Having trouble identifying your strengths? Try these questions

In the excellent Harvard Business Review article, “Why Talented People Don’t Use Their Strengths”, the author Whitney Johnson cites one of the main reasons being that we often undervalue our own strengths.

“As a leader, the challenge is not only to spot talent but also to convince your people that you value their talents and that they should, too. This is how you start to build a team of employees who bring their superpowers to work.”

The author has a few go-to questions for identifying your strengths. Here are a couple of them:

What exasperates you?

A strength comes so naturally to you that it might frustrate you when it doesn’t come as naturally to others.

For example, does it exasperate you more when people don’t speak plainly versus when people don’t speak diplomatically, or vice versa? What really gets under your skin?

According to the author, “When we’re inherently good at something, we tend to downplay it. ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ we say — and maybe it was nothing to us. But it meant something to another person, which is why they’re thanking you. Notice these moments: They can point to strengths that you underrate in yourself but are valuable to others.”

Here are a couple of examples:

• ‘You really handled that potentially charged situation diplomatically, thank you.’
• ‘You really told them straight, thank you for standing up for me!.’