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: Experimentation

Experimenters have a prototyping mindset. They’re able to rapidly generate many ideas, zero in on the most promising ones, put them into motion, and refine along the way. They have high standards, but they’re also not afraid of embarrassment or failure. Experimenters can help when the team is experiencing “analysis paralysis” and can’t take action—or when it simply can’t come up with enough new ideas.

Collaboration Tips

• Resist the temptation to edit too early when working with Experimenters. Their process is to generate a lot of ideas without judgment, then narrow down the best ones.
• Experimenters are very comfortable having their work critiqued—they don’t take it personally. So remember when they critique your work, they don’t intend for you to take it personally either.

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.