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: Problem Solving

Problem Solvers have a laser-like ability to cut to the heart of a problem and reveal a previously unseen path forward. Like an urgent-care doctor doing an intake, they’ll ask just enough questions to assess what’s going wrong and why. And then—bam—it all falls into place: They can see both the illness and the cure all at once. Problem Solvers can be of great help to a team that has hit a dead end and feels stuck.

Collaboration Tips

• Problem Solvers think on their feet and process information rapidly, which may put them a few steps ahead of you. If you’re having a hard time keeping up, ask them to pause and walk you through their thought process.
• Problem Solvers know and accept the fact that no solution is perfect. If you’re someone who excels at detecting gaps, you’ll never be satisfied with anything they suggest. Try to agree in advance on what “good enough” is.

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.