From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Use your strengths

From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Use your strengths

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- Does laziness or modesty mean that sometimes you don't use your strengths to their best effect? Because once you know your strengths, then your duty as a great team member is to use them. Volunteer for anything that you can contribute towards. What are the challenges that your team is facing at the moment? And what strengths do you have that you can offer to help with these challenges? Also, looking at it the other way around. What are you good at? And when can you volunteer to do those things? If you find this question difficult, then there are a couple of things that you can do. First, you could ask your colleagues what you're best at contributing, and hope that there isn't a long silence as they scratch their chins. And also, have a look at my list of required team roles, which contains things that you might be good at, like organizing, and that could be people or ideas, or pushing things along to get the job done quickly. Maybe being a networker, meeting new people, collecting new ideas. Maybe being the creative idea generator, or the reverse of that, thinking about what might go wrong with other people's plans. And maybe setting up systems or making sure that the detail gets done. These might be things that you don't normally step forward and offer to do. Perhaps there are things that make you feel a bit anxious, even though you're good at them. Or things that you don't feel that you're good at, but maybe you are. Or things that you don't like doing, even though you're good at them and the team needs them. Or maybe things that you don't do very often, but which you could be good at, given a little practice. So what I'd like you to do now is just think about that. Have a look at the list and pick one extra thing that you can volunteer to do for the team.

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