Business Bites: Strengths Based Assessments

Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. This week we're going to be talking about strength-based assessments.

When we're looking at assessments, it's important to understand what is the thing we're measuring and why. A lot of assessment tools that we currently have, whether they're personality types or gap analysis, focus on what's missing, what is the person lacking, or what do they need to work on, or what is the development opportunity.

When we look at strength tools or strength-based assessments, what we're trying to measure is what does this person already do well? What do they have unique strengths in? What do they have unique capacity in? Now, there are a lot of different tools out there that measure strengths and competencies in different ways. But the core of what we're thinking about goes back to Dr. Martin Seligman's research on positive psychology. Using the benefits of what people already do well to be able to enable them to do more, right? Utilizing those strengths in an extra capacity, not focusing on the weaknesses, which is of course the opposite side of strengths, but using the strengths and how do we leverage them better? Not only as individuals but as a part of teams.

When we're thinking about, again, whatever tool did you decide for your strengths assessment, there are many that are out there, it's important to consider what are the competencies that I'm going to be measured on? What are those different strengths? And how does my organization talk about those strengths? Do they value certain types of strengths in our culture, in our work product, in our outcomes? And how do we talk about performance relative to the skills that folks have? Are there really clear benchmarks as far as the roles? Do we need to understand some of the work-based competencies?

Again, a couple of questions to consider because not every organization supports the idea of positive psychology inherent in the systems they have. Not that they don't support positivity, it's just that the structures they have in place don't support that type of language.

So when you're thinking about strength-based assessments, again, a number of tools to decide from, but it's important to think about how will you benefit from this? How will this additional language help your colleagues understand you better? And what is your plan to leverage or implement this new information after you've taken the assessment? Thinking about these three considerations ahead of time will help you ensure that you're not doing this alone and that others from your team can also benefit from your new insight.

This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you on what other terminology you'd like bite-sized. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.