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Discovering your strengths

Understanding what you do best is essential to succeeding professionally. But often we are unclear on our own strengths. In this Linkedin Learning course, leadership expert Dave Crenshaw walks you through a simple framework to identify your strengths. Discover your natural gifts, your passions, your skills, and your greatest abilities. Dave shares specific exercises to help you pinpoint what you should focus on doing (and what you should avoid) to develop your strengths and increase your value as an employee. The exercises can also help you clarify if your current job is a fit and what you can do to address a mismatch.

View the full course, .

Profiling tools for individuals and teams

In the dynamic landscape of personal and team development, profiling tools have emerged as invaluable assets, providing individuals and teams with unique insights into their strengths, preferences, and potential areas for growth. Managers and leaders at Sussex can utilise one of two recommended profiling tools, Strengthscope™ or C-me. Both tools are designed to assess and enhance personal and team effectiveness, but they differ in their approaches and focus.

Strengthscope is primarily centered around identifying and leveraging individual strengths within the workplace. It emphasises the positive aspects of an individual's skill set and seeks to maximise their potential by aligning tasks and responsibilities with their strengths.

C-me, also known as Color Code, is a personality profiling system that categorises individuals into four color-coded personality types. C-me places a strong emphasis on understanding and adapting to different communication styles and interpersonal dynamics within a team.

While Strengthscope hones in on strengths for optimal performance, C-me focuses on personality types and communication preferences to foster effective collaboration and team dynamics. Both tools contribute valuable insights, but they cater to distinct aspects of personal and team development.

Managers can commission individual or team reports from either provider by contacting the Organisational Development Consultant (ODC) team at odconsultants@sussex.ac.uk. 

The Strengths Guy podcast

Listen to The Strengths Guy, a series of real talk weekly podcasts covering topics to inspire, educate and well, maybe even transform. Occupational psychologist Dr Paul Brewerton takes you inside some of the stuff that can help you get the most from work and from life, every day.

Strengths based leadership is getting a lot of interest these days and rightly so. When leaders enable the strengths of their teams, there is a large spike in engagement. This can also lead to significant increases in productivity when taken into performance management conversations. This episode looks at the unique qualities of leaders who lead with their strengths and how you, too, can become a more effective leader through strengths based leadership.

The strengths-based approach offers a compliment and an antidote to the deficit approach. And strengths-based learning and development helps us focus on developing and stretching our strengths, rather than spending all of our time on hammering out our weaknesses and shortcomings.

Are strengths still relevant in our volatile, unpredictable world in 2023? That’s the question I’d like to address in today’s episode and next week in a two-parter, by putting the pros and the cons in this episode. And in my next episode, I want to cover some of the practicalities of introducing and embedding a strengths approach into organisations today.

Research tells us that people who use their strengths every day see many positive outcomes: less stress, better relationships, greater job satisfaction, higher levels of well-being and improved problem-solving. So how can you be part of that group? Today I want to share my top 5 tips for making strengths part of your daily practice and bringing them into your day to day work flow.