A SWAT team is a special weapons and tactics team. But as a manager, you probably don’t need one of those.
Your special weapon is a SWOT analysis.
It will help you form a complete picture of your team audit’s skills making it easier to anticipate work challenges and figure out what kind of professional development to invest in.
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Strengths and weaknesses are internal.
Things coming from within the organization and team.
For example, resources or the lack thereof, the team size or the expertise of its members.
On the other hand, opportunities and threats are external factors such as industry trends, potential partners, or competing organizations.
What makes the difference between a strength and a weakness or an opportunity and a threat is whether you think it will have a positive or negative effect on your team.
To conduct a SWOT analysis, you need your entire team, or if not the entire team, at least a representative group so you can make sure you get as complete a picture as possible.
Together, list your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and compile them in a SWOT matrix, which looks like this.
It’s best to start with the top squares, strengths and weaknesses.
That way, you can figure out if your strengths will help open up opportunities or if your weaknesses might make you more susceptible to certain threats.
This makes it easier to fill out the bottom squares.
Once you’ve done your SWOT analysis, your team can then start coming up with an action plan for how to capitalize on your strengths, fortify your weaknesses, minimize your threats, and grab every great opportunity.
