique you can just bolt onto a poor relationship and expect to work. You need to have a good foundation to work from. There is some advice here and here that will help you if you are struggling with this.

And regular readers will recognise one of the reasons that explains why this works. In Self Determination Theory terms, enabling somebody to work to their strengths supports their sense of competence and gives them room to act autonomously, and those are two of the three needs that drive motivation.

The weird thing in all of this is that most people don't really know what their signature strengths are.

Robert Biswas-Diener and his colleagues interviewed 50 people who had done genuinely courageous things, including someone who had skied to the South Pole. Most of them did not think of themselves as courageous. They had assumed they were behaving as anybody else would, and only realised otherwise when other people started commenting on it (Biswas-Diener, Kashdan and Minhas, 2011). These people had been displaying a signature strength (courage) at an extremely high level for years, and assuming it was ordinary.

You will likely have people on your team doing the same thing. I know that I frequently coach people whose strengths awareness is very limited and who feel like they have discovered a new super-power when our conversations help them finally understand what their strengths are.

The simplest way you can remedy this is to get your team to take a strengths assessment. There are paid tests you can take, but I often use the free VIA character strengths test which is perfectly adequate for these purposes.

The VIA classification comprises 24 character strengths that fall under six broad virtue categories: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. As the VIA guidance says, "every individual possesses all 24 character strengths in different degrees, giving each person a unique character strengths profile. These strengths influence your behaviour and help guide how you relate to the world around you in a naturally empowering way." A list of the strengths is here.

Here are four things you can practice.

Whether you want to use a strengths assessment or not, you need to take some time to observe your team from a strengths-based perspective. Only about a third of people can identify their own strengths (Biswas-Diener, Kashdan and Minhas, 2011). So, if you ask your team member what they are best at, you will often get a list of skills back.

And remember, strengths are contextual, so even if you get them to take the test, you might not always be able to identify whether x or y strength is active, but you will be able to see the effect of strengths use.

So, over a fortnight, keep a note of when each person comes alive in their work; what they pick up unusually quickly, what they volunteer for when nobody has asked, and what they reach for when things get difficult. Do it on paper rather than in your head, because otherwise you will remember the last thing that happened rather than the pattern.

Unfortunately, some leaders and managers are better at telling people what went wrong than at telling them what they did well, and even if we are more positively oriented, the praise we do give can sometimes be too general to be any use. "You're great with clients", for example, gives your team member no detailed actions that they can repeat.

So be specific about the behaviours you observed. Try something like: "you noticed she looked uncertain and you gently helped her explain what she was worried about and that changed how the whole meeting ended. That was a great example of your strength in understanding people."

That case would probably be an expression of what VIA calls the Social Intelligence character strength. But the name doesn't matter. It is the sentiment and the behaviours that are important. Now the person knows what they did and they will know how it made them feel, so they can look for opportunities to do more of the same.

This is also why focus on strengths beat focus on weaknesses in performance reviews.

It is easy to do this, as long as you look out for it, and it helps build repeatable behaviours, linked to strengths, that your team member will feel great about doing.

Another way to identify and harness your team member's strengths is to use a coaching approach to help them deepen their understanding of how and when they do their best work. Avraham Kluger developed an practice he called the feedforward interview, which he and a colleague later built into a strengths-based appraisal process at a manufacturing company. Instead of focusing on development areas or what went wrong, you ask the person to tell you about a time they were at their best at work, and then you look together for the conditions that made it possible (Bouskila-Yam and Kluger, 2011).

In a one to one it can be as simple as this:

Bear in mind this is better if it is not a one-off exercise. In the studies where strengths coaching improved performance, people had several short conversations of this type over a month or so.

It is also not simply about using the strength more often. It is about helping the person to recognise when they can harness a particular strength and when not to. For example, if they need lots of time and space to be able to invoke a particular strength, they need to learn that they can't try to shoehorn the use of that strength into a situation when a fast turnaround is essential.

This is the step that is easy to skip, but it is the one that makes the difference.

Dorien Kooij and colleagues ran a field experiment in which employees were helped to reshape parts of their job around their strengths and interests. It improved the fit between the person and the job, particularly for older workers, who tend to have a clearer idea of what they are good at and when they are at their best (Kooij et al., 2017).

But (and this is critical), research shows that the benefit of strengths-based leadership depended on how much autonomy people had in their job (Ding et al., 2021). Telling somebody when they are brilliant and then giving them no space to express their brilliance is probably worse than saying nothing at all, because you have raised an expectation that you are not then meeting.

So, look at how the work is divided up on your team and think about how you can move one thing for each person towards what they are best at. Tell them why you are doing it and give them the autonomy to shape how they do it. These can be simple things like a part of a project, the chairing of a meeting, dealing with a difficult client, or helping the new starter who needs bringing on. But doing this can boost performance and engagement right across the team.

There are a couple of limitations that are worth being clear about. These are important because strengths use is such an intuitively great idea that we can get a bit carried away with it if we're not careful.

The first is that strengths can be over-used (especially if not tempered by other strengths) and stop working. Ryan Niemiec describes the goal as hitting the golden mean, which is using the right strengths, to the right degree, in the right situation (Niemiec, 2019). For example, the person whose honesty is not moderated by kindness can be blunt and hurtful in the way they deal with others.

The second is that none of this is a reason to ignore genuine poor performance. Working to somebody's strengths will not fix a genuine skills or capability gap and there are times when a person may genuinely not be up to the job. That said, identifying and leveraging strengths can help with the person who is disengaged or has a bad attitude. And if it doesn't, you can at least show that you have tried to get the best out of the person concerned.

Doing this properly can change the way that your team thinks about you. You become the person who boosted their development and their job satisfaction by noticing something in them that they had not noticed themselves. That is the kind of thing people tend to remember about a manager for a very long time.

It also buys you back some time, because somebody working to their strength needs less involvement from you and does better work. That matters, especially early in your leadership journey if you are still trying to get out of the habit of doing all the work yourself.

You do not need to do all of this this week. Start with a conversation about strengths and then maybe the fortnight of watching and writing things down. Then you will hopefully see how this can work in practice.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching - If you have a team member you know is capable but cannot seem to get the best from, or you are trying to work out how to divide the work up so that people are doing what they are good at, that is exactly the sort of thing we can work through together. There are more details here.