A super cool design team exercise

Our Head of Design, Joanie, recently sent out a survey and told us all to fill it out. This survey had a list of every single team member on the design team, and next to each name was a simple inline text input field. We were instructed to leave a strength for each person in that input. Doesn't have to be long, you don't have to work closely with that person or even truly know them well, but whatever comes to mind as a strength for that person, jot it down.

Well, we all did it and a few days later, Joanie sent us each an individual compilation of our strengths, as told by our teammates. Here's what came back:

How my team sees my strengths

Some of my personal favorites:

• Enthusiastic
• Taking initiative and sporting a good attitude are some of Branon's strengths
• "Yes-and..." - Branon's the go-to person for taking a half-cooked idea and turning it into a full chef's special. Broad knowledge across both dev and design, plus a background in healthcare, make him an imagination powerhouse
• Social and uplifting
• Positive attitude
• Great collaborator
• Makes extremely technical things seem easy, and is so can-do and approachable that I always feel empowered talking to him
• infectious optimistic energy
• collaborative, strong accessibility eng knowledge, and enthusiasm about binding eng and design closer together
• Communication
• Positivity
• Supportive
• Able to explain complex things in a simple and understandable way
• Exploring solutions
• dedication
• Warm, accessibility hero, team player
• Branon is willing to jump into seemingly any project and get his hands dirty
• Sunshine
• Empathetic and Optimistic
• Helpful
• friendly and quick to help others
• Positive, proactive

Many of us made "wordclouds" out of our list, and here's how mine came out:

Wordcloud of all my strengths

Reflecting

Aside from this just flat out being a cool exercise for the team to do, it struck my teammates and I as psychologically intriguing. It's interesting to see the way people perceive me at work and how little or how much it mirrors the way I feel about myself at work.

Overall, there are themes in my strengths here that I think are quite congruent with the way I feel at work, and with the things I actively invest in to grow my skills and my contributions to the team. But not everything!

To be candid, I was quite surprised to find that many felt I could take complex topics and help make them simple. I do enjoy teaching very much, so maybe I've grown to be good at it, but I've never really considered myself to have that skill explicitly. As a self-taught engineer/designer amongst ex-FAANG designers and engineers, it's easy to feel like I'm just trying to keep the pace with these technical geniuses at work. Hell, maybe I even feel like I ramble a lot when I'm trying to explain things or bridge gaps in knowledge to others. But to many on my team, it's nice to know that's not the case. 🤓