Welcome back to a #ThoughtFULLThursday. I missed you last week, but I hope you had a safe and fun 4th of July holiday weekend. My name is Casey Hasten. I am an Executive Recruiter, Director of Recruiting with VIP and all around #hiringguru.
For those of you who cannot see me (this is originally a video post), you should know I am wearing a Super Hero cape today. The reason for this prop is I want to talk to you about identifying your team members’ superpowers.
This is a really fun exercise that you can do with your team and will yield some really great results. We did this last year as a team right before Christmas and had a lot of fun sitting around the table sharing what we felt were each others top strengths and coming up with our unique superpower. Hannah’s, for example, is she is a Connector; specifically a connector of dots. Jason’s is his Focus. You cannot distract him when he is on a mission.
So how does this help us build better teams?
Let’s go back to Hannah for a second. Remember her superpower is she is a Connector. She thinks about things differently than most and with her analytical mind, she tends to reach solutions quickly and then she’ll share those insights with the team, which helps us move forward faster. There is no need to waste time when we have that strength on our team.
Jason’s superpower is Focus. If I have a difficult search that is going to require some concentration, Jason is my guy. He is going to sit down, not look right or left, until he finds what we are looking for.
Last year to kind of seal in everybody’s super powers, I decided to make super hero capes for everyone and of course I put their superpowers on the back of it. That was a little logo on the back just like SuperMan. I had a lot of fun doing this for the team and they had a lot of fun as they opened up their gifts at Christmas.
This did several things for us. The first thing it did was give us a visual reminder of what our superpowers are and what we decided collectively as a team, where the strengths lay. Number two, it reminded us of the day when we all sat together around the table and talked about each other and talked about where our strengths lie. This releases endorphins once again, just as if we were experiencing the same event all over again and helped us bond as a team. The last thing we did was we put on our capes; we put on our masks; and we proudly paraded through the rest of the office. Again, seems like a real nerdy thing to do, but it bonded us as a team even further because we were all being crazy together. It also showed the rest of the office what our super powers were.
I bet you’re wondering about now what my superpower is. I’m the Networking Ninja. That is how my team sees me.
I hope this was helpful for you today. If you do this exercise with your team, please, please, please let me know how it goes. Let me know some of your unique superpowers that you come up with.
I’m Casey Hasten. Thanks for joining me for a #ThoughtFULLThursday and I’ll see you again next week.
