How to Build a Strengths-Based Culture

If you want to build a strengths-based culture in your organization, it won’t happen overnight. Sure, you may want your coworkers to take hold of strengths instantly to receive the tremendous benefits of focusing on strengths like: increased productivity, retention, job satisfaction, positive interactions with coworkers, and so forth.

But remember, Rome wasn’t built overnight. A strengths culture isn’t built overnight either. If it takes you more time to get momentum and traction than you hoped, don’t worry. Just because it’s a good idea to you doesn’t mean everyone else thinks it is (yet). Building a strengths-based culture takes time and effort.

So, take a breath, decide to plan, and enlist the right people. If this movement is going to stick within your organization, it’s going to take more than you. I should know—while my positivity, belief, and responsibility got the strengths movement in the door, they weren’t enough to sustain and grow it. We needed to spread the ownership of the strengths culture around.

The strengths movement in our organization has grown because we focus on six areas:

Leadership: getting buy-in from organizational leaders

Assessment: having every employee take the StrengthsFinder® assessment

Training: growing in strengths knowledge and practice

Coaching: receiving skilled strengths coaching

Publicity: making employee and team strengths accessible

Peers: enlisting peers to advocate for strengths

Then we brainstormed a bunch of ideas for building a strengths-based culture. Once you get thinking, you can come up with all sorts of ideas that fit your organization. You’ll have more ideas than you can act on.

If you implement just one idea, you’ll be farther along than you were. So, go for it! Start creating your strengths team and putting together a strengths strategy.

Building a strengths culture won’t happen overnight, but if you stay the course, it will happen. Have fun. You can do it!