Building a successful and efficient team is like assembling a puzzle, where each piece represents a unique strength or weakness.
Identifying and understanding these attributes is crucial for unleashing the full potential of your team. When utilized effectively, strengths can propel your team to new heights, while unaddressed weaknesses can hinder progress and productivity.
Ultimately, strengths and weaknesses are just two sides of the same coin. Any strength pushed too far becomes a weakness. But at the same time, any weakness can be honed into a strength.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the importance of identifying your team’s strengths and weaknesses and how to harness this knowledge to foster growth and improvement.
Examples of Team Strengths
- Leadership
- Creative
- Communicative
- Problem-solving
- Collaborative
- Decision making
- Flexible
- Dependable
- Self-motivated
- Optimistic
- Detail-oriented
- Empathetic
- Organized
- Fast learning
- Computer literate
- Disciplined
- Honest
- Patient
- Determined
- Hard-working
- Time management
How to Pinpoint Your Team’s Strengths
Build Personal Relationships with Each Team Member
Every person on your team is different. And learning their strengths entirely from a distance is challenging. The more you know your team members individually, the easier it is to pick out their strengths.
Talk to them and show interest in who they are. Your team members will appreciate your investment in them. And the more comfortable they are with you, the more they’ll open up.
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Learn about their hobbies.
People like to do what they’re good at, so they naturally gravitate toward hobbies matching their strengths.
Be Observant
Paying attention to how your employees act and interact at work can give you a great idea of their strengths. Watch the role they take in a group. Do they intrinsically lead the group? Can they instinctively tell when someone is struggling?
You’ll be surprised at how much you can pick up on just by intentionally observing.
Look at Their Social Media Profiles
Some people are very active on social media. Even perusing their profile can give you insight into their likes, past experiences, and how they feel about certain things.
If someone on your team isn’t very outspoken at work, they might post more about themselves online.
Get Feedback from Others on the Team
Crew members spend most of their time on the job together. Office staff members are around each other all day. Since they spend so much time together, other people on the team see individual team members differently than you will as the business owner.
Tap into their perspectives by getting their feedback about each other. While you review their feedback, look for patterns. Did almost everyone say that Lindsey is organized? Do people agree that Tom is great at making decisions?
3 Ways to Enhance Team Strengths
Recognize Achievements
When a team member succeeds, make sure to celebrate it.
Recognition helps validate strengths, encourages team members, and makes employees feel valued. A company culture of recognition will also help inspire other team members. It can even help you hire and retain employees.
By pinpointing accomplishments, you can help your employees see their own strengths. This validation can also motivate them to grow their aptitude even more.
Create Personal Development Opportunities
Personal development opportunities can happen in or out of your business. You might help your team members take classes, attend conferences, and earn new certifications.
Give your employees a chance to develop their current skills in a work-centric environment. They might know they’re great at talking to people, but they just need their eyes opened to see how that skill can come in handy during a sale.
Help them see how the strengths they already have as a person translates to them having that skill at your roofing company.
Align Tasks with Individual Strengths
If one of your employees has a knack for something, create more opportunities for that.
For example, if Leo is great at leading teams, put him as a team lead or give him a chance to manage your subcontractors. His natural leadership will shine through, developing that strength even more.
Examples of Team Weaknesses
What to Do About Team Weaknesses
Help Your Team Not Hide Their Weaknesses
Weaknesses are not flaws to cover up. You can’t improve them that way.
Your job is to help your team members see their weaknesses as areas of opportunity. It’s normal to have flaws, and it’s normal for those to crop up occasionally. Rather than covering them up, help your team identify their weaknesses so they can improve.
Overcome a Weakness with Another Strength
Focusing on a weakness can be demoralizing. And it’s tough for someone to get better at what they’re not naturally good at. It does get easier and better over time, but there are other ways to improve.
Help your employees fight a weakness with another strength. For instance, let’s say Eloise struggles with procrastination but excels in communicating with her coworkers. Instead of trying to overcome that by just setting timers, she can beat her procrastination by reporting her progress to someone else.
Empowering Success by Identifying & Improving Team Strengths
In conclusion, identifying and improving your team’s strengths and weaknesses is essential to building a successful and cohesive workforce.
Understanding and working on both strengths and weaknesses promotes individual growth, collaboration, and collective success. You lay the foundation for a resilient and high-performing roofing company by continually nurturing and developing your team’s abilities.
Want to dig deeper into identifying your team’s strengths?
Keep an eye out for our upcoming episode of Building Business! Ben Hodson (CEO of JobNimbus) and Jared Olsen (certified RESPECT coach) weigh in with best practices and personal insights into unearthing—and developing—your team’s strengths.
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