How to Uncover Your Leadership Character Strengths
Self discovery and increased leadership effectiveness
In my practice and throughout my work with clients, we delve into leadership from every angle, aiming to understand what shapes you as a leader.
We focus on values, strengths, principles, weaknesses, blind spots, and deeply held beliefs, some of which prove helpful, while others hinder progress.
We explore the roots of your identity and how this influences your actions and leadership style.
One area that we explore is character strengths. Effective leaders leverage their strengths and understand that their role is to create an environment where those they lead can thrive and perform at their best.
Exceptional leaders not only maximise their own strengths but also acknowledge and nurture the strengths of their team members.
The ViA Institute on Character Strengths is one robust tool that is freely available; and one that I often recommend.
Originating from research conducted in the late 90s, Dr. Martin Seligman and Dr. Christopher Peterson identified a common set of 24 universal character strengths.
These strengths were categorised into six broad virtue categories, observable across cultures and societies. While each of us possesses all 24 character strengths to varying degrees, our top strengths tend to remain consistent over time.
This infographic by the team at Visual Capitalist gives a simple overview.
Focusing on areas of your life and work that align with your strengths can significantly boost confidence, happiness, foster positive relationships, and reduce stress.
Seligman and Peterson's research, now housed and expanded upon by the VIA Institute, provides valuable insights and their free assessment is an incredibly useful tool to explore.
This week, I encourage you to take a few moments to reflect on your strengths and how they shape you into the leader you are today.
Reflect: The ViA character strengths tool is the only free, scientific survey of character strengths in the world. It takes 5-10 minutes and provides your rank order list of character strengths with the strengths that are most core to your identity at the top. Click the link below to take it ⤵️
Then reflect:
What surprised you about your top character strengths?
Which strengths resonate with you the most?
Why do you think they align with who you are as a leader?
What instances can you recall when utilising your strengths contributed to success?
Leverage: There’s a common misconception that to be a good leader you must have leadership as one of your top strengths; but that’s taking a simplistic view. Because what I see time and time again is that it is the leaders who know themselves well and who are able to optimise their strengths through the course of their work who are the most successful.
What can you do to intentionally incorporate your top character strengths into your daily leadership practices?
What specific situations or challenges exist this week where leveraging your strengths could lead to more effective outcomes?
If so, how can you apply them?
Lead: Great leaders not only maximise their own strengths but also recognise and cultivate the strengths of their team members.
What existing intel will help you identify the strengths of each member of your team?
In what ways can you create an environment that encourages your team to recognise and utilise their own strengths?
What can you do to adapt your leadership approach to align with the diverse strengths of your team members?
Scale: For a free team exercise that will accelerate your understanding of each other, ask your team to take the assessment ahead of a get-together. Invite each person to share their answers the questions in the first set of ‘Reflection’ questions above. You’ll be interested what you learn.
If you’ve found this week’s issue thought provoking please hit the ❤️ button at the top of this email so that more leaders can find it.
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