Strengths and Teams
Strong Individuals. Stronger Teams.
Professional and Executive MBA students, along with Full-time MBA and residential Specialty Master’s students completed the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment as part of their orientation. All students and alumni can consider leveraging the CliftonStrengths tool to discuss and create personal and team growth, whether at school, in an internship, or at work. An additional resource includes Gallup’s Theme Thursday webcasts, which dive deeper into the strengths and focus on how to leverage them to enhance engagement, productivity, and well-being. Utilize these resources to grow your knowledge of strengths and teams.
Think About Your Strengths
Achiever: hardworking, busy, and productive.
Activator: turn thoughts into actions.
Adaptability: go with the flow and take things as they come.
Analytical: search for reasons and causes, considering all of the factors.
Arranger: organized but flexible to maximize productivity.
Belief: unchanging core values that give defined purpose.
Command: take control and make decisions.
Communication: can easily put thoughts into words.
Competition: measure their progress against others and want to win.
Connectedness: believe that everything is linked and has meaning.
Consistency: treat everyone the same with clear rules and expectations.
Context: think about the past and history to understand the present.
Deliberative: take serious care in making decisions or choices.
Developer: recognize and cultivate the potential in others.
Discipline: have routine and structure to hold themselves accountable.
Empathy: sense others’ feelings by putting themselves in their situations.
Focus: take a direction and follow through.
Futuristic: inspired by the future and what could be.
Harmony: seek areas of agreement and avoid conflict.
Ideation: fascinated by ideas and make connections between them.
Includer: accept others and make efforts to include them.
Individualization: use each person’s qualities to help them work together.
Input: accumulate data and information.
Intellection: introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.
Learner: desire to learn and continuously improve.
Maximizer: focus on taking strengths and make them even better.
Positivity: upbeat and excited with contagious enthusiasm.
Relator: enjoy close relationships with others.
Responsibility: take ownership of what they say and do, valuing honesty and loyalty.
Restorative: good at dealing with and resolving problems.
Self-Assurance: confident in their ability to take risks and manage their own lives.
Significance: want to make a big impact.
Strategic: create alternative ways and plans to succeed.
Woo: like to meet new people and win them over.
Collaborating in the Workplace
It is important to have good partnerships in the workplace to accomplish objectives and solve problems. History and studies show that collaboration with others increase likelihoods of success. The more partnerships, the better! However, when asked if they have ever had a great partnership at work, around a quarter of employees say no.
Great partnerships don’t just happen. If both partners don’t really need the talents of the other, there is no reason to team up. Work should be divided fairly, with a common mission at hand. The relationship should have trust and communication to have the best possible outcome. Everyone faces challenges in the workplace, but it is better to have partners to help you through them than to face them alone.
Before you can forge a successful alliance, you must understand what you bring to the combination, and equally important, what you don’t. It is better to do just a few things exceptionally well than to spread yourself thinly across many disciplines, being the master of none of them. The key to achieving success is not trying to be someone else or striving to be as good as your collaborator at whatever he does best or seeking to be universally proficient. It’s in discovering your own exceptional abilities, recognizing your weaknesses, and understanding how someone else’s abilities complement your own. The 3 most important statements, when answered positively, best predict collaborative success:
- We complement each other’s strengths.
- We need each other to get the job done.
- He or she does some things much better than I do, and I do some things much better than he or she does.
Remember: Your strengths are stronger and your weaknesses are weaker than you realize. You need help. You are also precisely the help someone else needs.
- Complementary Strengths
- Common Goals
- Fairness
- Trust
- Acceptance
- Forgiveness
- Communication
- Unselfishness
- Accountability
- Respect
- Focus on Continuous Improvement
- Collaboration
- Shared Set of Values
- Define the mission of the team and its primary purpose for existing.
- Identify the time requirements expected of team members when they join the team.
- Identify SMART goals for the team: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, and Time bound.
- Describe the major activities that the team is expected to undertake, including their objective and strategies or analyses to be performed.
- State the expected outcomes when the team’s work is complete.
- Identify resources available to the team.
- Describe the type and frequency of reporting and the communication expected of the team.
- Identify any nonnegotiable requirements and rules expected of team members.
- Identify the skills and abilities needed to accomplish the team’s tasks.
- Identify roles and responsibilities of the team sponsor or coach, team members, and roles.
- Describe the key relationships that must be maintained.
- List the key measures to be used to track the team’s success.
Leadership Commitment in a Team
Improve productivity by 15 to 20 percent in six months, and up to 30 percent in eighteen months.
Drive accountability and responsibility to all areas within the organization.
Create a highly motivated environment and better work climate.
Share in the ownership and responsibility for tasks.
Prompt a faster response to technological change.
Result in fewer, simpler job classifications.
Elicit a better response to the less formal values of a younger generation of employees.
Result in effective delegation of workload and increased flexibility in task assignments.
Improve buy-in and common commitment to goals and values.
Encourage proactive and often innovative approaches to problem solving.
Improve the self-worth of the workforce, resulting in improved interpersonal relationships.
Increase four-way communication.
Allow for greater skill development of staff; cross-training in roles and responsibilities.
Promote an earlier warning system for potential problems.
Excite greater and faster interdepartmental interaction; reduced “silo” thinking.
Result in more time for management to work on strategic issues rather than day-to-day firefighting.
Reduce absenteeism as well as the number of accidents and defects.
Improve housekeeping and efficiency.
Require long-term investment of people, time, and energy.
Appear confused, disorderly, and out of control at times.
Can cause role confusion; members have difficulty leaving “hats” at the door.
Are viewed negatively by “old school” people who like order and control.
Require one to three years to be fully implemented.
Require people to change, especially managers, who must learn to trust and let go.