The reason is remarkably simple: if you discover someone's true strength, their real natural talent, and focus their work on this area then they don't consider it to be work. They feel joy, they're passionate and often the results are outstanding.
In general, I would say that there are three types of people:
Generalists
Specialists
Empaths
Generalists have a broad overview of what's going on and understand the big picture. These are the kinds of people that you want to put in roles where they're responsible for managing a particular client or stakeholder group. They'll maintain a relationship with those people and channel and manage any demands through the team.
Specialists have deep expertise in a particular field. These are the kinds of people I would nominate as knowledge champions in their field. That means that every time there's a deliverable within the team that falls under their area of expertise, they review it and suggest improvements or give feedback before it's disseminated more widely. In doing this, you show them that their expertise is valued.
Finally, there are empaths. These are the kinds of people who have a good sense of the emotion within the team and who are naturally great at relating to other people and fostering a positive team atmosphere. You might give them responsibility for taking care of a new team member induction, for instance. Even if your HR team has an induction process, don't underestimate the benefits of giving them a buddy, so to speak, within the team they're joining. These people are key.
Those are some basic examples of how you can leverage someone's natural strengths to generate additional meaningful interactions and improve team spirit.
Think back to Adam's story. What groups would you put his early team members into? It's fair to say that Kaito is a specialist. Adam is a generalist. Would you also class Jeff as a specialist? At this stage, Adam's wife Rose is playing the part of the empath.
How to Uncover People's Natural Strengths
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.
How this Works in Practice
I'd like to give you a real‐life example of where this worked in practice. I have a client in New York, who runs a massive open online course (MOOC) teaching modern architecture. To prevent this from being too dry, he has a live case study that everyone on the course works on.
The case study is designing and building resilient schools in the Philippines. You may remember that this country has suffered from earthquakes and tsunamis in the past. As a result of these natural disasters, the government in the Philippines decided to construct schools that were robust enough to enable them to be used as emergency shelters in the event of natural disasters such as these.
This was a six‐week course during which time my client provided guidance through videos. Participants didn't pay for the course until they had successfully completed it and received their certification.
He had over 35,000 people sign up for the course. He also had a team of 20 professors who were providing feedback on the designs that the students were creating.
The aim was to have a completed school design by the end of the sixth week. But as soon as it reached the fifth week, he saw a significant drop in the number of students. Many people were learning for five weeks, but when it came to completing the course and paying for their certificate, they just weren't interested.
As a result he changed his approach and asked for the fees up‐front. But this meant only 2,000 people signed up to his MOOC. By the time we had an online coaching workshop together, he was in trouble.
We decided that he should go back to the approach of taking payment on completion of the course, but that he'd focus on significantly increasing conversions to the final week and therefore payment. How did we do this?
To begin with, we decided to split this massive group of 35,000 people into groups of five. It sounds like a mammoth task, but we got the students to self‐organise and choose their groups based on factors like proximity, time zone and so on.
Once people had split into a group of five, they were invited to an online session where they each presented their lifeline and then discovered their strengths using the five questions I outlined above. Based on what they found out through these exercises, they then split the work from the project between the five of them.
Once the critical week, week five, arrived, they were invested in their team and they couldn't let their teammates down. This led to his conversions increasing to 20,000 completions of the course and
