As organizations constantly attempt to increase their speed and agility to stay competitive, a strengths-based approach is key to transforming an entire organizational culture and delivering improved business outcomes. Optimizing individual and team performance in order to enable organizational transformation is the foundation of the work Liatrio does for our clients, which is why we’re applying strengths-based training for our team.
Gallup, a global marketing/research and analytics firm that helps leaders and organizations solve their most pressing business problems, developed an online assessment called StrengthsFinder. I’ve personally used this assessment in my own career and recently introduced it to our team as a means of helping our members uncover and embrace their key strengths and aptitudes. The goal is to invest in our people’s growth, as well as recognize, optimize, and cross-support everyone’s individual strengths to benefit both our client work and our entire organization.
What Are Strengths-based Organizations?
Strengths-based organizations consciously strive to emotionally engage employees in their work. This kind of engagement is important to Liatrio because it results in higher levels of employee retention, team productivity and collaboration, and client satisfaction.
According to Gallup, organizations that participate in strengths-based development achieve the following benefits:
- Profit: 14.4-29.4% increase
- Sales: 10.3-19.3% increase
- Employee Engagement: 9.0-15.0% increase
- Low-Turnover Organizations: 5.8-16.1 pts decrease in turnover
- High-Turnover Organizations: 26.0-71.8 pts decrease in turnover
- Customer Engagement: 3.4-6.9% increase
- Safety Incidents: 22.0-59.0% decrease
The more each team member knows their strengths, the more effectively we will be able to support our clients’ technology transformations.
StrengthsFinder at Liatrio
As I mentioned, StrengthsFinder is geared toward individual productivity and team collaboration, enabling us to better serve our clients. To that end, Liatrio invests in their employees. Once a new employee joins our team, we want to find strategic ways to encourage them to recognize and reinforce their strengths. We want to boost employee engagement and satisfaction and make sure that each new team member thrives.
In rolling out StrengthsFinder at Liatrio, we worked with the members of our six-person Beta Test team to discuss our individual and team goals in advance and learn how StrengthsFinder works. After each team member took the assessment, we reviewed the results for each person.
We’re currently in the “understanding individual strengths” phase and pinpointing ways to apply the results to day-to-day situations. Our emphasis is on how each person can channel their strengths in a positive way (e.g., setting and achieving milestones) vs. a negative way (e.g., overcommitting and focusing too heavily on work).
In short, strengths are natural talents developed over time through the application of knowledge and skill. As we’ve learned, the odds are 1 in 33 million that someone shares the same top 5 strengths as you.
StrengthsFinder is helping our Beta Testers:
- Discover what they naturally do best and hone those skills.
- Strengthen self-awareness and engagement.
- Improve team dynamics and understand team members better.
- Enhance individual and team performance to benefit clients and the entire organization.
As it turns out, each person’s greatest room for overall personal improvement isn't where they’re weakest but rather where they’re strongest. At Liatrio, we’re working to help the members of our team make the most of their most dominant strengths and understand their full potential and growth opportunities.
Our takeaway: Focusing on your strengths results in exponential improvements, while focusing on your weaknesses only results in incremental improvements.
Identifying and Optimizing Strength Domains
Since taking the assessments, our Liatrio Beta Testers have been identifying our strengths domains. The four strengths domains are Influencing, Executing, Strategic Thinking, and Relationship Building. Ideally, well-rounded teams should include members from all four strengths domains.
As I indicated earlier, we’re currently analyzing our strengths to determine how each person can tap into their greatest potential and thrive, as well as which team dynamics work best for different situations. Discovering your strengths starts with understanding your five dominant themes of talent among 34 available themes. The graphic below shows different relationships (or pairings) based on these 34 themes.
For example, a person with an Ideation strength, like myself, might work well with a person with an Analytical strength when creating ideas.
Next Steps (the Future Looks Bright …)
We’re currently implementing StrengthsFinder at Liatrio, and we’re excited about what we’re doing to optimize the strengths of each of our individual team members. We’ll keep you posted as we continue to evolve the process. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about StrengthsFinder or about our progress, reach out!
Check out these additional resources to learn more about StrengthsFinder:
- StrengthsFinder 2.0 from Gallup
- StrengthsFinder Resource Guide
- Balcony / Basement Report
- Videos
- Podcasts
