Here are my top ten tips to manage your people to optimise their strengths:

1. Acknowledge that everyone has strengths, and that different people have different strengths, including you.
2. Identify the essential strengths that are needed for the whole team to do a great job. Get some expert advice on this if necessary.
3. Help your team members to identify their strengths, and their weaknesses.
4. Stop trying to get people to fix their weaknesses; it’s soul-destroying, for you and for them.
5. Work with your team’s strengths to ensure that all the essential bases are covered for everyone to contribute to performance and results.
6. Accept that this may involve switching tasks around between individuals to enable them to give of their best.
7. Minimise the impact of weaknesses by being honest about what they are and finding ways to re-allocate tasks that require a strength when the person responsible is weak in that area.
8. If a task cannot be switched to someone else, try partnering the individual with another team member who possesses the strength, so that they can help out, or coach.
9. Only if neither of the above is feasible, provide targeted training and development to minimise the impact of the weakness.
10. Catch people doing it right, and say so. Recognise your team’s strengths in action and the results achieved.

If you’re now the proud owner of an inventory of your strengths, well done. If you’re not, check out the blog post on why and how to do this, then come back when you’re done. So surely it’s now all about playing full out to your top strength, right? Nope. Doing this, according to the experts, can actually inhibit our progress. Worse, it might actually cause us to head right off the rails.

For example, if someone’s top strength is their creativity, and this is the only one they play to, they may lose themselves in day-dreaming and imagining new ideas, yet never bring their wonderful thoughts to reality. So if that person yearns to express themselves, they may never actually do it, or not quite complete a creative project; if they are paid to be creative, they may fail in their role for lack of tangible output and results; they may become disillusioned in their strength and in themselves. Eventually, that strength may wither without its owner quite knowing why.

From the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) team, whose mission is to 'strengthen the world', comes a very handy strengths owners’ manual. There is lots to learn and enjoy in this book, the bulk of which is spent detailing 60 different strengths. There are 'case studies in strengthening', which at some point will resonate with all readers, e.g. 'Realising the Best of Her Relationships'. I liked the short self-assessments, such as 'strengthspotting', and the fact that they can also be downloaded from the Strengths2020 website.

Let’s not forget though, that the main purpose of this book is as a companion piece to CAPP’s Realise2 strengths self-assessment tool. It can stand alone, but to work at its best, I think it’s necessary to pay up the £16.80 and take about twenty minutes to complete your online questionnaire. Armed with one’s individual profile, readers can then be selective about which of the 60 strengths they investigate in more depth. The book explains Realise2’s framework of 'Realised Strengths', 'Unrealised Strengths', 'Learned Behaviours' and (well done for calling it like it is) 'Weaknesses'. I particularly liked the 'strengths overplayed', as this can be an easy trap to fall into: the signs to beware of are clearly spelled out. Best of all, this book is in plain English, which is no mean feat as it has extensive academic underpinnings, and very practical. It doesn’t just provide the 'what' but also the 'how', 'why' and 'so what'?

If we identify what our strengths truly are, we then create the opportunity to have more:

• Energy
• Enjoyment of what we’re doing
• Resilience when things get tough
• Fulfilment and success

That seems like a pretty worthwhile list. Many of us think we’re perfectly well aware of our strengths. We usually think our strengths are simply what shows up when we do something we’re good at. Well, it ain’t necessarily so…

So what happens if there’s something we’re good at, but actually it’s not a strength? The Big Clue here is that we find it tiring – behaving in this way, doing this activity, can really drain our energy. We’ve probably become good at whatever it is because: