We are being made aware of most of our strengths through feeback from others.
Think about it…think about one strengths you know about yourself? Do you bake delicious cakes? Can you explain complex stuff so others understand it? Are you great at organising get-togethers?
Whatever your strength might be, I'm pretty confident that you only really discovered them because people have been telling you 'Your cakes are always absolutely delicious!', or 'Waoh, you made me understand this for the first time...', or ' Amazing how you can just seem to be able to organise these get-togethers with such ease'.
So we can see really easily how instrumental feedback is for the discovery and development of our strengths! And, I think we all know this intuitively, but research also confirms this: when we work from our strengths, we deliver more, find it easier to grow even more and are happier with what we are doing! We are firing on all our best cylinders!
As a leader it is therefore a key skill to encourage your team with meaningful feedback so strengths can be discovered and expanded on.
There are a few little tricks to make sure your feedback lands as intended:
- Look out all the time for strengths you see displayed in your team members and feedback quickly after you observed something: I just wanted to tell you something I observed in the meeting earlier.
- Focus on highlighting a strengths: I really loved the way you led us through today's agenda.
- Describe the impact: You really made sure we went through the items with due care and kept us on track to discuss the issues in hand!
- Name it and encourage: I think this is a real strength of yours and I'd love to see you support us in meetings much more in the future.
Doing this regularly with your team members will have two effects:
1. Your team members will feel valued, seen, encouraged and empowered.
2. By intentionally looking out for the strengths in your team, you will discover so much about your team yourself!
One of the things I did when I led a team a few years ago, was to set myself the target of giving some positive, meaningful feedback to one of my team members every day. It certainly made me appreciate my team even more and strengthened us as a team overall!
If you and your team would like to work on this together, I'd be very happy to faciliate a team session for you! Just get in touch with me, and we can chat about how that could happen: info@ricardabaldock.com
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