295: From Individual Strengths to Team Capability

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:01]:

How do you know what people are good at and how do you leverage their strengths to be more effective at work? That’s the question I’m answering on today’s episode of the Happier at Work podcast. You’re very welcome here. I’m your host Aoife O’Brien, and in the first few episodes in this mini-series that lead up to the launch of my book Thriving Talent, I shared initially about workplace cultures and how to create positive workplace cultures. I talked about toxic workplace cultures as as well and how to avoid them and how to fix them. And I also talked about the drivers that we have and sometimes the drivers that can become derailers, the things that get in the way of us doing our best work. Today I’m turning my attention to the capabilities section of the book. When I first devised the framework, I very much focused on our strengths. When I thought about the chapter of the book, I very much focused initially on strengths, and I thought this entire section will be about strengths.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:03]:

The entire section is not about strengths. So I do talk about strengths, but then I talk about not just individual strengths and how to understand what they are, how to leverage them, but also collectively as a team, how do we leverage the strengths as a team, especially when there is conflict, and also how do we take things away that are getting in the way of us being able to use our strengths. So things like busy work, too many meetings, too many emails, things like that. So those things that get in the way, that’s the topic for another podcast episode. One of the biggest questions that I get asked is, how do you know what your strengths are? So I’ll spend a bit of time talking about how do we actually know what our strengths are. I think it’s something that we don’t talk enough about at work. It’s certainly not something that we ever really openly talked about when I worked in the corporate environment. We might know that person is really good at spreadsheets or that other person is really good at public speaking, but to understand the underlying strength and therefore the additional skills that that person may be able to build based on the underlying strength, definitely not something that we spoke about.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:17]:

So how do we know what each other’s strengths are? There’s a few different ways that you can do that. There are some online tools available, both free and paid, that you can reference to understand what your strengths are. So through a series of questions, you’ll be able to determine what your strengths are that you currently use, maybe some unrealized strengths as well, and some development areas that you didn’t know or weaknesses that you weren’t necessarily aware of. So there are free and paid tools that you can use to determine that. You can also look at feedback that you’ve had in the past. So whether that came from peers or your managers or clients. Have a look, what do people consistently say about you, about your behavior, about what you’re really good at? You can have a think about what are people coming to me to ask me questions about? What do they see in me that maybe I don’t know myself? Because oftentimes we’re blind to our own strengths. Another thing is to try new things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:19]:

So as you try different things, do you find something that, that makes you feel strong, that makes you feel energized, that’s very likely a strength. Maybe listening to people when they point things out, like, how did you do that? Or how did you do that so quickly? Or how did you do that so easily? Because oftentimes we are blind to our own strengths. We don’t realize that what we’re good at, what makes us feel strong, are the kinds of things that come quickly and easily. And we assume that everyone is the same as that. Now, when I’m talking about these strengths, I’m also talking about, uh, this is ways that you can use to identify strengths within your team as well. And I know for me in particular, it’s kind of hard to understand what, what people are strong at. So it really takes a concerted effort for me to notice what other people’s strengths are. But I think this is where feedback comes in really, really useful.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:16]:

Feedback from other team members, feedback through 360 forms, from clients, from other managers, and like that.— things so you can use that to build a picture of something, you know, of strengths and really getting it out into the open and talking about what we’re good at. Another thing worth bearing in mind, it’s not just about individual strengths and what I’m really good at versus what someone else is really good at. It’s thinking about the bigger picture in a team. What are the complementary strengths that we have and how do we bring those diverse strengths together to achieve what it is that we want to achieve achieve at work. The kind of most common example of this is someone who’s a very big picture thinker versus someone who is very detail-oriented. So the big picture thinker is going to be focused on creating a vision. They will be able to paint a really clear picture of what that future state will look like and be really clear on what that is. They may be less clear on how to get there.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:22]:

They’re clear on what it will be, but the steps to get there may be less clear for that person because they’re not caught up in the detail. The detail-oriented person, on the other hand, will be the kind of person who can outline what steps are needed in order to get to that future state. So they’ll be able to go into the detail of how to actually get there. Now, the caveat that I’ll put with this is that quite oftentimes people who have complementary strengths antagonize each other. So they rub each other up the wrong way. Going back to the example of the big picture thinker versus the detail-oriented person, the detail-oriented person probably gets really frustrated because they’re, they’re not thinking in the clouds in the same way that the big picture thinkers are. So the big picture thinkers are focused on the future and all these wonderful ideas. The detail-oriented person is getting frustrated with the how to get there and trying to work out the exact steps.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:23]:

Now the visionary, the big picture thinker, is getting frustrated because the detail-oriented person can’t really clearly see where the vision is going or how to get there. And so they rub each other up the wrong way. They kind of antagonize each other a little bit. I do talk about this a little bit more detail in the Thriving Talent book about how to address this and some of the different kinds of complementary strengths that may actually end up antagonizing each other and how to overcome that by calling it out, by actually having a conversation and understanding how we each bring our own unique strengths to those kinds of situations. So I think it’s really important to acknowledge that as well and how we actually work as part of a team. One of the other areas I look at in this section is the bigger picture of the systemic nature of work and how, how to get things done at a broader scale using AI and try not to be overwhelmed by AI, but also learning in the course of our work, because what I’m hearing more and more is people don’t have time to take time out of their day to go on specific learning courses, but it makes more sense. And what I’m seeing more and more of is learning in short bursts. So whether that is 5-minute learning, learning on the job, or using AI to be able to learn and reflect and do it in real time as you’re doing your job, rather than taking specific time out for learning, which is what we would have done previously.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:00]:

So lots and lots to talk about in that chapter, and it’s really focusing on capabilities. As I mentioned, it kind of went from just talking about strengths to understanding how do we unleash capabilities so those strengths within a team are actually multiplied. And in a future episode, I’m going to be talking about how to take out those things that typically get in the way when we’re talking about these kinds of things. So things like busy work, too many emails, too many meetings. How do we address those kinds of issues so that we’re freed up to do our best work so that we are able to work to our strengths and we’re spending most of our time working to our strengths as well, rather than working in our zones of competence or zones of incompetence, that we’re really focusing on that zone of genius. Separate note to that, I am working on something to really help people to understand the different levels that this operates in, because I think a lot of what exists out there at the moment in relation to strengths is very two-dimensional. And I’m trying to think of things in a broader context. So understanding problems that we want to solve, the kinds of things that we want to create in the world, the impact that we want to have, the people that we want to work with.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:17]:

So thinking about multiple different dimensions to really understand as individuals, where do we fit in, in the grand scheme of things, selfishly, I’m doing this for myself to really understand and be able to articulate the strengths and the unique capabilities that I bring to the engagements that I get involved in. But also I see an opportunity to share this with organizations, to share this with individuals, to give them that better understanding of who they have exactly within their teams and where they’re best placed, where they’re actually going to fit. That’s not something I talk about in the book, potentially an opportunity for a future book, but leave that with me for the time being. If there’s something you’re going to do differently after listening to today’s episode, whether it’s talking more openly about the strengths within the team, whether it’s pairing up people with the acknowledgement that they may antagonize each other, but the sum of the two people working together is going to be greater than the sum of the whole of the people working together is greater than the sum of the parts. I’ve messed up my, my sayings there, but I think you understand what I’m trying to say. It’s about leveraging what we have, but acknowledging the fact that they may antagonize each other and there are steps that you can take to address that. So it’s really about creating an environment where people can thrive, where they can do their best work by understanding what that best work actually is for them. So do let me know what you’re going to do differently.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:43]:

Get involved in the conversation on LinkedIn or feel free to email me on podcast@happieratwork.ie.