Looking for ways to have greater impact as a leader? Check out my article on leading from your strengths, featured on Forbes.com!
Everyone says we have to be well rounded leaders. But what if we traded well-roundedness for extraordinariness instead?
Leaders who work from their strengths — or as I call it, from their comfort zone — tend to be happier, more effective and more engaged. According to Gallup, they also positively impact their business’s bottom line and are about six times more engaged in and out of the office.
Gallup research spent decades working to understand more about the relationship between human behaviors and strengths. Their research shows a strong connection between working from one’s strengths and one’s engagement in life.
We know it feels good to work from our strengths, but what makes it so powerful? Why is working from your strengths (your comfort zone) so powerful?
In my experience, one of the best methods to develop yourself is to identify your natural (instinctive) way of thinking, feeling and behaving — in other words, your natural talents. Imagine being able to consistently operate from higher performance levels than you ever have before, and over the long run!
At the beginning of my career, one of my early mentors suggested I take on a project that I wasn’t interested in. Not only that; I didn’t enjoy that particular team’s culture. And the team was failing. However, I knew that if I did this right, it could lead me to an early promotion and to a position that I wanted. So I said yes.
I was determined to make this happen. And luckily, I was starting to dabble into the extensive research that supported the notion that working from your strengths (and the team’s strengths) was way more effective in achieving higher levels of performance. So, I decided to try to distribute the work based on what each team member was good at (and enjoyed doing). This even included my own tasks. I was about to prove my theory.
But what about weaknesses? Should we just avoid them or forget about them?
Think about any aspect that you want to improve, but choose only one area of your life that you want to develop. Got it?
Would you say that’s a strength or a weakness? If you are an average human, it will most likely be a weakness.
For me, it’s attention to detail. Yep, I might be a visionary, but when it comes to planning all the details carefully, I get bored and fall short.
A super exciting study from 2016 revealed that humans (that’s us, BTW) tend to think that improving our areas of weakness is much harder than improving our strengths. In other words, we prefer to work on our weaknesses!
However, other studies show that developing our strengths allows for faster growth than just improving our natural weaknesses. On top of that, these studies have found that leaders who use their strengths are happier, more confident and less frazzled.
Bam! I’m sold!
Notice, this doesn’t mean that you should ignore your weaknesses. We’re all works in progress, and taking stock of where we can improve is part of a life well lived. But it’s not how we’re going to lead.
Back to my little leadership experiment, there was nothing extraordinary about our new approach; we focused our efforts to work from our strengths. For example, we chose our strength of optimism and manifesting to attract more funding and resources to support the project as a team. We zeroed in on and embraced individual strengths and created small subteams. I prefer to work alone, so I did much of the research needed to support the work. It wasn’t complicated, but it increased the level of engagement and productivity.
The result? We delivered the project on time and just a tiny bit over budget. But the important thing was that the team was super engaged and happy.
Maximizing your leadership means starting from a place of competency, comfort and confidence. It means engaging fully and being powerfully effective for those you serve. And the best way to do that is to lead with our strengths.
You can access the original article and links to many more by going to Forbes.com or by clicking here: Why Leading From Your Strengths Makes You A Stronger Leader
Have any tips you’d like to share? Let me know! I’d love to learn from you.
With love,
Mari Carmen
