Play to your strengths. It’s good advice—but we don’t always heed it.
Everyone has personal strengths and weaknesses, things that we’re good at and things that we just can’t hack. For example, maybe you’re great at engineering but useless at leading teams. If someone asks you to design something, you’ll thrive. If you have to manage others, you’ll flounder.
It makes sense to focus on your strengths. The same is true in the business world. Managers can utilize the strengths of their team members. A company can focus on its own strengths.
While this may seem obvious, it’s not always what happens. Managers may assign tasks without considering personal strengths. Companies may try to take on roles outside of their strengths. And this can lead to inefficient processes and poor results.
While it’s good to grow and learn, it’s not good to ignore strengths. In strengths-based leadership, managers identify the strengths of individual worker and encourage them to focus on these strengths. This may involve assigning tasks based on strengths. It may also involve creating teams with members who have different, complementary strengths.
Strengths-based leadership offers three key advantages.
1. Strengths-Based Leadership Can Increase Engagement and Job Satisfaction.
There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from a job well done. People like to feel that they’re excelling at their jobs. They don’t like to struggle or underperform.
By allowing workers to focus on their strengths, we are allowing them to thrive. And when employees thrive, they have better job satisfaction and engagement. This, in turn, can create a positive work environment and reduce turnover.
2. Strengths-Based Leadership Can Yield Better Results.
People may enjoy things that they’re not particularly good at, and they may be good at things that they don’t particularly enjoy. When we find the intersection – things we’re good at and enjoy – we find our true strengths.
By focusing on these strengths, we can increase productivity. After all, it’s human nature to drag our feet when we’re doing something we dislike or have no talent for. But when we do things we’re passionate about, we can get into a state of flow and produce amazing results.
3. Strengths-Based Leadership Can Allocate Your Company’s Resources Efficiently.
When people talk about strengths-based management, they often talk about the focusing on the strengths of individual workers, but the same principles can be applied on a larger scale.
Your company has limited resources. To get the most out of these resources, it makes sense to focus on your strengths. Sometimes, this means outsourcing certain services or products.
For example, a steakhouse might order cheesecakes and other desserts from a local bakery. This makes sense because the chefs at the steakhouse know how to make steak. They’re not pastry chefs. Instead of wasting time and resources on something outside of their expertise only to produce an inferior product, they turn to the best pastry chefs around.
No person is great at everything. No company is great at everything, either. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and it makes sense to play to our strengths.
At Insuresoft, we’re working hard to leverage the strengths of our people and to focus on our core strengths, while building an ecosystem of partners to complement our solutions. Download our new case study on payment processing to see this concept in action.
