Discover Your Team's Strengths with a SWOT Conversation

If you want to access your team's potential, have a SWOT career development conversation with them. 💡 SWOT is a familiar strategic planning and management tool. However, it can also be used in a personal context, like this:

Strengths - Ask questions like:

"What work activities do you find yourself getting absorbed in?"

"What type of work brings out the best version of you?"

Weaknesses - Ask questions like:

"What tasks or responsibilities feel like a struggle for you?"

"What area of your work could you improve on?"

Opportunities - Ask questions like:

"What opportunities are open to you?"

"How could you use your strengths on this new project?"

Threats - Ask questions like:

"What threats could harm you?"

"How could you leverage your strengths to reduce this risk?"

By using this framework for development conversations with team members, you can discover much more about their talents, identify opportunities and roadblocks, align strengths to opportunities and help them protect against potential threats.

The key is to focus more on amplifying strengths rather than only fixing weaknesses.

💡 Here's a short sample SWOT conversation:

🗨️ You: "What work activities do you find yourself getting absorbed in?"

💬 Team Member: "I really enjoy the client research and strategizing we do before pitching new accounts."

🗨️ You: "Great, we have that new potential client next month. How could you use your strengths on that project?"

💬 Team Member: "I'd be happy to own the research process and prepare a strategy brief to inform our pitch."

🗨️ You: "That's a great idea. I am confident we can consider that when we align on the upcoming deliverables for this client next week."

This approach can trigger an empowering, motivating development conversation!

Want to learn more?

I recorded a 20-min podcast episode on this topic to go even deeper!

🎙️Listen to the Podcast Episode