BOOK NOTES

If psychologist Sigmund Freud is famous for treating what’s wrong with people, Don Clifton should be remembered for studying and developing what’s right with people. We seem fixated with fixing. We study disease, not health. Study causes of divorce and less about what makes happy marriages. More about studies of sadness rather than joy. Gallup estimates by knowing what’s right about people, their strengths—and allowing workers to use theirs everyday increases customer engagement scores and profitability while decreasing employee turnover. Currently, about 1 in 3 employees globally feel their strengths are in play daily.

Why? Most organizations still believe that each person can be competent in nearly anything and that one’s greatest growth comes from their greatest weakness. These flawed assumptions can be replaced with two that guide the world’s best managers. That is—each person’s talents are enduring and unique and their greatest growth comes from growth in their greatest strength. From interviewing and studying millions of the world’s best doctors, teachers, salespeople, hotel housekeepers, pastors, etc. Gallup discovered 34 of the most prevalent themes of human talent.

WHAT ARE STRENGTHS?

A strength is near perfect performance in a given task. You do it consistently, repeatedly, successfully, and happily. You flourish when you maximize your strengths, not fix your weaknesses. The notion that great performers need to be well rounded is simply misguided and not true.

To build a strong life around strengths you need talent, knowledge, and skills. Talents are your recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. Knowledge is your understanding of facts and principles accrued through education and experience. Skills are your abilities to perform specific tasks through practice and bring structure to experiential knowledge. Your talents, according to Gallup, are innate while you acquire skills and knowledge through learning and practice.

“…the key to building a bona fide strength is to identify your dominant talents and then develop them with knowledge and skills.”

Your greatest potential lies in your dominant talents. You can identify them from activities that come easy and quick for you. In things that simply absorb you, talents reveal themselves to you. CliftonStrengths® assessments can help you identify your talents and even better—give you a common language to describe them. Your talents are like broadband connections—loud and strong. They don’t change much after your mid-teens. Skills determine if you can do something while talents reveal how well and how often you do it.

Talents are your raw material for building strengths. They have a here’s how you show up quality (you can’t help it) and feel-good quality about them. Talents with knowledge and skills help you to live your best life.

If you attended a party where you don’t know most of the guests, would you spend most of your time with people you do know? How might you react to an employee who tells you they need the day off for a sick child? Or might you react to an alarm in an aircraft shortly after take-off? Your top of the mind reactions to any of these stressful situations often reveal the best trace of your talents.

Here’s another way to consider talents. When you are doing a particular activity, try to isolate the tense in which you are thinking. For example, if you are thinking “when will this be over,“ you probably aren’t using a talent. But if you are thinking about the future like, “when will I get to do this again?” it’s a good sign your talents are in play. CliftonStrengths assessment presents you with pairs of statements and asks you for spontaneous reactions to help identify your talents. This is where you have the greatest potential for a strength.

CliftonStrengths offers 34 themes (i.e., Achiever, Futuristic, Restorative, etc.). Gallup’s book describes each of the 34 and gives examples of how they show up differently in people. For example, the achiever theme helps explain one’s drive. You feel as if each day begins at zero. For a nurse, it may sound like ordering new equipment, meetings with other nurses, or entering data in a computerized logbook. A writer calls this theme her “divine restlessness” because there is always more to do. The narratives of each theme are revealing and compelling to understanding who you are.

FOCUS YOUR TALENTS

Our fixation with improving our weaknesses is deeply ingrained. Parents when presented with these grades from their students report card (A English, A Social Studies, C Biology, F Algebra) spent the most time discussing with them which subject? 77% Algebra, 6% English, 1% SS. It also helps to explain why we have, according to psychologist Dr. Seligman, over 40,000 studies of depression and 40 such studies on the subject of joy, fulfillment, and happiness. You can transform your talents into near perfect performances. Philosopher Baruch Spinoza said it best, “to be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.“ We are most likely to exercise our highest potential using strengths.

You filter the world through your signature themes (strengths). They are powerful because they are instinctual. Your chances of sharing the same top five themes in the same order with another person are 1:33 million. Your themes are interwoven uniquely with your other themes. The real secret to self-awareness is understanding these combined effects. Unlike many personality tests, these pieces aren’t mutually exclusive. They are all who you are and remain largely unlikely to change in your signature themes. You can, however, acquire new skills and knowledge to accompany them, which may alter the focus of your life.

By focusing on your signature themes, you become stronger, more robust, and open to discoveries. You begin to appreciate people with other themes. Your themes influence all the choices you make. While we remain obsessed with weaknesses, this is not an invitation to ignore them. Rather, we need to manage our weaknesses. And a weakness is according to Gallup, “something that gets in the way of success.” How do we manage them? Avoid working in areas of lesser talent. Hunker down to get better and use your other themes. Find a complimentary partner. Develop support systems and processes.

Your signature themes have little to say on your career field but much guidance to offer on your role. Themes may suggest directions you may take but there is NO linear relationship between themes and fields. Your signature strengths may not help you to decide between being a retailer, carpenter, or lawyer but they can help you enormously make the most of whatever field you choose. For example, many medical doctors studied by Gallup had responsibility in their top five while countless teachers have developer and empathy and salespeople have activator and competition in their themes.

To confirm this, Gallup did a study of 20,000 people who love their jobs. What about their signature strengths? Many people who had the same job differed in their strengths. And people with the same strengths were often in vastly different roles in their profession. The conclusion: YOU WILL BE MOST SUCCESSFUL WHEN YOU APPLY YOUR DOMINANT TALENTS IN YOUR ROLE MOST OF THE TIME.

FINAL NOTES

Effective leaders know their people and their strengths. It’s why Coach Phil Jackson—when he left the Bulls to join the Lakers —took his mediation practices and offensive tactics with him but gave a different book to each player based on what he really knew about them to show his appreciation and focus on who they were. He wanted to capitalize on their uniqueness.

Imagine knowing the strength profile of each of your team members….how you might communicate with them using the common language of strengths, treat them differently, and call upon them to contribute their gifts? Activators may become excellent recruiters, arrangers may love launching projects, and those with command probably don’t like to be supervised too closely. Gallup offers an entire section of the book with ideas devoted to managing people with every theme.

To build a strengths based culture, consider these two assumptions: (1) Each person’s talents are enduring and unique (2) Each person’s greatest room for growth is in their area of greatest strength

The leader needs to select for talent, set clear expectations, focus on strengths, and develop each employee. CliftonStrengths is not a selection tool, but rather a developmental one. Know each employee’s strongest talents, how these relate to their job, and how to build onto them. Organizations are a puzzle but by knowing the strengths of everyone, you let light into the room to avoid miscasting them.

Remember Don Clifton’s philosophy… “What would happen if we studied what was right about people?”

Publisher: Gallup Press, Washington, D.C., 2020