The Work Revolution: Freedom and Excellence for All

Strengths of a Team

Individuals are widely varied as to whether specific tasks create or destroy their personal energy. We all have different strengths and experiences, meaning that one person’s hell can be another person’s playground. For example, as I’ve already mentioned, if you put me in the middle of a networking happy hour where I don’t know a soul, you’ll see me wither up under loads of anxiety. Put my friend, Brant, in this same situation, and he lights up, chatting up people, getting to know them, being exhilarated by their stories. I’m an introvert, whereas Brant is a classic extrovert, so it’s easy to understand that we would have different responses to the same situation.

The biggest obstacle to achieving strengths-based leadership is shifting the team away from a guilt-based work environment. We feel bad about handing off work we dislike to someone else. We also feel guilty when we enjoy our work. We are conditioned to believe that work equals suffering; so when we love what we do, we seem to think we are cheating the system. But it is critical to remember that we all love and hate different things. And as teams adopt a strengths-based approach, the guilt associated with work will start to fall away, and we will start to realize that we can all feel engaged in what we do.

As a leader, there are concrete things that you can do to bring out the strengths of the individuals on your team, including allocating work according to those strengths and shaping your team to fill ...