Descriptors: point person, disciplined, purposeful, laser-like precision, identifies important areas quickly, goal setter and goal getter
Responsibility – You take psychological ownership of what you say you will do, feeling duty bound to follow it through to completion. This near obsession for doing things right and your impeccable ethics create your reputation as utterly dependable. In short, you do the right thing, do things right, and do what you say you’re going to do.
Descriptors: committed, accountable, independent, trusted, conscientious
Restorative – You are adept at dealing with problems. You enjoy the challenge of analyzing symptoms, identifying what’s wrong, and finding the solution. It energizes you. You enjoy revitalizing things, people, or processes.
Descriptors: problem solver, troubleshooter, finds improvements and solutions
The Thinking strengths explain how you analyze the world. Those who possess one or more of the eight Thinking themes are exactly that—Thinkers. They need to be in roles that don’t merely execute but have some mental activity behind it. Early careerists with a lot of Thinking themes are often frustrated by the “pay your dues” mentality in many corporations, relegating them to worker bee roles when they’d rather be doing the mental heavily lifting.
Analytical – You search for reasons and causes. You think about all the factors that could affect a situation. Others see you as logical and rigorous. You do not want to destroy others’ ideas, but you do insist that their theories be sound.
Descriptors: thinks things through, smart, deep, thorough, comfortable with numbers, figures, and charts
Context – The past is important to you because it helps you understand the present. By thinking back, you see the blueprints for the present, and realize what the original intent was. You must discipline yourself to ask the questions and allow the blueprints to emerge.
Descriptors: has robust historical frame of reference, learns lessons from the past, knows how things came to be, can leverage knowledge of the past
Futuristic – You are inspired by what could be and inspire others with your vision. You see in detail what the future might hold, and it pulls you forward. You make the picture as vivid as possible for others to see and keep asking, “Wouldn’t it be great if…?”
Descriptors: imaginative, creative, visionary, inspiring
Ideation – You are fascinated by ideas and find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. Others may label you creative, original or conceptual, or even smart. What you are sure of is that ideas are thrilling.
Descriptors: improves on the existing, learns quickly, agile mind
Input – You have a craving to know more and often collect and archive information. You keep acquiring, compiling and filing stuff away because it’s interesting and keeps your mind fresh, without knowing when and why you might need it.
Descriptors: great resource, knowledgeable, excellent memory, mind for detail, collects interesting things, excellent conversationalist
Intellection – You like to think; you like mental activity. You enjoy time alone because you can reflect. This introspection lets you compare what you are doing with all the thoughts and ideas that your mind conceives. This mental hum is a constant in your life.
Descriptors: excellent thinker, enjoys musing, capable of deep and philosophical thought, able to work alone
Learner – You have a great desire to continuously improve. Learning enables you to thrive in dynamic work environments where you are asked to take on short project assignments and learn a lot about the new subject matter in a short period of time.
Descriptors: always learning, catches on quickly, interested in many things, finds life intriguing
Strategic – You find alternative ways to proceed, sorting through clutter to find the best route. This ability cannot be taught. You play out alternative scenarios allowing you to see around the next corner. You discard paths that lead nowhere.
Descriptors: good judgment, identifies risk, sees the shortest path to a goal, quickly identifies patterns
Now that I’ve introduced the strengths by category, I’d like to address some commonly asked questions before we go further into strengths exploration.
Common Strengths Q & A
Where can I purchase the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment?
tinyurl.com/yar7d7f4
I’ve taken StrengthsFinder in the past. Do I need to retake it?
I suggest retaking the assessment if you’ve had a significant life or job change or if you took the assessment more than three years ago.
I’ve taken the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment before. I’m trying to take it again and I’m getting an error message.
Gallup allows one Top 5 assessment completion per account created on their website. They prefer you purchase the “All 34 CliftonStrengths” report (which is more expensive) if you’ve already taken the Top 5. To retake the Top 5 assessment you’ll need to create a new account using a different email address.
I’m considering changing jobs. How can I tell if I have the right strengths?
Remember, your strengths are only one aspect of the four pillars of career fit. In addition, multiple combinations of strengths could prove successful in a role. An example is project management. If a person has Discipline (Executing theme), Achiever (Executing theme), Learner (Thinking theme), Consistency (Executing theme), and Input (Thinking theme), they have three Executing and two Thinking strengths. This person will approach project management as a Doer and a Thinker.
Perhaps the greatest contribution they bring is the ability to keep projects moving forward and planning out complex projects into work breakdown structures based on their Discipline talent. Another contribution stems from the Input strength because people with Input are great at taking in information and have a mind for details and facts.
However, a person with Influencing and Relating strengths could be just as effective in a project manager role, approaching his or her job in a completely different way. The people-facing talents would create a tendency to concentrate more on the project team than tasks. Let’s say a person’s strengths are Relator, Activator, Individualization, Arranger, and Positivity.
The approach to project management in this case would be flexibility and an ability to calmly handle chaos (Arranger), while influencing people’s sense of urgency to initiate their tasks through the Activator talent. The Relator strength would equip them to find common ground and build connections easily across the organization. People-facing and inward-facing strengths can both contribute to success in the same role.
Where strengths become more exclusive is in specialist or expert roles. Specialists tend to perform a narrower set of tasks than generalists do. Individual expert roles such as IT, compliance, engineering, quality assurance, and architectural design often have a dominant set of strengths correlated with their roles. For example, engineering is an expert occupation and requires at least one of a few strengths such as Analytical (fact-finding), Deliberative (risk mitigating), Restorative (problem-solving).
Do I need to purchase “All 34 CliftonStrengths,” or should I purchase only the Top 5?
The Top 5 report is usually sufficient for anyone who wants to understand or explain his or her own strengths. Strengths are useful for job interviews, personal development, building teams, and many other applications. One situation when it might be necessary to view the full thirty-four strengths is when you are hiring or if you’re considering a role where you know a strength is of paramount importance.
For example, I’m often asked what strengths are required to have a job like mine. As a career consultant I help career changers who are often uncertain of their future. As a Leadership
Consultant I help leaders solve complex challenges.
While coaches can be successful with a wide variety of different strength profiles, helping people figure out work they’re wired for, determining how to get from where they are now to where they want to be, and helping leaders solve intractable challenges requires strategic thinking.
If you’re interested in a consulting career and Strategic is not in your Top 5, you can purchase the “All 34 CliftonStrengths” report to see if it appears in the Top 10.
I don’t agree with my results. What should I do?
I’ve had two people disagree with some, but not all, of their strengths in approximately two thousand strength discussions. The questions I ask are, “Were you distracted when you took the assessment?” and “Did you let quite a few questions pass without answering?” The assessment is timed and provides you with twenty seconds to respond to each statement. “Did you answer the questions as you thought you should, rather than how you really are?”
If the answer is no to the above questions, have someone who knows you well read your “Strengths Insight Guide” report, downloadable from your dashboard at www.gallupstrengthscenter.com, and provide his or her opinion on how well each strength represents you.
If the person who reads your report agrees your report doesn’t sound like you, retake it. Again, I’ve never had one person completely disagree with all five strengths, and only one person out of two thousand chose to retake it. They agreed with their next set of results, so it’s also possible that person misread the instructions or the assessment statements.
Is there rhyme or reason to the order of my strengths? Is the first one listed my strongest?
This question will be fully answered in the next section, “Identifying Your Driver, Passenger, and Fuel Strengths.”
My strengths sound just like me, but how do I explain this to other people, such as interviewers?
The “How to Wow Interviewers” section of “Show the World!” discusses this and provides the link to an instructional video.
Identifying Your Driver, Passenger, and Fuel Strengths
After you’ve taken the StrengthsFinder assessment, you’ll have access to download a free report from the Gallup website called the “Strengths Insight Guide.” This report can be found at www.gallupstrengthscenter.com on the main page after logging in, under Reports and Tools, shown here:
We’ll use this report to complete an exercise to order your strengths by intensity (most-to-least strong). About 50% of the time, after clients read their report, they will order the list of strengths differently than the default rank order provided by Gallup. While you’re on the Gallup website, also download the “Strengths Insight and Action Planning Guide.” It has reflection questions you should find helpful.
I was meeting with a friend for brunch recently, and she brought her strengths results to discuss with me. Tammy’s report had Includer listed first as her top strength, but after reading her report she felt Strategic was the most compelling of the five.
What’s the difference? Well, your number one strength is going to be the one that’s most important for you to use every day. It sets your priorities. In Tammy’s example, Strategic, which is the ability to generate alternatives and figure out the best available option, compels her more than the ability to draw in people who feel left out (Includer).
Includer is one of her strengths. She just identifies more with Strategic. This makes Strategic the strongest of Tammy’s top five strengths.
The order of your strengths is important. Your top (strongest) strength is like the Driver of a car. The Driver is in control. He decides the route to take and how fast to drive. He determines whether to make a stop on the way to the destination and perhaps even controls the radio.
The Driver calls the shots.
Just as the Driver of a car decides where the car is heading, your Driver strength sets your priorities every day in your work because it has greater intensity than the other strengths.
Continuing the car analogy, your strengths can be organized as follows:
• Driver: This is the strength that you would consider very strong.
• Passengers: These are the next two strengths you would consider strong. However, they aren’t as strong as your number one strength.
• Fuel: These two strengths are moderate in intensity.
Now, picture the Driver behind the wheel of the car. The passengers sit in the back seat like co-pilots and help the driver navigate the car. They aren’t in control, but they can influence the Driver.
For example, when I pick up my son, Justin, from school, my daughter, Kathryn, and I always pass a Bruster’s Ice Cream store. She almost always asks if we can stop for ice cream before or after we pick up Justin. And I almost always say no. However, in the past couple of years I’ve stopped twice in response to her plea for ice cream. As a Passenger she can influence me, the Driver. The Passenger is not as intense as the Driver but still has influence.
Fuel strengths are the most moderate in strength of your top five. In fact, the Fuel in a car doesn’t have any interest in trying to influence the Driver where it should go. It provides the gas needed to reach the destination and nothing more. The Fuel strengths give you the push you need to accomplish your priorities, but these strengths work in service to the Driver.
Let me explain with an example. If Achiever is my Driver strength, my priority every single day is to be tremendously productive. If Achiever is a Fuel, I am busy and productive each day but with much less intensity. My number one priority is not to be productive. The ambition I have serves the greater strength (Driver) to accomplish its goals. If my Driver were WOO (Winning Others Over), my priority would be to meet and interact with everyone whose path I crossed that day. Achiever as a Fuel would give me the stamina to network and schmooze with people throughout the day.
I’ll explain more about your Driver, Passenger, and Fuel strengths, but first let’s do a ranking exercise to see how you would order your strengths.
After taking the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment, open your “Strengths Insight Guide” and read each paragraph under “What makes you stand out?” Underline or highlight each phrase or sentence that describes you—you probably won’t agree strongly with all statements.
The image below illustrates a strength in my own “Strengths Insight Guide”—Ideation—along with its description. One of the things that makes this report valuable is the description is customized to you. Another person with the Ideation strength will have variations in the description in his or her report because elements of some of your other top strengths are woven into the description, which is why this report resonates so strongly with the person who took the assessment.
After you complete the underlining exercise for your first strength:
Reflect: Is this strength very strong, strong, or moderately strong in you? Note your impression on your report next to the strength, such as VS for very strong, S for strong, and MS for moderately strong.
Repeat the underlining exercise for the next strength listed in your “Strengths Insight Guide.”
Reflect: Is this a little stronger, equally strong, or a little less strong than the first strength? Again, note your answer by marking very strong (VS), strong (S), or moderate (M) next to the strength.
Repeat the underlining and comparison exercise for all five strengths, determining if they are slightly stronger, equal to, or slightly less strong than the others. This will help you order the strengths. Some people agree with the ranking Gallup provided, while others reorder them. Try not to worry about getting the order wrong. It’s not black and white, and you can always reorder your strengths if the guide doesn’t feel accurate.
Take a m
oment, now, to download the Coachee Strengths Worksheet at MyYouMap.com.
Next, enter your strongest theme into the Driver section on page two of the Coachee Strengths Worksheet you downloaded, shown here:
Note: Sometimes people have two Drivers. This occurs when you simply cannot choose one strength as the most dominant and consider two strengths as equally very strong. In this case, the two strengths work like a student driver education car, where the student and the instructor can take over control of the car. One strength sets your priorities in some situations, and the other strength takes over in other situations.
No right or wrong order exists, but it would be highly unusual to have three Drivers. Choose one, ideally, and two if they are tied for top spot.
Place the next strongest themes in the Passenger section of the strengths worksheet, and the moderately strong themes in the Fuel section, shown here:
Tip: If you’re struggling to determine your Driver (very strong), Passengers (strong) and Fuel (moderate) strengths, look at your “Strengths Insight Guide” to see which strengths have the most or least amount of underlining.
Keep in mind you don’t use your strengths one at a time. Your Driver and Passenger strengths combine, or work together, like cogs work together to make the hands of an analog watch move.
Put another way, when you combine primary colors such as yellow and blue, you create green. Similarly, your strengths combine to create new strength behaviors. I call these Strength Personas.
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