Unlocking Potential: The Power of Strengths-Based Leadership | 002

Consuela Muñoz: In today's episode, we're going to be talking a little bit about the framework that I use with leaders as themselves as individuals, and that we would use for their teams. When I started creating my first ever strengths program, I was volunteering with our women's resource group. And we got this idea that we wanted a strings program. And of course, I'm like, me, me, me, me, it's going to be me, I want to work on the program. And so I volunteered to work on the program. And they said, alright, we want a couple people on this. So there was a lady brand new to our volunteer group, our subcommittee for the career development, and she's going to work with you. Awesome. So we have our first meeting. And she's never even heard of strengths. So I could have looked at like, Oh, my goodness, what are we going to do with this woman not knowing anything about strengths, but I saw that as an opportunity and opportunity to find out her strengths and really just start applying things. So we had her take the assessment, she take the assessment, we kind of went through her results, her and I, and then we started the work of developing a program that we could use to work with the women's team that we were put together. And so we created this 12 week program. And we got funding from the group to do this, we're going to use a couple of books in our process. And we're going to have our info call. And the program went amazing. So many people signed up. Right from the beginning, we had a waiting list, it was awesome.

So all these women going through the program, but and I can talk about that another time. But what I really want to talk about is the transformation that my co organizer had. So I operate from influencing I drive from influencing she drives from executing all her top five strengths were in executing something that I don't really have in my top five. So it was a really interesting contrast. And as we're working through, how do we figure out how to leverage her strengths, how do we worry about growing her strengths and developing her strengths, and, and minimizing or getting control over those weaknesses. So they're not in the way, as we are doing this work? We're talking about creating our strengths statement creating our weakness statement. And we're really talking about one of her weaknesses. And she had this weakness, where she was in a new team, she had been an admin, and she had gotten her degree and she had been bumped up to this team. And now as an exempt employee, and she had to attend as part of this group, they had a weekly meeting. And that was really a weakness for her because every time she went to this meeting, it was just absolutely draining for her. So she'd go to this meeting and be training. And so we had discussions like why is this draining for you? And then the next piece is how can we use your strengths? To stop this being a weakness? What can we do with your strengths to change how you see this meeting. And so we really started having some deep conversations. And as a result, she really figured out that the reason she felt like an admin and that it was also draining is she constantly was having to take notes. So she felt like the admin, she had to take the notes. And then the other piece is that she drives from executing. And she didn't feel like they were getting things done. They weren't moving. Every time they would get there, everybody was very strategic. And we talked about all these ideas and all these things they wanted to achieve. But they wouldn't make progress. And it drove her a little crazy because her strengths need them to make progress.

So we had conversations about how she would use her strengths to change that. And in the process of doing that, she was able to talk to her manager about not wanting to take the notes every time. And so easy fix, we're gonna rotate, everybody's going to take a turn taking notes. But then what she did is she created a shared page, a shared area, where if people were bringing ideas to the meeting, that would those would be added to this shared area. However, there was a stipulation and they could only be added to the area. If they had a legitimate due date. They could only be discussed at the meeting if they had an actual due date, and action plans to go with it. So if anybody came with a, you know, this big idea that they hadn't really piled up put a lot of thought to, it got tabled for when they did and so only things that we're actually getting being worked on. We're going to be put on that list and actually given attention and resources. So as we went through this 12 week course and she's implementing this and she's making these changes that meeting, which had been a weakness She became a strength of hers, everyone on the team was so glad that she was bringing this to them that they were able to start having real progress to start really seeing some results come in from having this focused way of putting their items through this list and only working on things that had a date. And we're actually going to have action items for. But even more than that, and the way her team and her leader appreciated her, she realized that while she thought everyone was seeing her and treating her as an admin, still, she was the one treating herself as an admin.

So by using her strengths to deal with this weakness and grower strengths, at the same time, she really started seeing herself in a different way, and really started showing up for her team in a way they loved and appreciated. And as we were doing this process with the entire group of women that were gathered for the strength program, it became really clear that this worked for me, this was working for her, and it was working for the women on the team. And in that way, I was able to really figure out what is that formula? What is that method for helping individuals and leaders to really work from their strengths to achieve things that previously they weren't achieving, to feel differently about themselves for the leaders themselves to be engaged in themselves. And by being engaged to help everybody on the team level up with their engagement and going from being maybe engaged to really engaged. So as we're doing this work, where it is, and this is just with a volunteer group, right, this is, you know, just a diverse group of women from the company that are gathered into this program. And all these women are going back to their teams and, and telling me like, Oh, my goodness, you need to do this for my team, my team needs what you're sharing with me, they need to be able to know this about themselves and our team to work in this way. There was a leader who had heard about us, and she was really charged with creating a brand new team, a team from scratch, to run training and development for all of the manufacturing plant. It's a brand new team, it hadn't existed. And they were trying something different. And then that instead of hiring, learning and development people or people that have done training in the past, they were going to hire all the individuals from the plant floor. So they were taking machine operators, individuals working on the plant, and they were going to create a team to work and develop the learning and development program for that manufacturing plant. So kind of a different idea, and a different approach that they were taking. So she was tasked with a pretty big job. And as she started doing this work, and she's assigning roles, she noticed some tension among some of the members and some members that just weren't performing. And she was struggling a little bit and how do we handle this? How do we move forward with this? How do I get this to work, because they really wanted this to work. And she had heard from her mentor about the work that I was doing.

So she reached out to me. And we had a great discussion. And as part of that, we decided we would put her entire team. So one entire team through this strength process through the method we had developed right through this original strength program. And so we're putting the whole team through the strength programs, 12 weeks, and as she got, you know, we started going through I'm going through with each individual and looking at their strengths report and what's going on with them. And then we're looking at the team, what is the what is the team map look like where everybody's strengths fall, and who should be doing what kind of things and we're going through all the parts of the training. Each individual on on the team is really getting engaged and excited about what they're best able to do. And so we uncovered a couple issues. So in one instance, we had an individual who wasn't performing. Part of the reason was that he led from strategic thinking very much with input data, needed a lot of information, and then he could do amazing things with that information. The issue came and that they decided it would be he needed all this information. So they would send him to the plant floor, asking everyone for the data that he needed. So if you think about it, he really needed like for himself for his strengths to be satisfied. He really needed like 100 pieces of data like I may be exaggerating, but he needed a lot of data. And he was just getting a trickle, he was getting a couple pieces of data. And that's it from each person. Why was that? Well, he didn't have a lot of relationship building strings. And so interacting with people wasn't natural for him. And that was a really a difficult thing for him to do.

So as we're having discussions about how best to get things done, what was decided is that we would have one of the individuals that really led from relationship building, and she would go out on the floor, and she would gather all the information. So she went to talk to everybody that she that where they needed information, brought that information back to the individual that was really good with all that data, that strategic guy. And he was able to take that information and solved the problem for them. They're having an issue with other automated vehicle stopping too often. And so they were able to drastically improve the way that it ran from the data that he analyzed and figured out how to solve the problem. But the way it wasn't working was him doing both parts of it because relationship building, not a natural place for him to be. And then there were a group of three people assigned to a project, two ladies who were executing, they drove from executing, and one individual that also led from strategic thinking. And the way that they had set up the program, the project, they were struggling a little bit, there was a lot of tension between the ladies and the gentleman, right, there was like just tension. And the project was kind of in a precarious position, right. And so as they're going through the training, they talked amongst themselves and decided to take this to their manager, they felt really empowered to be able to take this manager because she got them in this program. And she really cared about their development. So they went to this manager and said, Look, based on what we're learning in our strengths program, we feel that we should switch roles in this project. They went through and explained it really well, because we talk about how to use language in a way to explain your strengths in a way that are well received. They explained it to their manager, and she said, Okay, I'll let you switch roles. But I have the final say. So if I see that this is still struggling, I have the authority then to put you guys back where I originally had you. But she gave them that opportunity to then switch roles. And so where it had been a struggle, it started being really easy, this project started flowing really easy. What had been happening is the strategic guy was there trying to develop the actual massive Excel spreadsheet. And he kept coming up with new ideas and different things he wanted to put in there. And then the women were tasked with trying to come up with all the things that needed to be in there and let him develop the spreadsheet. And so when they switch roles, and he was able to ideate around all the things that could possibly need to have in there. And the ways that the it needed to function like you click on here and it goes there all the different, you know things about the way the spreadsheet was functioning. And then the ladies would go and do it and do it and do it. They actually finished the project ahead of schedule where it had been in macarius position. Now it's ahead of schedule. And more importantly, the tension dissolved like that. They started getting along the project was in flow. And that's how they were able to finish it had a schedule and everybody getting along. And so this really worked for the team, and that they really look to see who has what strengths, what are we trying to achieve, what is the result that were trying to get, and they were able to switch those positions, and in switching them had a much easier project. And that is the work that I really do.

The framework that we bring in is how can each individual understand their strengths in such a way that they become fully engaged with their work. And then especially with the leader, the leader, being engaged makes a huge difference. It is one of the main indicators on whether the team will be engaged. So we get each individual, get that leader engaged, get the team engaged, and start looking at who is the best fit for what we're trying to do based on the strengths and where they naturally operate from. So we start leveraging those strengths, getting everyone engaged so that we can really put out bigger and bigger goals bigger and bigger and goals that we know we can achieve because the team is operating at full speed. That's what we want to do. That's the work we do and that really is what drives our performance. So again, this is what we want to do we want Want to lead right we want to leverage those strengths and power engagement achieve aspirations and drive that performance and that's what we're going to learn about over these next couple of episodes