Hey, this is Chris with Hacking your Leadership. On this week's discussion on
employee engagement, we're continuing with our culture acronym. We started a few weeks
ago with the C in culture, Consider Yourself, moved on through the U
Understand People and then the l lend air support. Now, last week we
talked about tracking progress, and on this week we're going to go over the
second you, which is utilized strengths. This is a kind of a timeline
of events that you want to go through and so if you do it correctly,
it's in a really effective way to change the culture of a team that
you're inheriting, or to lift employee engagement if you want to kind of level
set and go back to some of the basics that you need to do as
a leader. When I think about utilizing strengths, the first thing I think
about is just making sure people are cast in the right role. And that's
something that can happen. You can figure that out right away or it could
take years to figure it out and it can change over time. Yeah,
I think a great you know, call out around people's ability to change the
strengths. I also think for me, when I first hear it is think
about like, don't just consider or strengths like their ability to produce a specific
outcome. Many times it's easy to look at somebody and say, oh,
hey, look at they're able to do this really well. They had this
outcome really well, therefore they're good at this. But what you might be
looking for somebody who can impact and influence their peers and other people. And
you know, the strength around the ability to train people, mentor people inspire
people could be a very different strength than the person who maybe has the strength
of individually producing a very specific outcome. So that's just something as a leader
that you really want to be conscious of is when you when you use the
term strength, how are you defining it? What do you mean by that?
What are the filters that you're using, And is it really a strength
if if it's not matching what the behavior is that you need them to do,
and it's just being defined by you know, again, maybe a perception,
a perspective, or a very specific outcome. Yeah, I think that's
great. I also think it's important to not just utilize strengths, but make
sure the person actually enjoys what it is that they're doing at least the most
part, right Like, not every single thing that we do in our thirty
to fifty hours a week that we work is something that we're gonna absolutely love
doing. But a person who is doing if most of the work they're doing
for that thirty to fifty hours a week is work they don't like doing,
they're gonna burn out. And even if they're producing the outcome that you're looking
for and it appears they're very strong in whatever that is, I know plenty
there are plenty of things I'm really good at that I don't like doing,
and so that doesn't mean I won't do them, but it means I don't
want to do them for a year or two years or three years straight.
It's you know, you can, you can kind of jump in and get
it done, but if it's not kind of bringing a passion to what they
want to get done, you want to work with them to make sure that
you're not burning them out for the sake of whatever you think is important,
which is the outcome at that given time. The second thing I think about
when I think about utilizing strengths is the people who tend to be really good
at something and they really like doing it, but they're really bad at something
that is like a core prerequisite almost of being able to have the job to
begin with. I think about people who just you don't want to talk to,
like they just they're just not good with people. But whatever part of
the job is they do well, they do really well. And maybe it's
really difficult to find somebody who has those strengths. I know plenty of leaders
who have tried to utilize the strengths of their employees and they and what they
do is they they allow their employees to get away with things that they're not
very good at that really shouldn't be allowed to, you know, be gotten
away with because they happen to be really good at a strength that they're really
that they love doing and they're good at and it's really great for the business.
And so you know this, this can't be a blanket of immunity to
you as a leader to think, Okay, well, this person is really
doing what they love doing and they're really good at it, so I'm just
going to overlook these things that they're terrible at. There's still a basic modicum
of you know, kind of a cost of admission. If you want somebody
on your team, and those include things like being kind to others and empathy
and you know, being able to work well with the with the team members
and with your clients. Yeah, I think it's a great call out.
It's kind of like utilize strengths with an asterisk that says, but also be
conscious of their opportunities. You know, like it's not you can't just be
can't just be all in on you know what people's strengths are, because again,
sometimes the reality is that in many workforces, in many industries, you
know, having a strength that's something maybe only a part like a part of
the job or you know, a portion of the responsibilities, and you can't
just allow that person to only do that thing all the time. You know,
you really have to have the context of the strength within the framework of
what it is that we're doing as an organization, as a team, and
then allowing them to utilize those strengths to help guide the team and move the
business forward. But that it does not mean utilize strengths like that that if
they're really good at that one thing, that's all you have them do all
the time. And then either what you were mentioning, like ignoring some of
the things that really need to be addressed, and or not having equity in
how you are assigning responsibility because well, that person's really good at that thing,
so I only make them do that thing. And I think in retail
you see that a lot in a lot of different you know, companies and
organizations. And I think one that pops in my mind right away is like
merchandising. Like somebody's like, oh, they're just so good at like merchandising,
so like basically we just let them do that all day. It's like,
well, yeah, but that's not the actual job here, Like,
like a merchandizing is a part of the job, and everybody's responsible for it,
but like they should make sure that they're doing other things as well,
unless that's of course their job. Like, if that's their job, they
let them do it. It's a strength, they're great at it, fantastic,
But in a lot of cases there's a lot of spill over and overlap
and responsibility, and as a leader you have to be conscious to make sure
that you're not doing those types of things right. Right, So if you're
thinking about retail, you know, I look at all retail jobs as essentially
customer service jobs, they're all customer service jobs. Whether you are an entry
level sales associate or you are a store general manager of a location, all
of those roles, at some point or another are going to be a retail
customer service role. And so anybody who is in a merchandising role, or
is in an operations role, or any role that is, when everything's running
smoothly and everybody is able to do exactly what they're supposed to be doing and
the number of clients or customers matches the number of people that you have to
do their job correctly, then great, that's all fine, but at some
point in time, it's going to be there's going to be more of those
customers than you expect it at that moment in time, and every single person
needs to be able to do that job of doing retail customer service because that's
the core of what the entire business exists for, is that retail customer service.
So if you have people who are in those support roles who are not
good at retail customer service, they need to They don't necessarily need to be
a plus at it, but they need to be able to represent the brand
well and they need to be able to represent the experience that you're looking to
get out of it, that you would get out of the people who do
this every single day and that's the core of their job. I want to
go over some of the things that you can do as a leader to make
sure you are utilizing strengths with your people, if you want to kind of
make sure that you're doing this, doing right by this and doing right by
your people. But first I want to give it up to word for one
of our sponsors. All Right, if you're a leader of people and you're
trying to do a better job at utilizing strengths, this starts with taking inventory
and having your people take an inventory of what those strengths are, but also
in the context of what they like doing. And so you need to go
through and make a list of the people that you have and write down what
you believe they are good at, and write down what you believe that they
enjoy doing. And there's going to be some overlap, but there might be
some things that don't overlap because of what they've said, what they've said to
you, and they need to ask all of these people what they think about
that they need to make a similar list without seeing yours, and you sit
down with them and compare and try to figure out a way to make sure
that the majority of the time that they spend working is in doing things that
they are both good at and enjoy doing. And if that's not possible because
of the role that they're in, then it just means that you need to
work with them to say, hey, you know, it appears that the
role that you're in you'd rather be in a different role. You know,
I can't necessarily get you there right now, but this is what we need
to do. In order to get you there. There needs to be an
open spot. There needs to be these are the skills you need to get
better at. I can work with you whatever it is that needs to happen
to get that person into the role they want to be in. You should
try to do as a leader as long as from their end they're holding up
there under the bargain, which is continuing to do well the things they're expected
to do of the current job until you can make that happen for them.
You do this with each of your people, and you'll find that over a
very short period of time, you can get more people cast in the right
roles. You can get people doing the mostly what they are both good at
doing and what they enjoy doing. Yeah, and this is one of those
situations kind of talking or following up on what you just talked about, which
is like you want to over communicate this with the team. You want to
talk about this as an actual strategy that you're doing. You want to tell
people this is what you're looking to accomplish in the feeling of like leveraging each
other's strengths and what are those strengths, and then even maybe doing something where
they get an opportunity to talk about each other, like how do they see
each other's strengths, what are the things that they see in one another,
to again bring the team along, because when you start to move a team
in this direction, it's important that everybody on the team is really clear on
what the strengths are of each person on the team, because then you're if
you ask them to do a little bit of different work, or if you
assign certain responsibilities to each of them, or if you have somebody spend more
time doing this, somebody spend more time doing that, there's not this feeling
about like what's going on? How come they only get to do that,
you know, like when you over communicate that with your team and you're in
the space of leveraging strengths, it is really important that everybody knows that that
people have an opportunity to ask questions, that people have an opportunity to share
what they believe their strengths are, and then also that you get a chance
to tell them what you think their strengths are. So it's with all the
right intents. If you start to do this with the team, but people
are not aware that you're doing it, it can sometimes come across as favorite
or inequity in regards to how you have work done or delegate it out.
So it really is important that you share, you know, what this is
that you're doing, and inform others and bring them along in this journey and
the strategy. Yeah. Absolutely, it's impossible to talk to every person simultaneously,
and they will talk to each other before you have a chance to talk
to all of them, and there will be some wondering going on. So
absolutely communicate this early. Talk to your people about it as you start the
process, even before you start the process, and make sure that they're on
board with it. Also, if you have any peers that are also kind
of associated with you, know, that have to kind of lead this team
when in your absence or if this is not something you do solo, then
talk to your peers about it to make sure that they're on the same page
with you as far as the goals that you have for the team and what
you're working through to get through it. Thank you all for joining us for
this discussion and employee engagement. We'll see you next week and we'll talk about
the R in the culture acronym, which is recognizing behaviors. Have a great day,