15Five’s Guide to Identifying Employee Strengths in the Workplace

Employee strengths define what they excel at. This covers technical skills (e.g., debugging code), soft skills (e.g., communication), or even personality traits (e.g., creativity). Identifying employee strengths allows managers and leaders to put employees in positions to succeed while keeping them passionate about their work.

Identifying strengths, giving employees ways to leverage them, and making strengths the foundation for growth lead to greater productivity, more employee engagement, and ultimately better results for the organization as a whole. Dedicated performance management platforms like 15Five give managers everything they need to build and spread a strengths-focused culture that helps everyone become their best selves.

Here’s how.

Key Takeaways:

• Understanding and leveraging employee strengths leads to higher engagement and productivity.
• Identifying both employee strengths and weaknesses is essential for long-term performance growth.
• Employee performance improvement plans can turn weaknesses into future strengths.
• 15Five’s performance management tools streamline strength identification and tracking.
• Cultivating strengths in the workplace boosts morale, collaboration, and retention.
• Continuous feedback and development are essential to improve employee performance over time.

Why employee strengths matter

Employees are your organization’s greatest assets, and their strengths are their greatest assets.

Beyond this, there are two reasons why employee strengths matter: employee engagement and productivity.

Strengths and employee engagement

Employee engagement defines an employee’s alignment with your mission and values, their enthusiasm when collaborating with others, and their dedication to performing their role to the best of their ability. A highly-engaged employee is a joy to work with and will gladly tackle any task they’re given. A disengaged employee participates in fewer discussions, isn’t as collaborative, and rarely takes initiative.

Not only is working with engaged employees more enjoyable, but it can make the difference between a team that continually crushes projects and one that constantly struggles.

Strengths, feeling like your supervisor recognizes your strengths, and being able to do work that leverages these strengths each have a massive impact on employee engagement. According to a Gallup survey of 1,003 employees, only 1% of employees who said their supervisor focused on their strengths or positive characteristics were actively disengaged, compared to 40% of employees who felt ignored by their supervisors. Being ignored was even worse than having a supervisor who focused on the negative. Only 22% of these employees were actively disengaged.

Strengths and productivity

You are more productive when working on tasks that naturally align with your strengths. A salesperson will be at their best when engaging with prospects, presenting findings to other teams, or rallying a team around a common goal. Developers will get more done if they can focus on debugging code or building new product features rather than leading a brainstorming session.

But it goes beyond this. Just knowing their strengths makes them more productive. According to the same Gallup survey, employees are 7.8% more productive when they know their strengths, and teams see 12.5% greater productivity by focusing on these strengths. That gain in productivity has massive impacts on individual projects, cross-team collaboration, and your mission as a whole.

Working with employees to identify weaknesses and improve on them can have similar impacts, but a clear picture of their strengths can guide their growth and help them become better contributors.

How to identify employee strengths

There’s no single solution, and it’s far from a one-and-done type of situation. You need a holistic strategy for correctly identifying strengths and charting how they evolve over time. Here’s where you start.

Self-reporting

The first step to identifying an employee’s strength is to ask them. You’ll usually have a decent idea of their strengths based on their resume and the types of answers they gave in their initial interview before they were hired. But to get a more complete picture of these strengths, you need to ask them.

Of course, this is highly dependent on how much trust employees have in their managers, how effective communication between the two parties is, and how much support employees feel they have when developing their strengths.

That honest, open conversation is an important first step in identifying strengths.

The skills matrix

A skill matrix is a document—usually a spreadsheet—that allows managers to get a better understanding of their team’s strengths. Technical skills, soft skills, and even personality traits are arranged on one axis of the spreadsheet, while a list of team members is on the other.

For some teams, a skills matrix is filled out through self-reporting, meaning that employees are asked to rate their own skills. Other teams might have managers fill the skills matrix so that it represents the manager’s perspective on their team’s skills.

A skills matrix is a perfect reference point for identifying strengths and weaknesses across an entire team—as well as finding the skill gaps you need to address. Making regular updates to a skills matrix also allows managers to chart how these strengths evolve over time.

Performance reviews

Performance reviews give managers a regular, accurate read on an employee’s individual performance based on their day-to-day work. The first few performance reviews in an employee’s tenure with a company allow a manager to get a sense of where that employee excels, where they struggle, and how they should be aiming to grow. With these strengths identified, managers can then set goals for growth.

Regular performance reviews also serve as milestones, allowing managers to track an employee’s evolution over time, especially as they take on new responsibilities and new strengths emerge.

Tasks and projects

Managers can get a much deeper understanding of an employee’s strengths by overseeing the various tasks and projects they take on. Project management skills become apparent when an employee owns projects that either slide into being overdue or get completed ahead of schedule. Leadership abilities surface when people start to take on more responsibility and lead their collaborators through difficult tasks.

Maintaining a regular, healthy oversight of what team members are working on is essential for identifying their strengths. 

Real-time tools for manager success: A closer look at 15Five

Best practices for identifying employee strengths

Identifying employee strengths individually can be done in an ad-hoc way, but these methods rarely translate well to being deployed throughout the organization. For a system that works across your teams, consider the following best practices:

• Observational assessments: Through these assessments, managers can supervise employees as they complete essential projects and tasks and see where they shine.
• 1-on-1 check-ins: These regular check-ins can focus on what employees do well and how managers can best support them.
• Manager feedback: Feedback should be a jumping-off point for honest conversations about strengths and how they can be developed.
• Self-assessments: Employees should regularly review their own performance, identify their strengths, and have a hand in charting their path for growth.
• Peer reviews: Coworkers often have the best view of an individual’s strengths. Honest, constructive peer reviews can help surface these.
• Performance evaluation tools: Dedicated tools facilitate many important aspects of recognizing and evaluating performance, making identifying and building strengths much easier.

Now, while you can use platforms like spreadsheets to manually build out the processes you need, there’s an easier way to make this happen at your organization.

Make 15Five your partner in strengths-focused growth

15Five is a performance management platform that allows leaders to quantify, measure, and improve performance across their organization. Instead of relying on manual, irregular performance reviews and spreadsheets, 15Five supports strengths-focused growth with:

• Real-time feedback collection through employee engagement surveys, dedicated feedback channels, and more.
• Performance reviews with strengths-focused prompts.
• Goal tracking tied to individual employee strengths.

You can learn more about what 15Five can do for your teams here.

Understanding employee strengths and weaknesses

Strengths and weaknesses aren’t fixed. They may appear so, especially when they’re first discovered, but a strength can both improve with growth or decrease with inattention. Likewise, a weakness that becomes a priority for growth can become less damaging over time. This simple fact—that weaknesses can be improved on—makes traditional weakness-focused performance reviews and evaluations unsuited to the reality of an employee who is motivated by their strengths, and whose strengths are the vector through which they improve.

Weaknesses are far from permanent, and they should rarely be the focus of honest conversations about an employee’s growth. Unfortunately, that is all too often the norm. The Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), for example, is too often used as a tool to rectify specific weaknesses, usually with the added weight of a potential termination if sufficient growth isn’t achieved in time.

There’s a better way to use PIPs, however, that encourages employees to see their potential for growth as an opportunity to deploy and develop their strengths rather than just needing to fix a weakness.

By using PIPs with a strengths-based focus, you can reinforce an employee’s strengths, use them as a lens to frame future growth, and encourage employees as they work towards their best selves rather than causing unnecessary stress.

Take, for example, an employee struggling with communication skills. Maybe they don’t always identify the right channel for certain messages. Maybe they don’t communicate clearly in person, or their presentations are lacking.

A typical PIP process would mention these weaknesses and give the employee a timeline and a path to improving them. While this accurately identifies the problem, it’s neither encouraging nor particularly successful. Only 10% to 25% of employees put on PIPs typically make it through.

Instead, a strengths-based approach would go beyond just recognizing this gap. It gives this employee a clear understanding of their strengths and how they can contribute to their development. Say this employee is known as a particularly strong writer when it comes to briefs, and their project management skills allow them to turn even complex projects into a clear breakdown of the expected work.

Building a PIP strategy based on these strengths gives this employee a clear path to applying these skills to communication, maybe by developing their own guide to using the right communication channels or properly preparing for presentations. With a bit of guidance and encouragement, they could rapidly gain leadership-quality communication skills.

Tools that help discover and cultivate strengths

While skill matrices and performance reviews are strong options for uncovering employee strengths, they’re not necessarily the best tools for the job. Properly identifying, surfacing, and developing employee strengths requires data, regular check-ins, and proper measurement.

Performance management tools are the best way to facilitate all of this. They automatically pull data from performance reviews and engagement surveys, turn it into actionable insights, and put it all at the fingertips of managers and leadership. They give leaders better reports, fed with real-time data, to identify trends and skill gaps in their organizations.

With these tools, employees get what they need to identify their strengths and build goals around those strengths. Meanwhile, managers can better understand how these strengths help keep employees engaged, as well as track progress towards strengths-based goals.

15Five is an example of a platform that empowers both managers and employees to identify strengths and use them as a foundation for growth. Built-in performance evaluation templates help guide conversations around strengths, while integrations with productivity software like Microsoft Teams and Jira allow tasks to be aligned with these conversations.

These platforms can save a ton of manual work while grounding these conversations in actual data instead of hunches and self-reporting.

Creating a strengths-based development culture

Identifying employee strengths can be especially difficult if this process doesn’t align naturally with your company culture. Highly competitive fields, where employees are expected to cover up their weaknesses and over-emphasize their strengths, can make it difficult to have the honest, open conversations needed to correctly identify strengths and use them as a foundation for growth.

Integrating a focus on strengths over weaknesses into your culture can take time, but it’s worth the investment. You can begin doing this by:

• Implementing a kudos system: Kudos allow employees to give each other props in the context of their day-to-day work. Encourage people to publicly recognize their coworkers when they display their strengths, and give them a channel to do so (e.g., a specific Slack or Teams channel).
• Shift performance reviews to focus on strengths: In too many organizations, performance reviews focus on what employees are doing wrong and what needs to change. Subtle shifts to your performance review, like starting by mentioning an employee’s strength or framing growth goals as strength development, can help grow this culture.
• Make positive feedback more visible: When managers and leaders make positive, strengths-based feedback more visible, they encourage employees to work on their strengths. They also make public communications more positive overall.
• Use continuous feedback loops: Continuous feedback loops, as facilitated by tools like 15Five, give employees channels for getting help in identifying and developing their strengths. Meanwhile, managers get a way to check in employee growth and quantify their strengths, especially as they compare with the rest of the organization.

Making a shift towards strengths-based development improves morale throughout your organization, drives employee engagement, and grows your talent pool over time.

How to improve employee performance over time

According to research from the World Economic Forum, 1.1 billion people will see their jobs radically transformed by technology in the next decade. Ongoing performance development isn’t just about helping employees build up their strengths, promoting from within, or growing the value of your workforce as an asset over time. It’s about staying ahead of disruptive trends and equipping your employees to meet whatever challenges come their way.

15Five’s performance management suite allows managers to set clear goals, measure employee growth over time, reinforce progress, and achieve more positive outcomes. As a foundation for tracking and driving employee growth, it helps guarantee that employees grow consistently.

Combined with a culture of strength-based development, these tools allow employees to chart a path for sustained growth. By knowing their strengths and using them as the lens through which they see their potential, they’re inclined to find new opportunities for growth rather than just trying to cover for their weaknesses.

Build on strength

Identifying an employee’s strengths allows managers to put them in positions and projects where they can make the most of those strengths while charting a path for future growth. This drives employee engagement, improves morale, and promotes continuous improvement throughout your workforce.

In too many organizations, company culture is focused on identifying and shoring up weaknesses. By prioritizing strengths, you’ll create a more positive company culture that helps everyone become their best selves.
Want to know how 15Five can help you build this culture? Book a demo here.