How to Accelerate Your Personal Development
by Max Isaac
Increasing personal effectiveness by taking a strategic approach to managing yourself, your job, and your sphere of influence.
A basic principle, which we are finding highly effective in coaching executives, is Play to Your Strengths, and Manage Your Weaknesses. We utilize Belbin Team Role Theory as a highly-effective framework for identifying one’s strengths. Through identifying one’s strengths and weaknesses, and making them explicit to others, one can accelerate results.
Through the Belbin Reports, one receives 3rd-party observer input as objective feedback, which is a vital factor in creating a realistic appraisal of one’s strengths and weaknesses. Because this instrument focuses on strengths, our experience is that there is minimal defensiveness in receiving the feedback that this report generates. We have found that defensiveness is one of the largest barriers to improving personal productivity, a concept we discuss in detail in our Team Accelerator workshops.
Another major barrier to improving personal productivity is a low level of coherence (not seeing yourself as others see you). Our data, based on hundreds of thousands of Belbin Team Role Reports, shows that over 70% of those who complete the report are relatively inaccurate in how they see themselves compared to how others see them. By focusing on the team roles in which they excel, and formulating plans to build further strengths in those areas, individuals are able to increase their personal effectiveness very quickly. Likewise, identifying the roles that they are the most likely to fail in provides an “insurance policy” that can be implemented with immediate effect by involving others that do have those roles as strengths.
Do you have an opportunity to play to your strengths using this approach?
Call us toll-free in North America at 877.333.3606 or phone us at 416.483.7380.
Email us at info@belbinnorthamerica.com.
About the Author
Max is the CEO of Belbin North America. He brings a depth of knowledge and experience from his career in general management and consulting in North America, England, Europe and Asia. Max has assisted CEOs and senior leaders within client organizations with the design and implementation of Interaction Planning processes, team based organizational development programs and Lean Six Sigma initiatives.
