Читать книгу Power Teams Beyond Borders - Peter Ivanov - Страница 16

I like to believe that everyone has a superpower. It's what I call people's natural strengths.

Uncovering each person's superpower is essential for building an effective virtual team. I'm going to give you a simple exercise now that you can try with your team. Begin by splitting into pairs. One person will be the coach and the other will answer the questions, then they'll swap. Here the questions everyone should ask (and answer):

1 What do you find easy and fun to do in your job?

2 What is your biggest success so far?

3 What do people most often ask you for help with?

4 If I were to ask your best friend what your biggest strength is, what would they say?

5 From everything you've just told me, what do you think your biggest strength is?

Then the coach says, ‘From everything I just heard, I think your biggest strength is….’

By the end of this exchange, you should have two strengths listed for each person. One that they have identified themselves and one that their ‘coach’ has identified. Capture both of these strengths in the Strengths Matrix. I'd encourage you to use different colours for each, for example red for the individual perspective and blue for the external perspective.

The next step in this exercise is for each person to share their superpowers with the rest of the team. But before they do that, give them some time to come up with an avatar who shares their strengths. This can be a comic book character, a superhero, a celebrity, a politician – anyone who inspires you. This brings some humour and fun to the exercise.

What you find when you go through this exercise, especially after having plotted everyone's lifelines as I discussed in the last chapter, is that everyone begins to feel special because they can see the strengths and talents they're bringing to the table. But this also has an incredible effect on the team as a whole, who will now feel as though they can achieve anything they set their minds to because of the Strengths Matrix they can see before them.

The other advantage to setting up a Strengths Matrix is that you'll improve everyone's enjoyment of their job and therefore their quality of work. By allowing people to work on tasks that play to their strengths, not only will they enjoy their job more but they'll be more productive and produce better outcomes as a result.

This will also be important when it comes to setting goals and building a roadmap for your team. Once you have created a Strengths Matrix, you won't need to delegate tasks. Your team members can choose their own goals and tasks based on their strengths. This leverages their talent and creates more ‘gravity’ within your team. Remember how important that is for bringing everyone together and keeping them focused.