Read time: 2 mins
Capitalizing on Your Leadership Strengths
When you understand your strengths, you can begin to cultivate your role to ensure that you get to make the most of your talents. Doing this can help make you a better leader and bring more meaning and purpose to the work you do.
In this video, Emma Seppälä, Program Co-Convener on the Women’s Leadership Program from the Yale School of Management Executive Education, explains how your personal strengths can help you, and your team, excel.
Transcript
When you really understand deeply what your best self is, and when you’re in a place where it is valued, you can actually shape your role. You can actually craft your position in such a way that you are really honing in on your strengths.
There was a data engineer who spent most of her time behind the computer at work, and yet, she did this exercise and realized that she has these fabulous people skills and this deep empathy that really helps her mentor others. And she realized that she isn’t able to perform those kind of activities in her position. And so, she crafted her job in such a way that she could engage more with other people, nurture other people on her team, and that made the job a lot more fulfilling for her. Sometimes, you need to actually change your position to capitalize on your strengths more.
Some environments will support your strengths, others will not. A Gallup study of over 200,000 employees asked them, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every single day? Now, think to yourself, what percentage of those people do you think answered “no”? 80%. Think about what would happen if 80% of the people answered “yes.” And that’s what you can do when you bring out the best self in your team and the people that work with you. What is the outcome of a conventional feedback session, performance review? A study run by Gallup showed that 86% of people who leave that kind of session do not feel inspired or motivated to change; and 30% of them – their performance actually gets worse. So, our current way of doing things is not working.
Your strengths are a gift to everyone around you. They can really help you excel as a leader, and they are probably talents, gifts, strengths that make you happy when you engage in them. So, there’s something to really take in and think about: “Are you using them currently in your life, and how can you use them more? How can they inform you about how to lead a team and how to bring out the strengths in others?”