In Bobbie’s April 6 “Coronavirus Curveball Tip of the Week” video, she explores ways to deploy your team’s signature strengths to provide some certainty during these unsettling times—and help them focus on the future.
Transcript of Coronavirus Curveball tip of the week: Strengths Spotting
Hi everyone, Bobbie LaPorte here again with this week’s Coronavirus Curveball tip of the week.
As a reminder – now, more than ever before, you have a special obligation as a leader to create mindsets and behaviors that provide some sense of certainty for your team and help them focus on the future.
So let’s talk about another tip for doing just that. Today I want to share with you another concept from Positive Psychology called “Strengths-Spotting” – which is about identifying and connecting your team with their Signature Strengths and talents. Just like the positive emotions, we discussed last week, connecting people with their strengths builds the capacity to handle stress and challenges in times like these.
If you need help identifying the strengths of your team members, you can use the VIA Strengths Assessment at: www.viacharacter.org. It’s scientific, free, and takes less than 5 minutes.
Here are some ideas on how you might deploy your team members’ strengths:
– if you have someone on your team who is a SME or excellent teacher on a subject, have them prepare and share a short teaching session on a topic that would help everyone
– if there is a practice or process on your team – whether it is sales, CS, engineering – that you have been wanting to revisit or redesign, ask someone who is good at process to lead a special project to help with that
– or you could have your team take the VIA assessment..and then in a staff meeting have them share their #1 Signature Strength. This will help everyone get to know and appreciate their teammates’ talents and build stronger connections during this time when many people are feeling isolated
You might also discover new talents to help accelerate progress on some of your key projects at this time when you might not be as busy as normal
I hope this is helpful; I’ll see you again next Monday, In the meantime, remember that leadership makes the greatest difference when the world around us is uncertain. Take care.