While collaboration within a team is necessary to get the job done, every person has a unique talent, and when we combine them together to accomplish a common goal, it can give companies a real competitive edge over others. But winning over weaknesses and solving problems with the concept of teamwork can be challenging. Building a super-powerful team denotes tapping into individual strengths and bringing them as a united force to face obstacles and serve a common purpose. So what is the essence of a super team? Some of the key characteristics of such team members are that they are organized, sociable, easily adapt to evolving circumstances, and ready to take on new challenges. They work efficiently and with the best intentions for the team. Most importantly, they believe in the core values of your business and fully focus on the task at hand, as a result contributing to the team’s strengths.
In conversation with AlignThoughts, Tamy Sass, a successful entrepreneur, and TEDx speaker, said that the most critical and challenging part in building a successful business is to find your dream team.
So, How Does A Super Team Look?
Support, Use Potential, Eager, and Relationship are the core elements to strategically build a powerful team for your business or company.
How To Utilize Individual Strengths Of Team Members?
The best employees bring something to the table no one else can. We aren’t maximizing the efficiency of a group if we are unaware of each other’s strengths and talent. Identifying individual skills might help understand why people communicate in certain ways and what information they require to make decisions.
1. SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis can help team members assess their strengths and weaknesses. It stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats. It is a conventional method of gaining insight into an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Individuals can, however, utilize it to evaluate their personal skills at work.
Individuals in a team will be able to discover and build on their strengths, get more familiar with their shortcomings to improve or mitigate their negative impacts and seize possibilities for development or success by doing such an analysis.
Strengths
Benefits relate to internal factors that can positively affect business goals. For example, a strength of a company can be expertise that is better than the competition and represent a significant strategic advantage.
We need to invest in our key strengths to prosper in the long run. Still, it is also essential, if not equally important, to invest in developing new, additional strengths while removing weaknesses.
Weaknesses
Weaknesses are all areas where a team needs improvement and those where we could have problems in the future. A weakness is any situation in which a competing company can overwhelm us or prevent us, in whole or in part, from doing business successfully.
Opportunities
Opportunities refer to elements beyond our influence, like geography. However, we can also create new opportunities with constant efforts that positively impact our performance.
Threats
It’s critical to identify threats because they represent potential negative impacts over which we have no control. In addition, they might be a big factor that affects a team’s or company’s success. Examples of some external threats can be economic, political, social, etc. In contrast, internal threats could be a weak business strategy, poorly skilled employees, etc.
2. Evaluate Each Team Member’s Strengths
John J. Murphy, the author of ‘Pulling Together: 10 Rules for High-Performance Teamwork’, says, “Behind every genius is a team. When people play off each other’s skills and knowledge, they can create solutions that are practical and useful.”
Employers must do more than highlight their strengths. And teams need to take the initiatives to learn each team member’s strengths to use these insights to interact with team members more effectively and harness their abilities to fulfill the organization’s goals. Leaders can boost teamwork, employee engagement, and production by doing so.
3. Apply Team Member’s Strengths To Achieve Common Goals
Assist the team in recognizing each other’s distinct personalities and strengths and how these assets can form a strong image and increase collaborative skills. In the presence of project co-workers, discuss the strengths of specific team members.
Suggestions for how the team could use the strengths of others are welcome, as is listening to what the team has to say. Finally, look beyond your projects to the rest of the company and determine if proven strengths may be used to parts of the business that have been overlooked.
4. Let The Team Members Understand Their Co-workers’ Strengths & Weakness
According to a research study from Google, team members aware of each other function better together. Let’s look at a hypothetical situation.
Team member A, an extrovert, is more outspoken about what he brings to the table might feel that team member B, who is an introvert and less outspoken, isn’t contributing enough to the team. If A learns B’s personality traits, then A will value B more highly, resulting in increased team cohesion.
Teams that appreciate one other’s strengths and weaknesses are always stronger and happier.
5. Leaders Put Skills To Use And Develop Them
Leaders must take responsibility and identify potential skills among colleagues in a team. This will allow them to maximize their skills as a team. This is why good leaders are so important in a company’s endeavor to maintain and boost employee engagement.
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6. Organize Training For The Team
Team leaders have a critical role in developing employee strengths due to the nature of their jobs. Managers who recognize team members’ strengths and place them in positions that allow them to use those strengths contribute to happier, more engaged, and committed employees.
The primary benefit is that team members acquire new skills. In addition, team members report feeling more engaged with their work and desire to do their task better as a gratitude of the company’s trust in them.
7. Cross-Training Among People With Same Strengths
AÂ Gallup study of nearly 7,500 full-time employees found that almost two-thirds of full-time workers experience burnout at work. In addition, 23% of employees feel burned out at work very often or always. Yet another 44% of the respondents say they feel burned out sometimes.
Cross-training among employees with similar strengths can help share the load and reduce team burnout levels. We can do this by matching assertive employees with teammates who have a shortcoming in a similar area to form mentoring relationships.
This cross-training allows strong employees to hone their skills while creating a healthy work environment.
8. Assist Employees In Aligning Their Strengths With The Role’s Expectations And Responsibilities
Team member strengths should ideally coincide with expectations in the best-case scenario, but things can occasionally go awry. So make sure you encourage and guide people to focus on their natural talents and then set goals that align with their abilities and responsibilities. As a result, your staff will be happier, more committed, and more productive.
Concluding thoughts on building a solid team,
In the end, business becomes worthless without the people who participate in it. To build a super powerful team means understanding the person you are working with, understanding their positive and negative sides, complementing each other. If we have a team that is aware of togetherness, things go much easier.
If we are trying to transfer positive energy to people and create an environment in which we are welcome, we must have positive effects that come back to us. Of course, every person is important, but treating a person in an unnatural way of communication can cause a feeling of insignificance, which eliminates the person from bringing new ideas to the table.
As Phil Jackson says, “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”
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Key Takeaways On Team Strengths
Divide The Roles Among Team Members Evenly
How To Utilize Individual Strengths Of Team Members?
Why Is It Important To Recognize Individual Strengths Within Teams?
You demonstrate your trust in your team members’ talents when you recognize their strengths. As a result, they’ll be more willing to speak up and share their thoughts. In addition, they’ll gain expert power, which will boost their motivation and self-esteem.