How to capitalise on your Strengths
Review: Gallup CliftonStrengths.
Gallup – CliftonStrengths Disclaimer: I have no commercial arrangements with Gallup whatsoever, this review is entirely independent.
As part of my research, I recently undertook the Gallup (as in surveys/polls) CliftonStrengths assessment. A deep dive questionnaire based on Gallup’s many years of business and management research that identifies your key managerial strengths, giving you suggestions on how to improve them and pointing out things to avoid. I’m recommending it, its accuracy is stupefying, and its recommendations are well thought out and practical. I did The Top 5 CliftonStrengths Assessment at a cost: $66.00 AUD.
Your ClifttonStrengths are your natural talents, which are not always easy to identify or are simply taken for granted. The developer Don Clifton, wrote “Talent x Investment = Strength” plus "Your talents are your naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour." They are innate, natural abilities you can productively apply. To turn your talents into strengths, you must invest in them -- practice using them and add knowledge and skills to them.
Step 1: Take the assessment
During this 30-minute assessment, you'll see 177 paired statements, you choose which one best describes you in under 20 seconds. The assessment measures your talents, your natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving -- and categorizes them into the 34 CliftonStrengths themes.
Step 2: Get your results
You receive customized reports, and guides that help you manage your strengths, improve on them and avoid pitfalls that you are naturally inclined to fall into.
The report statements describe who you are precisely.
Developed over decades spent studying millions of CliftonStrengths assessment results, these statements explain exactly how each of your Signature Themes makes you stand out in the world.
Your CliftonStrengths 34 Report shows you how to:
Make the most of your strongest CliftonStrengths.
Understand your full CliftonStrengths profile.
Manage potential weaknesses.
Managing a team is no easy feat, most managers feel:
The CliftonStrengths Managers Report helps you understand how your strengths can make you a better manager and improve your team's performance.
Like there's not enough time in the day.
Paralysed by the pressure to meet performance goals.
Unsure of how to help their teams resolve conflict and solve problems.
Like they're struggling to balance their own work while managing a team.
Step 3: Use your results to improve yourself
There is a customized dashboard on the Gallup Access platform where you will find resources and tools that will help you learn how to do more of what you naturally do best.
Here are 3 of my reports as an example:
1. Top 5 Themes
My Top 5 Themes out of a total of 34, are my greatest strengths.
1. Maximizer
2. Individualization
3. Achiever
4. Arranger
5. Focus
Here is an example of one of the Maximizer themes attributes - Personal Strengths.
Personalized Strengths: What makes me stand out?
People who are especially talented in the Maximizer theme focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence. They seek to transform something strong into something superb.
By nature, you normally devote your energies to pinpointing what makes people special and unique. This knowledge probably permits you to inspire many individuals to do their finest work. Chances are good that you are grateful when your questions are answered, your studies yield new information or your knowledge increases. You routinely deepen your understanding through conversations, the media, the Internet, books, or classes. You resist spending the majority of your time on topics that are not in line with your natural abilities. Instead, you choose to take advantage of your talents — and by doing so, you consistently produce top-notch results. It’s very likely that you are likely to do your best work when someone truly recognizes your strengths. You want to be appreciated for the talents you own, the skills you possess, and the knowledge you have acquired. Because of your strengths, you often accommodate the unique talents of people. Characteristically you accept human beings just as they are. You argue that excellent outcomes are produced by people who have ample opportunities each day to do what they do well. Instinctively, you inspire others by finding out what motivates them. You give individuals lots of recognition. You celebrate each person’s uniqueness. Your acknowledgments and compliments typically energize people.
2. Report For Managers
Example: INFLUENCING (One element out of 10 elements provided)
You focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence. You seek to transform something strong into something superb. How This Theme Contributes to Your Success You are a catalyst for team development. Your approach to developmental conversations includes taking the time to dissect goals and performance metrics so that they meet your standard for quality and excellence. You have a reputation for taking good things and making them better. You always focus on excellence in everything, whether on a personal, team or organizational level. You want good things to become great, satisfied customers to become brand advocates and your team members to be more than just successful — you want them to be exceptional. You can sense and pinpoint others’ strengths.
However, you’re not satisfied with just pointing out and praising those strengths. You want to nourish them and push that individual to new heights of success. This strengths-focused recognition energizes team members and encourages them to continue investing in themselves.
How this theme could get in the way of your success
Your insatiable need for excellence could frustrate team members who want to get a project to a good spot. Rely on others to help you know when good enough is truly good enough.
Remember, people aren’t projects you need to maximize; they are individuals with unique sets of strengths that you should develop and care for. Don’t let your natural ability to see areas of improvement affect your employees in a critical way.
Action items
How to apply Maximizer as a Manager
This theme gives you an edge — here’s how you can use it.
Mention each team member’s major accomplishment while you’re coaching or giving feedback. You instinctively see the best in others, and you want to help make them even better. When you highlight team members’ best performance, they become more aware of their strengths and contributions.
Make it a weekly habit to ask your team members when the team performed its best this week. This question helps your team members see their best moments from two perspectives: First, they realize how the team succeeded, and second, they notice their personal contributions to the achievement.
Meet with your highest achievers more often. Study how each one reaches their goals and use those insights to coach them to higher levels of success. As they increase their performance, it’ll inspire their peers to do more while also providing you with best practices to coach all your team members to be their best.
Set strategic performance metrics and milestones for your team. Start every day with an assessment of progress: your own, your team’s and everyone’s on the team. Every employee needs to feel challenged and to learn and grow on the job. Your intentionality when it comes to achieving excellence will meet this need and create a more productive team.
3. Signature themes report
Many years of research conducted by The Gallup Organization suggest that the most effective people are those who understand their strengths and behaviours. These people are best able to develop strategies to meet and exceed the demands of their daily lives, their careers, and their families. A review of the knowledge and skills you have acquired can provide a basic sense of your abilities, but an awareness and understanding of your natural talents will provide true insight into the core reasons behind your consistent successes.
Your Signature Themes report presents your five most dominant themes of talent, in the rank order revealed by your responses to StrengthsFinder. Of the 34 themes measured, these are your "top five."
Your Signature Themes are very important in maximizing the talents that lead to your successes. By focusing on your Signature Themes, separately and in combination, you can identify your talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy personal and career success through consistent, near-perfect performance.
Maximizer example
Excellence, not average, is your measure. Taking something from below average to slightly above average takes a great deal of effort and in your opinion is not very rewarding. Transforming something strong into something superb takes just as much effort but is much more thrilling. Strengths, whether yours or someone else’s, fascinate you. Like a diver after pearls, you search them out, watching for the tell-tale signs of strength. A glimpse of untutored excellence, rapid learning, a skill mastered without recourse to steps—all these are clues that a strength may be in play. And having found a strength, you feel compelled to nurture it, refine it, and stretch it toward excellence.
You polish the pearl until it shines. This natural sorting of strengths means that others see you as discriminating. You choose to spend time with people who appreciate your particular strengths. Likewise, you are attracted to others who seem to have found and cultivated their own strengths. You tend to avoid those who want to fix you and make you well rounded. You don’t want to spend your life bemoaning what you lack. Rather, you want to capitalize on the gifts with which you are blessed. It’s more fun. It’s more productive. And, counterintuitively, it is more demanding.
What makes me stand out?
This is a summary of all of my strengths and what I do well.
You are an expert in team development.
By nature, you normally devote your energies to pinpointing what makes people special and unique. This knowledge permits you to inspire individuals to do their finest work. You routinely deepen your understanding through conversations, characteristically you accept human beings just as they are. You argue that excellent outcomes are produced by people who have ample opportunities each day to do what they do well. Instinctively, you inspire others by finding out what motivates them. You give individuals lots of recognition and celebrate each person’s uniqueness. Your acknowledgments, understanding and recognition typically energize people.
You embrace a wide array of people, you honour their differences with ease and the specific things each one does well. These insights help you mix and match one person’s talents, skills, and knowledge with those of others in a team. Ultimately, you suggest positioning individuals in such a way that unique traits complement each other. Because of your strengths, your intuit — that is, you know without conscious reasoning — how individuals with very different work styles or personalities can complement each other.
You are intrigued by the unique qualities of each person. You are impatient with generalizations or “types” because you don’t want to obscure what is special and distinct about each person. Instead, you focus on the differences between individuals, you instinctively observe each person’s style, each person’s motivation, how each thinks, and how each builds relationships. Because you are such a keen observer of other people’s strengths, you can draw out the best in each person. This Individualization theme helps you build productive, high-performance teams, you are a catalyst for team development and change. You look to nourish people’s strengths and push individuals to new heights of success.
This strengths-focused recognition energizes team members and encourages them to continue investing in themselves. You are not satisfied until you make each person feel seen, heard and valued. To do this, you get to know team members better in the context of work while discovering who they are at a personal level. This helps you build stronger, longer-lasting relationships with team members. you push others outside of their comfort zone. You think more about what can be than what is. When you share this curiosity about the future with others, you push a team to think beyond today and find new and smarter ways of working.
Additional Reports
1. Strengths Insight Guide.
2. Your Theme Sequence Report.
Finally
This was only a brief look into all of the reports and information provided from doing the assessment. Overall I found the results to be incredibly accurate and the suggestions for how to improve myself and avoid pitfalls to be helpful, practical and realistic.
For $66.00 AUD, I think it is a worthwhile investment in developing your natural talents and management effectiveness.