Our team at Positive Difference is committed to assisting you to improve the wellbeing and performance of your people. To this end, we are proud to be an official supplier and accredited practitioner of one of the world's leading strengths assessment tools. Developed by Alex Linley and his team at the Centre of Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP), Strengths Profile is changing the way corporations, schools and other organisations help their staff to be at their best.
A strength is a natural talent which has been honed by years of effort and experience into something that we're good at, and most importantly, that energises us.
When we are using a strength, we feel:
Metaphorically, like diamonds, when our natural talents are “cut and polished”, we shine!
In their continuous quest to grow individual and organisational capacity, smart leaders and savvy coaches are applying a strengths-based approach to help their people and their business flourish. This approach is supported by a significant body of research evidence.
In The Strengths Book, published by CAPP in 2010, Alex Linley, Janet Willars, and Robert Biswas-Diener report that people who use their strengths more are:
From the findings of their 2002 survey of 19,187 employees from 34 organisations across seven industries and 29 countries, the Corporate Leadership Council reported that when managers emphasised performance strengths, performance was 36.4% higher, and when they emphasised personality strengths, performance was 21.3% higher; When managers emphasised performance weaknesses, performance was 26.8% lower, and when they emphasised personality weaknesses, performance was 5.5% lower (Linley, A., et al., 2010).
Formerly known as Realise2 or R2, Strengths Profile is a leading tool for several reasons.
By means of a graphically elegant online survey, Strengths Profile identifies sixty strengths across five families of strengths:
In the Strengths Profile report, strengths are placed across four quadrants:
The emphasis on energy is the key to the success of a strengths-based approach to wellbeing and performance. Strengths Profile uniquely examines strengths from three dimensions: how often people use them, how good they are at using them, and, most importantly, how energised (or de-energised) do they feel when using them. Through this lens,
Strengths Profile is a powerful tool with multiple applications in every organisation. Below are some examples of how you might apply this tool.
When people's strengths are celebrated and encouraged, a more positive organisational climate is created. From Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden-and-Build Theory, we know that a positive workplace creates an upward spiral of positivity. From Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory, we know that when people are intrinsically motivated (by doing what they love), they are more productive. Hence, it follows that when people are using their strengths, they are more likely to be intrinsically motivated, experience increased self-esteem, and exert more discretionary effort. Simply, our productivity is maximised when we use our strengths because we are doing what we're good at, and we happily do it for longer.
It is not surprising that most people dread performance appraisal. If it focuses on people's weaknesses and is dominated by negative feedback, the loss of the staff member's self-esteem and intrinsic motivation can actually have the opposite effect. Productivity is likely to decline and resistance and resentment increase. Instead, performance appraisal can be an opportunity to focus on the person's strengths. With the guidance of Strengths Profile, the staff member can be praised for their realised strengths, and their good work validated. Opportunities for what Amy Wrzesniewski calls job crafting can be taken by the savvy manager, to sensitively reduce the use of learned behaviours, whilst increasing the use of unrealised strengths of staff. Supported by coaching, each staff member will be able to set achievable but challenging and exciting goals that flow directly from insights gained from a debrief of their strengths profile.
Strengths Profile provides a wealth of information to assist those in HR roles. For example, identifying an unrealised strength of a late-career staff member might point to just the strategy needed to re-energise that person; identifying the learned behaviours of a highly-valued staff member might reveal which strengths are being overplayed, so intervention might prevent burnout; should particular leadership roles require particular strengths, Strengths Profile may assist selection of the right person for the job.
Team performance and cohesion can be enhanced by identifying each other's strengths, and then deliberately leveraging members' diversity. A stronger team might be built by valuing questions such as:
Below you can order the Expert Strengths Profile, optionally with a one-hour telephone debrief. The detailed profile will look like this sample Expert Strengths Profile.
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