Your Superpower is your contribution, the role that you’re put on this Earth to fill. It’s what you do better than anyone else.

Everyone has unique strengths – those things that come effortlessly and naturally to you. From Superpowers to Great Teams, a new online class offered by IDEO U in partnership with SYPartners, guides learners through a discovery process to identify their unique strengths—called Superpowers—and learn to amplify them.

Drawing from the archetypes and attributes of effective leaders, these superpowers range from empathy—a strong ability to understand the needs of others—to systems building—understanding all of the pieces of a process—to creative thinking, grit, and decisiveness, among others. Tapping into your superpower will not only help you to bring your best self to work, it will allow you to create the conditions for the people around you to thrive. Knowing yourself and how you relate to others is key to building strong relationships, great teams, and thriving organizations.

Superpower: Empathy

Empathizers have remarkable powers of perception when it comes to other people. With antennae up, they pick up on the needs and emotions around them, even when no one is saying anything. They also learn a person’s likes, dislikes, style, and personality quirks with ease—which makes them great stand-ins when the team is trying to build a relationship with someone and needs to find the right way in.

Collaboration Tips

• Empathizers are deeply affected by the emotions of those around them. If an Empathizer is having a hard time letting something go, you may need to spend some time talking it through before he or she can move on.
• While Empathizers are great listeners, it can be fruitless to try to vent with them about someone else. Their very nature is to push you to see the situation from the other person’s point of view.

Identify your superpower, build stronger work relationships, and learn how to set the conditions for thriving, collaborative teams in our new class, From Superpowers to Great Teams.