Culture Corner: Playing to Your Strengths
What are you good at? Time management, organization, creating, decision making, influencing others? Too often we focus more on the things we cannot do versus the things we can and when we do, we miss out. When we give our attention and effort to the things we do well, we play to our natural abilities or our strengths and that can help us grow personally and professionally.
Here’s what happens when we focus on the things we’re good at – a Gallup survey shows 60% of employees say the ability to do what they do best in a role is very important to them. In turn, when those strengths are used every day, Gallup found we are six times more likely to be engaged at work and that translates into being more engaged at home too. Bottom line, focusing on our strengths allows us to be at our best!
If you’re not sure what your strengths are, here are three steps to help…
- Ask for Feedback – reach out to those around you, personally/professionally and ask them what they think you’re good at, your strengths.
- Look for trends – listen to the feedback, if you think you’re a good communicator and others also mention it, you know that is a strength.If others note you are an influencer, but that’s not something you thought about yourself, it’s worth asking for examples of how they see you as an influencer. This is gold, a strength you didn’t realize you had.
- Reflect on an “I am” statement – based on what you already believe and the feedback you’ve received, summarize your strengths. Think through who you are and who you want to be. I am a good communicator because I take the time to explain new information and assure key individuals are involved in the discussion.
Once you are more familiar with your strengths, take the time to imagine where those strengths can take you, create a plan to help you grow, set a goal, we also encourage you to reach out to your leader, use them as your accountability partner, they may even have insight into what else you can do to challenge yourself. We all have room to grow and when we focus more on building our strengths, the sky is the limit on what we can accomplish. Figure out who you are and play to your strengths!
