[This blog post is part of the P&I series where we share our personal and professional journeys and how they link to a re-thinking of P&I and its purpose. Read the previous and the next blog post of the series.]
Inspired by the gems that our 3D mapping showed P&I has, we decided to look at our individual strengths. As we continued to go through this journey, we learned that it is an iterative one, winding and intertwined: we needed to go back now to look at ourselves individually.
For this, we tapped into the Seligman’s 24 strengths test. We chose this one because it looks at dimensions that are often overlooked in teams’ performance tests, but that we consider fundamental blocks for strong, trustworthy, and creative teams. In this test, the 24 strengths are organised under 6 virtues: courage, justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence. The questions measure the degree to which an individual possesses strengths under each dimension. While questions and answers are not exhaustive, the exercise triggered a meaningful personal and team reflection.
Because we like to nurture from our teammates’ perspective, we decided to introduce a variant: each teammate would also identify the virtues that he/she saw in the other colleagues. Thus, the result of the exercise was very rich: we got the results of the questionnaire, the perspective of our peers, and the aggregated organisational common strengths, which would be integrated into our organisational identity: courage, integrity, gratitude, and love. Other strengths present in our team members were: curiosity, vitality, persistence, hope, appreciation of knowledge, humility, justice, and goodness.
This exercise was quite enlightening from a personal perspective, it uncovered strengths that we either didn’t know that we owned or that we had forgotten about. It also gave a us chance to realise how vital these strengths are for having a pleasant, enjoyable and productive work experience. We are so lucky to have a team that has such a solid base. We have also used these strengths to inform the principles of our work.
What laid ahead for us was to do some collective sense-making of everything we had done so far. To crystallise this we used an adapted version of Current Reality Movie (CRM), another Theory U tool.