Let’s Get Strong: Strengths at Work

Please note: the UMD Power Lab is an optional lab, highly recommended, and costs an additional fee. Please read the important statement at the bottom of the description.

This course will help you build the confidence to bring your best self to work by identifying and learning to capitalize on your unique strengths. Strengths-based management is the secret ingredient to creating employee engagement which increases key performance indicators for all organizations.

This certificate offers an extraordinary opportunity for you to spend some quality time with yourself to assess your current level of soft skills, clearly define your core self, and build soft skills which are essential to professional, not to mention life, success.

Not only will your performance increase when you capitalize on your strengths, you’ll enjoy your work much more.

We have been schooled on fixing our weaknesses from grade school to the workplace. Weakness correction only gets you to acceptable, that is no weakness. Weakness correction alone does not get you to outstanding performance levels. Not individually and not as an organization. Identifying, accepting and embracing, and capitalizing on your strengths is the difference between good performance and excellent performance. Doing this with your team or your organization is amazing!

This course focuses on strengths, who you are at your best, not on skills, like knowing how to keyboard. Skill weaknesses, of course, must be addressed. They can be improved.

The course will define strengths, explore several strengths models, provide a free self-assessment of strengths for all learners, and help you learn to capitalize on your strengths and manage your weaknesses.

Verified learners who access the Power Lab to take additional self-assessments and receive confidential individual results from the Realise2 Strengths Profile. The Realise2 Strengths Profile provides strengths feedback along three axes: is it a strength, how often are you using it, and does its use energize you. This strengths assessment provides a dynamic tool to optimize your use of your full portfolio of strengths at work allowing you to increase your energy by how you deploy your strengths. It is a very insightful and practical tool which can be used with teams as well.

This course will prepare you to become the leader you hope to be by focusing deeply on understanding your strengths. Practical tools and techniques for use right away to be happier, more productive, more promotable, and more passionate at work.

Get the Models - Understand three models of strengths

Get Why It Matters - Understand the business case for using strengths-based management versus weakness-correction

Get the Data – Learn your unique strengths profile and how to optimize your strengths at work

Set the Goals - Set personal development goals for using your strengths more

Learn the Tools - Learn tools and techniques for how to use your strengths to improve your performance and your team’s performance

Take Action - Build effective action plans to use strengths more at work

Make the Change – Put your strengths to work to increase your effectiveness as a leader

Get the Benefit - Be able to develop as a great leader able to create great culture: build positive workplaces where individuals flourish and organizations thrive

The UMD Power Lab includes a curated set of self-assessments offered at a discounted price paid separately from the edX content and certificate. These self-assessments are rigorously developed and cannot be supplemented with free versions that would mislead learners with poor-quality alternatives. The UMD Power Lab is optional but highly recommended for any verified learner in the course. It costs $89 per year and only needs to be purchased once per year for the entire suite of courses in the Re-Imagining Leadership Professional Certificate.

We've done everything we can to reduce these costs for you, and have built a free SMART Goals Mobile App to help you achieve your goals. Used together this forms a revolutionary design to coach learners at scale in leadership and power skills as a premium but low-cost experience above and beyond learning the course content and earning the edX certificate.

Week 1: What are Strengths?

• Introduction to Course
• What are Strengths?
• Mini-Lesson: How to Assess Strengths
• Why Focus on Strengths?

Week 2: What are Your Strengths?

• What are Your Strengths?
• Best Self-Introduction
• Best Self 360

Week 3: Modeling Strengths

• Gallup's Clifton Strengths
• VIA Character Strengths
• The Strengths Profile

Week 4: Capitalizing on Strengths

• Go Ahead, Own Your Strengths
• Manage Your Weaknesses
• Double Dare You: Using Your Strengths
• Slow Your Roll: Beware of Excess

Week 5: Capitalizing on Strengths - Case Studies

• Job Crafting & Re-Energizing
• Amp Up Collaboration
• Strengths to Excess/Deficit