#9to5Chick: How to Identify Your Workplace Strengths

How to Identify Your Workplace Strengths

Understanding your strengths is a pivotal first step for being successful in your career. Operating in the area of your strength not only increases confidence and enhances your visibility in the work place but also helps you gain meaning from your day to day tasks and allows you to choose roles where your skills are better suited and contributions effective. So when we read  Jacquelyn Smith’s  article on how to identify your work place strengths, written for Forbes online, we immediately saw the benefits for our readers. Hopefully after reading this article you’ll not only understand your strengths and how that can fit into the broader goals of your organization but also be able to communicate them at an interview or to your boss.

Here is an adapted version of the article the original can be viewed here 

What are work place strengths and why are they important?

“A workplace strength is any ability that is enjoyable, applicable, and that you are better at than most of your colleagues.”-David Parnell, legal recruiter, communication coach and author

According to Jack Bergstrand, Chief Executive of Brand Velocity, an Atlanta-based consulting firm, it is critically important for people to know their own workplace strengths and how they fit into the big picture. “By knowing your workplace strengths, the strengths of others, and the big picture of how these strengths fit together, people can much more easily work in their sweet spot and not be dragged into areas where they can’t add a lot of value.”

How do I identify my work place strength?

1. Listen to your emotions when you are working-Ask yourself, what activity provides satisfaction and happiness? Do I get compliments from my work?
2. Find the things that are of interest and fulfilling to you, and then seek the strengths (abilities) that derive from them.
3. Also ask yourself do I receive positive outcomes from these interests?

Types of work Place Strengths and their Characteristics

We’ve found four primary workplace strengths,” says Jack Bergstrand, chief executive ofBrand Velocity, an Atlanta-based consulting firm. “These are essential strengths to getting work done in today’s knowledge age, where work is interdependent, somewhat invisible, and ever-changing.” These strengths include

1. Envision Strength- visionaries who get energy and solve problems by asking and answering the question, ‘where do we intend to go and why?’ It is common to find these strengths with strategists, marketers, and CEOs.”

Characteristics of the “envision” workplace strength:

• Thinking strategically: The ability to see past today’s issues and focus on a longer term destination.

• Setting a visionary destination: The ability to establish a positive future in the minds of others that doesn’t exist today.
• Thinking inventively: The ability to conceptualize a working solution that can ultimately convert into a tangible product-service offering.
• Generating imaginative ideas: The ability to see and articulate possibilities that are not purely grounded in experience.
• Thinking creatively: The ability to offer new thoughts on subject areas that others have not considered.
• Pioneering new ideas: The ability to create a new line of thought that has not yet been proven in practice.
• Brainstorming new ideas: The ability to work with others to co-create new ideas and new solutions

2. Design strength- Where the ‘envision strength’ is more subjective, the ‘design strength’ is more objective. These folks like to get to the facts, and are well-suited as planners and very good at answering the question, ‘what do we need to do when?’ We often find these strengths in newly minted MBA’s, analysts, planners, and CFOs.”

Characteristics of the “design” workplace strength:

• Analyzing situations: The ability to conceptually break down a situation into parts and understand those parts.
• Defining clear policies: The ability to establish well-understood guidelines to help groups of individuals work in a unified way.
• Defining detailed objectives: The ability to create explicit goals to direct the work of individuals and the organization overall.
• Planning budgets: The ability to establish and control the allocation of resources to achieve organizational goals.
• Establishing clear performance measures: The ability to create a standard mechanism to evaluate whether or not goals are achieved.
• Judging performance objectively: The ability to independently weigh evidence and form an opinion on personal and organizational results.
• Making decisions by the numbers: The ability to make a final choice based upon quantitative reasoning and measures.

3. Build strength- Where the ‘design’ strength is more focused on facts and figures, the ‘build’ strength is more process-oriented – energized by how to best get jobs done. These individuals are energized by systematizing and systematized work. Where the ‘envision’ person typically hates repetitive work, the ‘build’ person thrives on it.  You will typically find build people in functions such as manufacturing, logistics, and IT systems management.”

Characteristics of the “build” workplace strength:

• Implement standard processes: The ability to get work done effectively, efficiently, and consistently, using a repeatable series of actions.
• Implement step-by-step procedures: The ability to get work done using an established set of instructions or checklists.
• Implement important projects: The ability to execute a planned set of activities to achieve a significant organizational or physical change.
• Implement integrated programs: The ability to unify—and manage as a group—a series of projects to holistically achieve enterprise results.
• Implement proven methods: The ability to use well-established procedures to improve enterprise performance.
• Implement practical solutions: The ability to solve problems by applying tools and techniques that are proven to be sufficient, rather than state of the art.
• Implement roles and responsibilities: The ability to systematically execute activities through the enterprise’s organizational structure

4. Operate characteristic- With knowledge work, this term has a slightly different connotation than it did in the industrial age. With knowledge work, operators make things happen with and through other people, and get a lot of energy from human interaction. They focus on the who. Sales people and good mentors are often very strong in the ‘operate’ area.

Characteristics of the “operate” workplace strength:

• Building personal relationships: The ability to productively and progressively bond with key people as individuals and groups on an emotional level.
• Working in teams: The ability to work with others in a way where you subordinate yourself as an individual to better achieve the goals of the group.
• Coaching others: The ability to help people contribute more by facilitating their personal growth breakthroughs to achieve specific personal and organizational goals.
• Supporting others: The ability to help people achieve their goals and recover when they encounter problems.
• Relating to people: The ability to establish a kinship with others, building upon commonalities and deemphasizing or diffusing differences.
• Communicating: The ability to transfer information verbally and non-verbally to achieve sufficient interpersonal understanding and produce actions.
• Changing spontaneously: The ability to consistently achieve better results by rapidly and successfully adapting to a dynamic environment.

Tell us which of the work strengths you’ve identified.

Adapted from Forbes