While growing their team, leaders navigate skillsets, opinions, facts, and leadership attributes. Following this approach helps them navigate what function a person performs and his responsibilities to serve their organization. The strengths-based leadership technique focuses on figuring out each employee on a team’s strengths to perform well collectively.
How do business people and leaders ensure the people they have recruited work effectively as a team to pursue the company’s goals? They use strengths-based leadership to get their staff to work together in alignment with one another!
To know more about organizing an innovative and result-driven team, you need to follow a specific leadership style, its significance, and how to practice it precisely.
Concept of Strengths-Based Leadership Theory
Strengths-Based Leadership theory, developed by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, boosts the productivity, efficiency, and success of a business by focusing on the organizational resources responsible for developing strength, i.e., people, tools, and computer systems.
This theory is also referred to as Strengths-Based Organizational Management (SBOM).
Before working on the Strengths-Based Leadership theory, Rath wrote StrengthsFinder 2.0.
This book copes with the idea of strengths-based personal growth and leadership assessment. After some years, it is widely recognized as one of the most effective ways to help leaders learn their team’s strengths.
Also, it highlights strategies on how to develop these crucial skills.
Conchie and Rath suggested that an impressive and goal-oriented team consists of people who collectively share multiple strengths. Furthermore, these two researchers’ findings showcased that people should focus less on minimizing their weaknesses and more on building up their talents.
Both of them suggested that instead of concentrating on learning new strengths, a leader should develop other people’s strengths; accordingly, hire people who have strengths to fill in the gaps in his organization.
Additionally, a leader needs to provide a sense of trust, hope, and passion to his team.
The Importance of Strengths-Based Leadership
There are multiple reasons why a leader needs to practice strengths-based leadership.
From people familiar with their strengths and how they can efficiently contribute to the team, this leadership type serves valuable purposes that can even hide leadership mistakes.
Discover these benefits in more detail.
Vanishes Unrealistic Expectations
Practicing a strengths-based leadership approach is a wise decision for leadership. This allows your team to be great at everything.
It is almost impossible to handle business when employees and leaders face all business facets, including fatigue, workload, anxiety, and other tendency issues.
Strengthens Team Bonding
A leader who practices strengths-based leadership approach teaches his team members to rely on each other in those areas where they lack perfection.
Thus, it allows your employees to learn how to perfectly teamwork to drive momentum and make a huge difference.
Finally, this relation-building exercise fosters team bonds.
Boosts Employees’ Confidence
Bringing your employees’ strengths into the limelight develops confidence. This step will make your team members feel motivated and satisfied.
For example, it is good to hear positive feedback and feel proud that your contributions are appreciated.
Following this, psychological theory proves to be a foolproof approach.
Leads Towards Perfection
Rath suggested that spending hours trying to fix and brush away weaknesses can make people unmotivated. To add more, he said that trying to achieve perfection in everything, and it is impossible to be good at anything.
On the contrary, our society wants us to behave like an all-rounder.
Hence, when a leader focuses on developing strengths, his team can achieve a supreme level of excellence.
Determine the Missing Attributes
It is hard to figure out why a team is not performing as expected if a leader is unaware of their team’s strengths.
So, when a leader comes to know the attributes of his team members, he will stop assigning a task to a person that weighs him down.
For instance, one employee might be good at creative thinking, but finishing work weighs him down. Therefore, the company needs to precisely hire a person capable of finishing a task.
Ensuring people are in perfect alignment with their strengths paves the way for success for your business.
Implementing Strengths-Based Leadership
There are different ways you can start incorporating strengths-based leadership into how you guide your department. To start this, you need to begin reflecting on your strong suits through a strength-based leadership test.
You can also ask your staff to help you identify their abilities.
Strengths Domains
The first step you need to do is to determine your staff’s strengths. This is the place where you have to take a strengths-based leadership test.
This test will allow you to figure out under what domain your employee falls:
- Relationship building
- Influencing
- Executing
- Strategic thinking
In addition to determining your employees’ strengths, you can check which factors are missing from the results.
For example, if 60 percent of the employees you hire fall under the strategic thinking domain, you need people with expertise in the other three domains.
Relationship Building
People who have relationship-building abilities can connect with others instantly. Their main priority is to establish a strong relationship with the people around them.
They are adept at winning trust, developing a sense of belonging, and building close relationships with others.
As relationship building is one of the four crucial areas of emotional intelligence, individuals with relationship-developing skills have a high attribute of emotional intelligence.
Moreover, it also enables them to build interpersonal relationships with their co-workers.
Whether they behave normally during a challenging situation or resolve workplace conflict between team members, they take all the preventive measures to ensure the team remains strong.
Influencing
People with excellent influencing power can quickly get people to do what they want from them. You think it is a persuasive tone.
They make followers based on people’s behavior and make them feel what they want.
Usually, they follow a charismatic style. On top of this, they motivate their team members to reach their goals.
They are the best storytellers; hence, they know how to capture their audience’s hearts. Because of their emotional hook, they are quite successful at giving people feedback on their actions.
Executing
Those employees who fall under this category are experts at driving plans. Following their specific approach, they develop an intense course of action to pursue their company’s goals.
With these people in your firm, you do not need to worry about completing your task. They possess solid self-management skills.
Executors like consulting with their team members on precisely reaching their company’s goals.
Thinking Strategically
Strategic thinkers know what the destination of their firm is and how to get there. They can tackle even complex situations. They are strong decision-makers who analyze logical facts and figures to conclude.
When encountering a challenging situation, they develop innovative and problem-solving ideas.
Assess Strengths
Once you have taken your team’s strengths test, it’s time to think about your responsibilities. Set an employee to pen down the duties you need to perform.
To add more, behave like a leader.
- How are you the most valuable and trustworthy for your team?
- What is the best place to spend your time working on your strengths?
- What are your weak points that are your employees’ talents?
During the processing phase, decide how much coaching an individual needs to avail of new responsibilities. Possibly, some employees are ready to step into their strengths without your help.
On the other hand, some others might need your help to fulfill their duties.
Significant Challenges
As mentioned earlier, there are many advantages of the strengths-based leadership approach. However, this theory has some specific concerns in the case when leaders entirely depend on it.
The reality is that more effort goes into account when you are building a solid team than identifying employees’ strengths and having them work on polishing the strengths.
Undoubtedly, this strategy is fruitful in many situations, but it is not the only single way to rely on it entirely.
As a leader, you should have a firm grip on emotional intelligence, conflict-solving skills, and other leadership styles.
As a leader, you should have a firm grip on emotional intelligence, conflict solving skills, and other leadership styles.
Plus, if you force your team to do only what they are great at, this approach can result in stunted professional and organizational growth.
For example, if your employee has weak emotional intelligence skills, you do not ask him to develop them because it is not one of his strengths.
But it is a skill that is mandatory in your workshop. So not addressing it would finally increase your work problems.
If your employees only concentrate on their natural abilities and strengths, you will know whether or not they have a solid understanding of all the business areas.
When you only depend on this particular approach, you may feel you know all the necessary things for determining a person’s strengths.
Related Articles
Avoid Depending Too Much on Your Strengths
To avoid this significant flaw, your employees need to spend almost 25 percent of their time improving all the facets that require extra effort.
This will allow your employees to master a specific skill. By focusing on strengths and giving new opportunities to your employees, you can establish a growth mindset while putting your team members on the right track.
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