Strengths Based Leadership Approach in Organizations
Strengths- based leadership focuses on your team’s strengths to build better teams. It lays stress on identifying and making best use of your own and your members’ strengths and assigning tasks to those who are strong in areas in which you are weak. A strength- based leadership approach can improve your delegation skills, expand team diversity and create a more agreeable leadership style.
However, the weakness of team members should not be ignored. If left out of control, they can destroy an otherwise united team.
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Most managers battle to handle their tasks, and those of their team members, in a way that derives the maximum benefit of everyone’s skills and abilities. Sometimes you have to collect data for an essential report, but data has never been your talent, but maybe someone else in your team has literally the skills you need,– and they’d feel excited at the chance to put them to good use.
Strengths-based leadership is the ability of determining and making the best use of your team members’ and your own strengths. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you, or your team, should ignore learning new skills. Infact, you should be capable of assigning tasks that you’re not so good at to others who are more skilled or experienced. This approach is that which works by focusing on your strengths, and delegating task.
Leaders can also use this approach to identify the strengths of their team members and encourage them to use those strengths in a way that benefits not only them, but the entire organization. The most successful teams possess a wide range of abilities.
When you are aware of each of your team members’ key strengths, you can apply them in a way that benefits the team as a whole. In this article, we are going to discuss how you can use this approach to develop yourself and your team members and also how it can make you a more effective leader.
Importance of Strengths-Based Leadership
A strengths-based leadership can profit your leadership and your team’s performance in many ways. Accepting that you need help, stimulates not only effective work experience, but also a qualified and noninterference leadership style. Asking for help is a symbol of strength, not weakness, and it helps you to ponder on what you do best. Sharing responsibility can also encourage creativity, modernization, and a sense of knowledge and purpose within your team. When you become aware of your team members’ strengths, you show them that you trust their abilities.
As a result, they are likely to feel more confident to speak up and express their own views. They build accurate power, which can further increase their self-worth and interest
Strengths-based leadership can promote team engagement and job satisfaction. Very few employees become disengaged if their managers actively focus on their strengths, while most of them back out if their key skills are ignored. What’s more, a strengths-based approach encourages you to hire employees based on their individual abilities and natural tendencies, not just because their skills and experience are similar to yours. This can lead to greater team unity, as team members complement one another rather than challenge one another for the same task. It can also produce a more diverse team, with a wider range of strengths, skill sets, attitudes, and cultural experience.
Organizations that follow strengths-based development improve their business results in several appreciable ways. When compared with other organizations following other methods of employee development, strengths-based companies undergo rise in sales, profits, and customer and employee engagement.
The Risks of Strengths-Based Leadership
Despite the benefits mentioned above, the strengths-based leadership approach does have some potential defects. Inspiring people to concentrate only on their strengths can restrict their opportunities to grow. Sometimes, encouraging your team members to deal with unfamiliar things can help to disclose skills they never knew they had. Be watchful that laying stress on individual talents and strengths doesn’t cause you to waive important knowledge or skills gaps.
You can also risk rescheduling your team members. As a result, they may become frustrated or hostile that others are developing new areas of expertise, while they aren’t. On the other hand, they may become too comfortable, and therefore less creative and innovative. Sometimes, strong team unity can lead to forming groups, where team members with opposing views don’t speak up because they don’t want to go against the general agreement.
This problem can extend when you only bring in people who think like you and have similar opinions, rather than people who bring genuine beliefs. In some cases, laying stress on individual strengths may lower team unity and effectiveness. If everyone leads in their respective areas, you might battle to define the team’s overall objectives. If you adopt the strengths-based leadership approach in your team, it’s important to cover the whole range of soft skills, as well as the specialized and effective abilities that are needed to get the job done.
Applying Strengths-Based Leadership
The first step to using strengths-based leadership effectively is to take a step back and judge your own strengths. What are you good at and what are your weaknesses? Use our personal analysis to measure your strengths and weaknesses. Discover your unique strengths. Online assessment is another useful way to analyze and make the most of your individual strengths.
You also need to be aware of your employees’ strengths. Once you have a clear idea of where the strengths lie, you can adjust their work to suit their unique skill sets. Pay attention to what your team members talk about during performance reviews, specially if they are eager to discuss a previously latent skill.
Stay open to feedback on your own performance. When hiring new talent, use the Competency Based Interviewing to make sure that you get the perfect blend of skills and knowledge. Ensure that whoever you hire will cover any skill gaps in your team.
Strengths-based leadership means increasing the efficiency, output and success of an organization by focusing on and regularly developing the strengths of organizational resources. At the heart of the strengths-based leadership is the basic belief that people have much more potential for building their strengths rather than amending their weaknesses. Strengths-based organizations do not ignore weaknesses, but rather, focuses on building talents and reducing the negative effects of weaknesses.
Conclusion
Strengths-based leaders are always focusing on their strengths and the strengths of their team members. Strengths-based leadership is supported by years of research. Researches have found that when strengths-based leadership causes individual team member competency to increase, but collective team performance to decrease, then it is not the best method. It is also in human nature to repair things. We are always looking for problems so that we can solve them and for gaps to fill them.
Not only we use this procedure with the projects we work on, but we also use this in judging our employees since it feels natural and correct. Here is where we go wrong. This approach is the cause of not being able to build powerful and varied teams and is the reason we are not using human potential as much as possible.
Thus, we are likely to have more average managers than we have true leaders. And at the end of the day, all this has an impact on our culture and ultimately our bottom line.
Truly speaking, if we stop trying to amend our employees and rather focus on their strengths and their passions, we can create a zealous army of brand leaders who, when authorized, could take our brand and our products to the next level.
