DO YOU KNOW HOW OTHERS SEE YOU?
On any given day there are many opportunities for others to observe you. They will take away a thought, an image, or possibly an idea about you as an individual. These takeaways may or may not be to your liking as they can be positive or negative. One example of a positive takeaway is when you display a strength that others readily notice about you.
Once you discover what your strengths are, you can leverage them in your personal and professional life. By doing this, I was able to see myself and others in a new way. I learned that my affinity for meeting new people is a strength referred to as WOO (Winning Others Over). I finally understood why members of my team often ask me to make introductions—they recognize my WOO. By realizing that WOO is a strength and is something that not everyone does well, I am able to help my team gain access to resources that help them be more effective.
A 50-year-old association was in jeopardy of folding. The same five volunteers had kept the association afloat for over 10 years, and they were worn out. A fellow colleague recommended that I help revitalize the chapter. My initial response was, “Who, me?” She convinced me that I could bring new energy to the organization by introducing new members and enlisting new volunteers. With some trepidation, I took her up on the suggestion. After a few challenging months, I was able to mobilize a new five-person board and double the membership numbers by Winning Others Over.
One strategy worked particularly well for me and my new team. As part of our weekly staff development meetings, we read Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton (Free Press, 2001). After completing the assessment, we discovered that our five-person team had a range of strengths with few overlapping themes. These findings served as the basis for a team-building exercise as we began to understand the strengths of each member on the team and could tap into them when needed. Through this experience, we all gained key insights about each other’s strengths, which led to an understanding of roles and responsibilities and a greater appreciation of the value that each person brought to our important work.
More to Think About and Try
To gain insights about yourself and the collective team, take the initiative and do the work to discover how to leverage the strong points among your team that complement your own strengths. Pick up a copy of either Now, Discover Your Strengths or StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath (Gallup Press, 2007) for your team. Reading either book as a group and taking the online assessment will expose the team to a larger pool of themes or strengths; it also may be easier for each person to accept and appreciate the themes/strengths when observed in others.
Find productive ways of receiving feedback from others to ensure that your words and actions are being perceived as intended.
Pay attention to cues like silence, puzzled looks, missed deadlines, and sloppy work, as they may be indications of how others are responding to your communications, behaviors, or actions. Always remember that the opportunity to open up or shut down others begins with you.