Each of us has a unique strengths profile. Strengths are our innate abilities. They are easy and rewarding for us to exercise. They are related to, but not quite the same as, our skills and personalities. Strengths are an expression of highly developed mental pathways and neural connections that take minimal effort to use.
Discovering people’s strengths and encouraging them to use them boosts productivity and has proven benefits on levels of engagement. This is because when we are using our strengths work feels effortless, we are energised and confident. The effect is multiplied in teams as feeling like this we are more able to be generous and patient with others, so the benefits flow onward.
Help your team members discover their true strengths and then find ways as a team to utilise everyone’s strengths to achieve the team task. Think of your team as an economy of strengths, and work out how to create extra value by trading your strengths.
A number of things seem to happen once this magic ratio is reached and even more so if the ratio moves closer to 6:1. When people feel good they are more able to think well, be creative, and work with others. In addition people become more willing to contribute ideas, and to work with goodwill through the moments of uncertainty, disconnection or confusion in the conversation until something new emerges. The benefits continue beyond the immediate team meetings, as team members’ actions in their own domains are more in sync with their colleagues.
3. Build common ground amongst team members
A very productive way to access these commonalities is through the sharing of heartfelt and meaningful stories. When people are asked to share personal stories of their moments of pride at work, or moments of achievement or success, or the part of their job that means the most to them, they are expressing their values and sense of purpose in an engaging, passionate and easy to hear form. The listener will undoubtedly find that the story resonates with them, creating an emotional connection at the same time as they begin to see the person in a different light. In the best scenarios, as people share their highlight stories, a sense emerges in the room of ‘wow, these are great people I’m working with here, I’d better raise my game!’ By bringing the hidden common purpose and sense of connection into the foreground, it becomes easier to negotiate surface differences.
4. Foster innovation
To help the team make the shift you need to ask questions, or introduce activities that mean people need to think before they speak, that brings information into the common domain that hasn’t been heard before. Positively or appreciatively framed questions are particularly good for this. So too are imagination based questions, for example ‘If we woke up tomorrow and we had solved this dilemma, how would we know, what would be different?’ ‘If we weren’t spending our time locked in this conversation, what might we be talking about?’ Or ‘as if’ questions ‘If we discuss this as if the customer were in the room with us, what will we be saying?’ Sometimes just getting people to switch from their habitual seating pattern breaks old and creates new dynamics.
This, combined with an awareness of strengths and a positive working culture, creates fertile ground for innovative thoughts and ideas to be expressed, explored and developed.
5. Build a beautiful future
Hope and optimism are both great motivators and also key in team resilience. In hopeless situations we need to engender hopefulness. Appreciative Inquiry as an approach is particularly good at doing this as it first of all discovers the best of the current situation, unearths the hidden resources and strengths of the group, and then goes on to imagine future scenarios based on these very discoveries about what is possible. As people project themselves into optimistic futures clearly connected to the present, they begin to experience some hopefulness. This in turn engenders some motivation to start working towards those more aspirational scenarios of how things can be.
By using the techniques described above it's possible to get a stuck team moving again and a move a working team from good to great.
Help your team members discover their true strengths and then find ways as a team to utilise everyone’s strengths to achieve the team task. Think of your team as an economy of strengths, and work out how to create extra value by trading your strengths.
2. Create a positive working culture
Research over the last 10 years has convincingly endorsed what many of us intuitively knew; a good working atmosphere makes a huge difference to a team’s productivity. What the research found is that the key to the difference between high performing and low performing teams is the ratio of positive to negative comments in team meetings. Interestingly this doesn’t need to be balanced, it needs to be weighted in favour of positive comments, at least by a ratio of 3:1.
A number of things seem to happen once this magic ratio is reached and even more so if the ratio moves closer to 6:1. When people feel good they are more able to think well, be creative, and work with others. In addition people become more willing to contribute ideas, and to work with goodwill through the moments of uncertainty, disconnection or confusion in the conversation until something new emerges. The benefits continue beyond the immediate team meetings, as team members’ actions in their own domains are more in sync with their colleagues.
3. Build common ground amongst team members
Teams are often made up of people with different skills and backgrounds who tend to see the world, and the priorities for action within it, differently. This can lead to friction and conflict. Yet at the same time, at a deeper level, there will be areas of commonality amongst team members, often in the areas of core values and central purpose.
A very productive way to access these commonalities is through the sharing of heartfelt and meaningful stories. When people are asked to share personal stories of their moments of pride at work, or moments of achievement or success, or the part of their job that means the most to them, they are expressing their values and sense of purpose in an engaging, passionate and easy to hear form. The listener will undoubtedly find that the story resonates with them, creating an emotional connection at the same time as they begin to see the person in a different light. In the best scenarios, as people share their highlight stories, a sense emerges in the room of ‘wow, these are great people I’m working with here, I’d better raise my game!’ By bringing the hidden common purpose and sense of connection into the foreground, it becomes easier to negotiate surface differences.
4. Foster innovation
Groups can get stuck in repeating dynamic patterns. When this happens listening declines as everyone believes they know what everyone else is saying – they’ve heard it all before. To break the patterns we need to move from rehearsed speech (which means exactly what it says, speech that has been thought or said so often it just tumbles out) to generative speech (which is the delightful sensation of hearing ourselves, or others, say something new).
To help the team make the shift you need to ask questions, or introduce activities that mean people need to think before they speak, that brings information into the common domain that hasn’t been heard before. Positively or appreciatively framed questions are particularly good for this. So too are imagination based questions, for example ‘If we woke up tomorrow and we had solved this dilemma, how would we know, what would be different?’ ‘If we weren’t spending our time locked in this conversation, what might we be talking about?’ Or ‘as if’ questions ‘If we discuss this as if the customer were in the room with us, what will we be saying?’ Sometimes just getting people to switch from their habitual seating pattern breaks old and creates new dynamics.
This, combined with an awareness of strengths and a positive working culture, creates fertile ground for innovative thoughts and ideas to be expressed, explored and developed.
5. Build a beautiful future
When teams suffer a crisis of motivation or morale it is often associated with a lack of hope. A lack of hope that things can get better, a lack of hope in the power and influence of the group or the leader, a lack of hope or belief in the possibility of achieving anything.
Hope and optimism are both great motivators and also key in team resilience. In hopeless situations we need to engender hopefulness. Appreciative Inquiry as an approach is particularly good at doing this as it first of all discovers the best of the current situation, unearths the hidden resources and strengths of the group, and then goes on to imagine future scenarios based on these very discoveries about what is possible. As people project themselves into optimistic futures clearly connected to the present, they begin to experience some hopefulness. This in turn engenders some motivation to start working towards those more aspirational scenarios of how things can be.
By using the techniques described above it's possible to get a stuck team moving again and a move a working team from good to great.
