Enhance Your Character Traits at Work
Helping People Recognise, Strengthen and Share the Character Traits That Carry Them and Their Teams Through Change
The trait that carries you through the hardest times can carry others too, once you understand it at its best, when it falls short and where it came from.
Enhance Your Character Traits at Work begins with a word everyone uses about Nana Rewi, except Nana herself.
A Story-Based Learning Resource: Nana’s Story — From Unshakeable to Shared Strength
Nana leads a team of twelve in a regional library service, where she has worked for nineteen years. When the service announces that it will merge with a neighbouring one, every person in her team turns to her. They have seen her steady them through a flood, cuts and changes of leadership. The word they use is unshakeable.
The obvious answer is to do what she has always done: stay calm, carry the uncertainty and shield the team from the worst of it.
What she hasn’t yet examined is the trait she leans on so heavily: what it looks like at its best, what it costs when it falls short, and where it came from in the first place.
Enhance Your Character Traits at Work follows Nana through the months of the merger. Through what her team sees in her, three stories from her own working life, a restructure she has never talked about and a mentor from nearly forty years ago, she discovers that the strength she was expected to show and the strength her team needs from her are very different, and that the second one has far more to offer her organisation.
Blending storytelling with Reflection Points, Learning Questions, Self-Coaching Exercises and the Enhance Your Character Traits at Work Workbook, the resource guides each of your people through the same journey Nana takes. It is designed for independent learning and for facilitator-supported group sessions, with a full Facilitator Guide and a Manager’s Guide that explores the same story from the other side of the table.
Enhance Your Character Traits explores the qualities that shape how you work, lead and respond under pressure, and how to build your inner strength. Here, one trait is seen from three sides through a Success Story, a Failure Story and a Passion Story, and brought to one of the moments organisations know best: change.
For Your Organisation
The Challenge
Your organisation goes through change. Mergers, restructures, new systems, new leadership and new ways of working. Handled well, change is one of the ways an organisation renews itself, and the people who lead others through it are among its most valuable.
Those people are often experienced managers who are expected to steady everyone else while the ground moves under them too. They rely on character traits they have rarely examined: resilience, patience, courage, calm. Under pressure, the same trait that carries a team can quietly wear down the person carrying it, and leave the team less prepared than it seems.
When that happens, the strength stays with one person rather than spreading through the team. The person who looks unshakeable reaches the end of a change exhausted. The team, protected from the worst of it, misses the chance to build its own strength. And the next change finds everyone a little less ready.
Enhance Your Character Traits at Work helps each person recognise the trait they lean on, understand it at its best and when it falls short, and strengthen it so that it supports them and the people around them. And it helps managers notice the person who looks unshakeable, so that change becomes a time when strength is shared and grows across the whole organisation.
Who This Is For
People leading or supporting others through change: a merger, a restructure, a new system or any moment when the people around them are looking to them for steadiness.
Perhaps they are known for staying calm, and rarely tell anyone what that calm costs. Perhaps they have come through a previous change exhausted, and want this one to be different. Perhaps they rely on a trait they have never examined, and sense it has more to offer than they have yet discovered.
It is also for the managers who support them, and for the learning and development teams who design the programmes around change.
What Your People Will Learn
- How to recognise the character trait they lean on most under pressure
- How to hear what others see in them, and what it reveals
- How to write a Success Story, a Failure Story and a Passion Story that show one trait from three sides
- How a trait at its best differs from the same trait overused
- How to understand where their strength comes from, and what it was always meant to do
- How to practise their trait differently, in small daily ways
- How to draw on their trait on the hardest days without carrying everything alone
- How to turn their own strength into strength the whole team can share
What Your Managers Will Learn
- How to notice the person who looks unshakeable, and check how they are
- How to share what is known and unknown during change
- How to make room for people to ask for help without losing confidence in them
- How to help one person’s strength become the team’s
What’s Included
- Nana’s complete story, told in three parts
- Reflection Points, Learning Questions and Self-Coaching Exercises at every stage
- The five School of WorkLife practices for sustaining your character traits: Self-Awareness, Observation, Effective Self-Feedback, Insightful Self-Questions and Writing Your WorkLife Stories
- The Enhance Your Character Traits at Work Workbook, including the What Others See Sheet, the Trait Balance Map, the Three Stories Worksheet and the Shared Strength Plan
- A Facilitator Guide with three 90-minute session plans, facilitator questions and guidance on feedback in the group
- A Manager’s Guide, exploring the story from the director’s side of the table
How This Resource Works
Enhance Your Character Traits at Work is built in three parts and nine stages.
Part One — Discover the Trait You Lean On
- Stage 1 — The Announcement
- Stage 2 — What Others See
- Stage 3 — Naming the Trait
Part Two — Develop the Trait Through Three Stories
- Stage 4 — The Flood: Nana’s Success Story
- Stage 5 — The Restructure: Nana’s Failure Story
- Stage 6 — The Storytime by Torchlight: Nana’s Passion Story
Part Three — Direct the Trait
- Stage 7 — Practising Differently
- Stage 8 — The Hardest Day
- Stage 9 — Shared Strength
Each stage follows Nana through a moment in the months of the merger, then turns to the experience of each of your people with a Reflection Point, Learning Questions and a Self-Coaching Exercise, and closes with time to write. By the final stage, each of your people has named the trait they lean on, seen it from three sides through their own Success, Failure and Passion Stories, and begun to turn it into strength their team can share.