This is How The Best Bosses Align Employees to Their Strengths
A how-to guide to align work to each employee’s strengths.
We know that employees who are able to use their strengths every day at work are more engaged, more satisfied, and tend to stick around at their companies for longer.
So, what do we do? We ask about them in interviews, we highlight them during performance reviews, and we even send our team members assessments to pinpoint exactly what their unique strengths are.
We know that to reap the benefits of engagement, satisfaction, and retention, we should be making sure every employee is given work that allows them to use their strengths every day.
But have you ever figured out how to do that?
Have you actually gone through the process of aligning the work your employees are responsible for completing to their strengths?
If you’re like most bosses, the answer is “no.” Because, while it sounds great in theory, it’s only philosophical until someone shows us how to put it into practice.
But, today we’re going to do just that. Below is a simple exercise that you can use to identify your team members’ strengths and align their work accordingly.
Make a List
Marcus Buckingham, best-selling author and founder of the strengths revolution, says we should start by asking our employees to “spend a week in love with their jobs.”
The next time Monday morning rolls around, ask each employee to take out a blank sheet of paper and make 2 lists that they’ll add to over the course of the week.
The first list is their ‘Love It’ list. Any time they complete work that they look forward to, enjoy doing, or feel energized after should be added to their ‘Love It’ list.
The second list is their ‘Loathe It’ list. Any work that they dread doing, push-off, or struggle to complete should be added to their ‘Loathe It’ list.
What this exercise really comes down to is a form of mindfulness. It’s about maintaining enough of a presence in each moment to cultivate an awareness of how they feel about their work before, during, and after they complete it.
Identify individual strengths
After your employees have spent a week in love with their jobs, sit down with them one-on-one to talk through their lists. Ask questions like:
- What work did you most look forward to?
- When at work did you feel like you were at your best?
- What work got you into a state of flow and made you lose track of time?
The answers to these questions are their strengths!
On the flip side, ask questions like:
- What work did you dread having to do?
- What kind of work drained you of your energy while you were doing it?
- What work did you put-off doing until you absolutely had to?
Discuss with the team
Now that you’ve debriefed with each team member and have an understanding of each employee’s strengths, bring the team together to discuss as a group.
Ask each team member to share two things with the group:
- This is the work that I love doing, these are the things that energize me, and these are the areas where the team can lean on me for help.
- This is the work I dread doing, these are the things that drain me of my energy, and these are the areas where I will need to lean on the team for help and/or support.
Let the team discuss, affirming when and how they have observed each other’s strengths in practice and sharing anything that surprised them along the way.
Connect strengths to work
Finally, your job as the leader is to step away and figure out how you can connect each team members’ strengths to the work that needs to get done.
This is the beauty of being a part of a team. For every team member who can’t stand doing X, someone else on the team looks forward to that work. And for every employee who loves doing Y, someone else dreads it.
All you have to do is look at the work that needs to be completed by the team in totality, and figure out how to get each person doing more of the work they love and less of the work they dread.
So what if the work doesn’t always cleanly line-up with their job titles?! Leaders are meant to make change happen. Think creatively and color outside the lines a bit.
What’s the worst that can happen? Your team ends-up learning something new? Or they end-up being cross-trained in more than one job? I’ll take it!
The payoff is that you will have developed a high-performing, highly engaged, and truly collaborative team that will want to stay working with one another long after your peers have turned over their entire staff.
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