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Canada's Healthy Workplace Week is overseen by
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Thriving on Strengths
- Building Capacity in Your Work Teams
Activities for Managers and Team Leaders
A key way to build the capacity of organizations, work-teams, and individuals to thrive is to focus on the strengths of your employees.
Why Focus On Strengths?
Leading research has identified that when employees have the ability to use their strengths daily in their work they are more engaged. What's more, this factor is linked directly with positive impacts for the organization's bottom line in terms of retention, productivity, and customer service. The research, writing and practice of leading business thinkers from a variety of industries also links using one's strengths at work to:
- Reduced stress,
- Increased resiliency during change,
- Intrinsic satisfaction,
- Decreased effort required to get results,
- Increased sense of control,
- More effective teamwork, and
- Improve creativity.
Shifting from Survival Mode to Building Capacity
4 Ways to Leverage Strengths of Your Teams
- Activity 1: Examine Attitudes and Beliefs
- Activity 2: Develop Awareness of Your Own Strengths
- Activity 3: Build Awareness of Team Strengths
- Activity 4: Create Systems Solutions
- A Final Word
Shifting from Survival Mode to Building Capacity
Most workplace wellness, culture change, and employee engagement initiatives begin by identifying and addressing immediate needs. While this tactic is necessary and can be effective, over the long-term this strategy can lead to systems, habits and attitudes that keep individuals and the organization as a whole stuck in a reactive crisis-oriented mindset. To shift out of this "survival" mode, it is necessary to think differently. Managers must shift the focus of their time and energy away from dealing with survival issues and towards building the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual capacity of their people - they must help them learn to thrive rather than just survive.
4 Ways to Leverage Strengths of Your Teams
For managers committed to creating healthy workplaces, the "one size fits all" systematic style of management may be the very reason why you, your team and your organization are struggling to keep up with the pace of change and the demands put upon you. Here are 4 activities to use with your team to identify and leverage the strengths of your team members.