Whether you are a parent, coach, mentor, or manager, there are many coaching, mentoring and development opportunities where strengths are a perfect fit.
What is Strengths Coaching?
It’s a conversation where your role is to ask questions about their strengths and motivations, listen and reflect on what was said. It’s a two-way enjoyable and rewarding process that involves working with others to maximise their energy and achieve their future career and life goals.
By helping people play more to their strengths, you will increase their happiness, engagement at work and ability to reach their goals.
It’s easy to apply
The Strengths Profile coaching model is easy to use and helps you guide others towards:-
- Using their realised strengths wisely – Support others to dial up or down the things that they perform well at and use often depending on the task and context.
- Using their unrealised strengths more – Support others to find opportunities to bring these strengths out more at home and work in order to unlock their potential.
- Using their learned behaviours when needed – Whilst we perform well in our learned behaviours, we don’t always enjoy using them so support people to use them only when needed for them to be effective.
- Using their weaknesses less – As something they don’t enjoy or perform well at, support people to avoid any negative impact they may have on their role or studies and use their strengths to overcome any challenges.
Who needs a Strengths Coach?
Everyone! At the heart of strengths coaching is the desire to help people to be their Best SELF by exploring what they can do and love to do. Through simple strengths conversations you can enable everyone to make a change in how they see themselves now and what they focus on in the future.
As a friend or parent – whilst you probably think you know each other well, what is at the heart of their motivations and what would they love to be doing differently and doing more of in their life? How have their strengths supported their successes to date? Help them to create a pathway to get there.
As a colleague or team member – spot strengths in others and take time to appreciate and celebrate the different strengths of those you work with. What do you each bring and how can you form complementary partnerships to ensure success on projects?
As a manager – develop the strengths of others and give feedback on their strengths. Focus development objectives on the areas they are already great at for maximum results and ensure you have team members working on the right things with the right strengths.
You’ll develop your own strengths too
In the process of helping others to develop their strengths, you’ll get to learn more about your own passions and motivations. Learning your strengths stories will inspire others, as well as give you the confidence to be using them to deliver on your work effectively. Having a conversation about my strength of Counterpoint with a manager was a turning point for me to ensure I used it positively and productively – rather than offer unwanted opinions!
If you’re ready to start your journey to becoming a strengths coach and see what your next steps could be, find out more here with the tool that I use: Strength Profile.
Thanks Trudy Bateman for this guest article. Always great to add your ideas. Katy