How ivision Empowers Teams Through Strength Discovery
People often hear the question “What are your strengths and what are your weaknesses?” Most people immediately respond with how they can improve their “weaknesses,” but why not highlight your strengths and make a habit to maximize your top talents in your role every day? Why not excel at what you do best?
Derived by Donald Clifton, CliftonStrengths is an online personality assessment tool that focuses on 34 main strengths that make up the individuals personality. There are four overarching categories of themes: Strategic Thinking, Executing, Influencing and Relationship Building. Each category has its own strengths to highlight, and every person who completes the assessment has a unique combination of results with their top five strengths and leading theme highlighted.
Strengths are deeply rooted talents that often come naturally, but the more we understand these strengths, the better we can leverage them. People who lead with executing are motivated to make things happen, and they are only satisfied when the job or project is done. Influencing is less frequent, but often is rooted in making connections and creating an environment of motivation and inspiration. The Relationship Building theme comprises of helping skills or talents and often is someone that is talented at ‘gluing’ people together in a team. Strategic Thinking is task-oriented, much like Executing, but likes to think about how the work needs to be done and thoroughly digests every piece of information for the current task and future tasks ahead.
How do we use strengths at ivision?
In 2020, ivision implemented Gallup CliftonStrengths for all employees, giving them the chance to take the CliftonStrengths assessment during their new hire onboarding process. This assessment provides a myriad of resources and tools on how to best use their strengths to succeed in their role, and their people leader leverages specific strengths and how they will play into the team.
We also use strengths in our everyday vernacular at ivision. You will often find ‘Strengths Photos’ used for employee recognition in emails and company and team meetings, and we use strengths as conversation starters in 1:1s with managers and in our mentorship program. We recently integrated strengths with our people success platform, Lattice, which we are most excited about!
The Power of CliftonStrengths
The more we talk about strengths, the more empowered our people feel to buy into their own strengths, and we’ve seen greater confidence, productivity and team cohesion as a result.
1. Performance Management
Some would consider their strengths as their superpowers, yet most people struggle to unlock these unique talents to use them every day in their role. In a strengths-based company, it is important to note that maximizing an employee’s strengths often leads to greater performance, and on the flip side, can be used as a pillar during coaching moments.
Strengths can be used as a communication strategy and tool to understand how one person’s talents operate. It is important for not only the employee to know their strengths but for the manager and team to recognize them to have the most effective outcome. “When employees are explicitly encouraged to use their talent in pursuit of a goal, individual engagement improves (from 9% to 15%) as does team performance and the company’s business metrics as well.” (Gallup)
Lattice requires our employees to use CliftonStrengths to update the “Grow” section to unlock their talent potentials and track to see how they are improving. Lattice empowers us to answer the question, “How can we use our strengths to improve and excel in our role?” As a former athlete, I will say the ball is in the employee’s court to maximize their strengths. We just make a promise to provide the tools and coaching needed to make the shot.
2. Productive Teams
Working in and with teams is key piece of one’s daily responsibilities. Nowadays, working in teams in a remote environment adds a layer of consideration that we didn’t have to navigate before. So how can we be productive in a team and in this type of environment? Here we are again… strengths.
The Gallup portal allows our employees to understand what we each bring to the table, and at ivision, we have an initiative to provide all the tools and resources to discuss our strengths in a team environment. We find that discussing your strengths, as well as what you bring to and need from a team, empowers everyone to seek collaborative opportunities and identify where we can complement one another.
3. Happy & Cohesive Teams
Understanding strengths from a team perspective allows for effective communication and alignment of team goals. Strengths are a major factor when working on projects together and within cross-functional teams.
CliftonStrengths is a powerful tool that allows individuals in teams to have shared understanding of what makes their team ‘go’ and commonalities among its members. Teams with this shared understanding may find themselves more comfortable with one another and have a deeper connection. Strengths spark different perspectives and ultimately lead to appreciation of each member’s unique qualities. CliftonStrengths is just one way to fuel a cohesive team which boosts morale, increases productivity and ultimately leads to lasting relationships with your teammates.
Over the past three years, we’ve seen how strengths have helped the ivision team foster an environment of connectivity among employees and of an empowered workforce who tackles their goals using their strengths. With strengths, ivision will continue our initiative to invest in employees’ professional and personal development. CliftonStrengths has shaped our culture to recognize all individuals’ strengths and praise each other when our strengths shine, thus creating a great place to work!
Here’s how you can get started to realize the same benefits for your team:
- Look at the Gallup CliftonStrengths website to learn more details about strengths.
- Analyze and decide what the individuals on your team do best. Need help? Consider implementing the CliftonStrengths Assessment to determine individual strengths.
- Build your team’s strengths by exercising the unique CliftonStrengths 34 Report in team bonding events.
- Continuously involve strengths in your day-to-day and empower your employees to lean on their strengths.
