Exercise: My Strengths, Your Strengths, Our Strengths

Lead Your Team Through the Profile, Part 3:
Process Your Team Members’ Strengths

This exercise is part of a series to use as you guide your team through understanding their profile reports.

For You To Think About

Each person has natural strengths. Natural strengths are an individual’s unique ways of going about the tasks of daily life. Each member of your team brings his unique combination of natural strengths to the group.

Image: St. Catherine’s university

Once your team has an understanding of the biblical basis for differences and has a grasp of the Law of Differences, they are ready to discover the strengths of their team.

There are several ways your team can benefit from processing their natural strengths together:

Members can discover insights about their teammates that they have not noticed before.
Members can offer feedback to each other to confirm their strengths.
Members can learn to interact with each other more effectively and productively by using the profile data.

For You To Do

This exercise helps your team discover each others’ key strengths. Together, your team will process the General Characteristics section of the report.

The General Characteristics section expands upon the basic information provided in the strengths chart. It is a narrative summary that outlines specific strengths, based on the individual’s responses in the profile questionnaire. You and your team can use this foundational section of the report as a platform to build unity and oneness.

What You Need for This Exercise

Each participant’s profile report
Highlighters, pens, and pencils for each participant

What To Do

Ask the group to sit in a circle.
Have participants turn to and read their General Characteristics section. Invite them to use a highlighter, pen, or pencil to select three statements from paragraph 1 that fits best according to how they understand themselves. Ask them to repeat the process for paragraphs 2 and 3, selecting three statements from each paragraph that seem to fit them best. Each participant should select a total of nine statements.
Process the data together in this way.

A. Ask the person on your left to begin. Invite that team member to share the first statement he selected and explain why he chose it. Ask the team member to clarify terms or words that may have more than one meaning.
B. Ask the group to respond. How do they see this team member living out this strength on your team?

Move on to the next person and repeat Steps A and B. Continue around the circle until everyone on the team has shared one statement.
Repeat the process until all selected statements have been shared by everyone on the team.
Summarize. Ask participants these questions and invite them to respond:

What surprised you the most during this exercise?
What did this exercise confirm to you that you may have already known?
Share one thing you learned about the strengths represented on the team.