Do you know what your core character strengths are? We all have things at our core that makeup who we are and what we value in our lives. By determining what our character strengths are, we can create more joy and fulfillment in the things we do on a daily basis.

Positive Psychology has classified 24 character strengths that we can identify and use in our businesses to help us grow happy and fulfilled teams. These strengths are broken up into six categories:

1.) Wisdom & Knowledge: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning, perspective

2.) Courage: bravery, perseverance, honesty, zest

3.) Humanity: love, kindness, social intelligence

4.) Justice: teamwork, fairness, leadership

5.) Temperance: forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation

6.) Transcendence: appreciation of beauty & excellence; gratitude; hope; humor; spirituality

By the way, these aren’t just the strengths you say you have at an interview, they are so ingrained we often don’t even realize we have them. In business, we can use these different strengthens to create rockstar teams of people that are doing the things that light them up (and that they are great at).

Say you have two employees –

Employee A’s top strength is Love of Learning.

Employee B’s top strength is Social Intelligence.

If you were looking to enhance your business systems and needed someone to research, interview, and implement a new system into the business, which employee are you most likely going to give these tasks to?

Hopefully, Employee A! This is the kind of project that would allow them to use their top strength and they are much more likely to enjoy it and feel empowered than Employee B would. Not to mention, they will likely get it done faster and better than Employee B.

This would also free Employee B up to be called into a project where they are going to be surrounded by customers, providing customer service, or even conducting research into the pain points of your potential customers so that they can use their top strength.

By allowing people to be in roles and complete projects in your business that align with their core strengths, you can decrease employee turnover, burnout, and increase productivity, employee satisfaction, and quality of work. In my role as an Online Business Manager, I actually survey potential hires during the interview process. By knowing these strengths ahead of time, you can guide people into positions that will ultimately be the best fit for them and your company!

But it’s not only the employees that can benefit from doing things that align with their strengths! Business owners should also be focused on tasks and projects that align with their core strengths. If you are too bogged down doing things in your business that don’t bring you joy, that can quickly lead to burnout and demotivation in a business owner, as well.

Hire out or delegate tasks to employees who are naturally more inclined to enjoy these tasks, or can get them done in less time for better ROI.

Curious what your top character strengths are? Take this survey and find out.