Teamwork. Some people love that word. Others despise it. Regardless, teams are a part of life.
As an employee, your individual success will in part depend on your ability to exist as part of a team. As a manager, the success of your department, work group or organization is a function of how well you use teams as a tool. However, most people form teams – or add to them one person at a time – without considering one key element: talent.
Talent is what drives people’s behaviors. It’s their natural strengths. This is different than skills and knowledge, which can be learned. Talents can be strengthened by an organization’s leaders to optimize employee performance.
Why is this important? Tom Rath, author of StrengthsFinder 2.0, provides valuable insight: “Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers…we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.”
If you have the freedom to choose from among a variety of employees to create a team or add to your workforce, take the time to think about the specific talents of individuals as they relate to the tasks they will need to perform. If you do not have the freedom to hand-pick members, you should still take stock of the various talents to help you decide how to develop the individuals and the team.
The Communiqué PR team is growing. As people have joined the organization, we’ve adjusted roles and responsibilities. But we decided to take team building a step further and analyze our strengths. Using StrengthsFinder 2.0, team members took individual strength assessments. The results were very interesting.
While team members have many common skills necessary for public relations work, such as written and oral communications, developing relationships and strategy formulation, the team had a wide array of strengths. Among the six of us, there were 20 different strengths. Some were shared, but every team member had at least one unique strength.
How do these unique talents benefit a team?
Imagine you have someone on your team with an “ideation” talent. A person with this strength may do exceedingly well at providing new perspective on familiar activities. She is known for being creative, original or conceptual, and for her passion for gathering knowledge that may fuel new ideas.
Now imagine another teammate has an “analytical” talent. A person with this strength questions and challenges others in order to strengthen ideas. She connects seemingly disparate patterns and provides insightful analysis that leads to application and implementation.
Individually, these two team members may garner great results. Together, they can forge a powerful partnership.
At Communiqué PR, we’re excited to have this new-found information about our team that will allow us to combine strengths to better serve our clients.
What are some of the ways you’ve assessed talent within your organization, and how have you benefitted?