Summary:

Donna Gosciej shares her insights on how to discover and leverage the superpowers of your team to work effectively. She emphasizes the importance of identifying the specific strengths needed within your organization and aligning them with the skills and aptitudes of your employees. By fostering a culture of respect and curiosity, you can create efficiencies and long-term success for your company. Donna also discusses the need for ongoing assessment and adjustment as the needs of your team and business evolve.

Key Takeaways:

• Identify the superpowers and strengths needed within your organization to grow and succeed.
• Engage employees in conversations about their strengths and match them to the right assignments.
• Reinforce the use of superpowers and course correct when necessary.
• Watch for blind spots and new challenges as your company grows and adjust accordingly.

Chapters:

Timestamp

[0:01:13] Identifying the superpowers needed in the organization

[0:02:55] Curiosity as a key superpower

[0:05:39] Managing the composition of superpowers in a team

[0:07:18] Adjusting superpowers to match the needs of the team

[0:11:37] Importance of open communication

[0:13:06] Using a more intuitive approach with employees

[0:14:59] Example of how identifying superpowers led to employee success

[0:16:48] Watch for blind spots and new strengths as company grows

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She, within four years, helped A successful company, grow from 1, 000 employees to 7, 500. Conducting 29 integrations. But to tell us more about her experience please welcome Donna. Hi Donna. Welcome to the show.

Some of those particular things can be communications, problem solving skills, planning and project management. So the first thing you do for identifying superpowers is identifying what superpowers you need to grow your company.

CheeTung Leong: Let's start there, Donna, like, how did you go about?

Figuring out that, number one, these superpowers existed. And then number two, did you use anything to codify them?

So you work with your CEOs on that. You work with your other senior managers and you say, what's needed? Everyone says communication is needed. If I'm in a manufacturing company and I'm working on a product line. Maybe my superpower needs to be, I need to be detail oriented because I need to make sure that my quality is better than for that product that's coming off the line versus a salesperson who needs communication skills, right?

So some of those things are identified first, and then you start with those particular five or six items, and you start relating it back to your interview. So as you're interviewing someone the first thing I ask people in interviews is tell me about what you're curious about.

I'm curious how fast someone gets to the water cooler as well for their cup of water in the morning, but I'm also curious about how that applies, right? How does that apply to my day to day job? And then as you do that interview, you start engaging the individual as helping them identify their strengths, their superpowers.

And skills and strengths really lie in where is that person's aptitude? The strength is what are they inclined to fall back on to be successful? And sometimes the skill that you've learned is not necessarily your strength. Maybe their strength is something totally different. Everybody has a strength. And so you engage an individual into identifying their individual strengths.

And then finally, when you're asking that individual, what is their strength? What is their aptitude? It falls into where is their desire? What keeps them there? And then that feel fills into their long term goals. Those questions that you ask those individuals about their strengths is What have been their previous successes?

What have been their previous accomplishments? And you will mostly find that most people's accomplishments and successes are a result of their strengths.

CheeTung Leong: This reminds me of the strengths based philosophy that the Gallup talks a lot about where there is this idea of naturally recurring thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that can be productively applied.

How would you distinguish between What your superpowers are and what are the competencies that the business needs from the different roles?

And you know as roles change as the business changes Do you find like that the needs of your team in terms of the inventory of superpowers that you have change as well?

Donna Gosciej: There's two areas you have to be really cautious of one is that someone's superpower can also become their dark spot if that makes sense That they are so busy being the thinker the planner That they don't engage the rest of the team.

I have to know how to reinforce both privately and publicly, where people are doing well. I have to watch. for individuals and their blind spots. And you have to be very intentional on following through on those areas that are needed. And as the company is growing again, what you needed in the beginning may not be what I need now.

And you know what? That's a superpower in and of itself. They're not trying to move the company along. They're trying to provide a consistent performance for the company and they will move with you as you move them along. It's nurturing all of those abilities. It's nurturing the powers through your meetings.

It's looking for where the empty areas are going to be. And your employees usually bring that to you. They say, look, we are stuck at such and such point. We don't know how to handle this. When you start getting questions. Does that mean you infuse somebody from the outside a consultant? Do you provide someone new?

CheeTung Leong: Philosophically and theoretically, everything that you mentioned makes a lot of sense. Is there a team that comes to mind immediately for you in the recent past or in recent memory where you've had to adjust the composition of superpowers on that team. How did you go about doing that?

Donna Gosciej: Actually it occurred in every single company that I've ever been in.

I've had to do that in all the companies and I've done it a variety of ways and some companies I've actually compartmentalized and become much more functionally HR.

So I became very functionally oriented and began moving people into just benefits, just employee relations, just recruiting, just those areas and made sure that I had a really strong skill sets and all of that as we grew because I needed redundancy and skill because of the size and scope of the companies.

When you're taking the strengths, what you start doing is you start maximizing on those strengths. So I had some people who are really good thought leaders, And could say this is what we're seeing. I had other people who were extremely good at planning.

So I put planning into kind of their scope and and we found that we were successful.

CheeTung Leong: Did you find that when there were mismatches with the superpowers and the strength of the team with what was needed, was it easier to train up some of the superpowers or the strengths that were deficient, or was it easier to switch out people in the team with others who had the necessary superpowers?

Donna Gosciej: I was very upfront with individuals as to what was needed. I was very upfront with individuals about deficiencies. That were occurring. And again, that comes down to all of that data feedback metrics where you're meeting, where you're not meeting. And it also came down to having some of the hardcore questions about is there something personal happening where you're deficient right now and you've seem to have lost interest or lost, I don't wanna say skill, because it's not skill, but you've lost strength. So what's going on with you personally? And there's no easy answer to that. It's occurred both ways. Sometimes I've switched people out and sometimes I was able to, someone would just say, I don't know what I don't know in this area. And I need help in building my strength to be even higher in that area.

One of my strengths is that I have a great propensity to explain the why things are happening. And I can coach people into understanding why the decisions are being made that are made. And so they can begin asking the hard questions as to where does this fit for me? As I said, the biggest caution you always have to have is It's always about open communication. And if someone is blindsided, surprised, then that's where I didn't do my job. And I didn't help them with their strengths, or I can say to them, your strength isn't needed here.

or this is not the position that you should be using your skill in because we don't have that opening for you.

Or do you feel like it is more helpful actually to have a more bespoke approach to the needs of the team? And then build out the competencies and the skills inventories from there.

Donna Gosciej: In my experience has been what I've used in, in, with my senior team members for us to understand how we can communicate and understand each other's strengths is we've used the formalized tests.

We've used the Hogan's, we've used the FIROs, we've used DISCs, I've used all of those. in my career over the years. So I use that usually with the senior team level and I use that as a baseline for what's going to be needed with the employees and from an employee standpoint, and because of cost purposes, I just use it as a guide.

I don't necessarily need to do a DISC and I don't need to do a Hogan for someone who's on a manufacturing line. But I've used it where there's a need for large projects. And I need to understand how the teams are going to mesh.

What the Off the shelf tools give you is a ready language that's easy to use, or rather something that you can train everybody around. But if You build your own, that can work for that team, as long as you're clear about what each particular superpower is.

Donna Gosciej: It really comes down to, developing feedback and metrics, right? How do you feed this back? How do you give people back information that says this is not working? I remember saying to one, one individual in one of my companies she was in the recruiting area and she came to me and she said, I just hate recruiting.

And I'm like why are you in this area? And she said, because that was my entry point into my job. And so I've always stayed in this area. And when I moved her into employee relations. And she was a great speaker and she was a great listener and she was very intuitive and was a and just created this entire culture of respect.

CheeTung Leong: Don, I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you to break everything that you've said down into some kind of framework that our listeners can take away from this conversation. Ideally. Something that, you could put on a bumper sticker and You can get started with this process and this approach tomorrow, ideally, or today.

Or they're abusing, their superpowers with others and not helping others grow. And then watch for the blind spots and watch for the new black holes that are going to be occurring as your company grows, as it changes with its own life cycle, and then begin to start all over again by identifying new strengths that are needed within your organization and repeat the process.

Donna Gosciej: I'm on LinkedIn under Donna Gosciej under my name. I ask that you at least drop me a note and let me know that you heard of me through the Engage Rocket podcast. So that I just don't know that I have just random people responding.