September 25, 2024

Thoughts, before Strengths

Today, in Power Shift, we're talking about Strengthsfinder results. Since I didn't post yesterday, there'll be two today—a before and after of the session.

In 2017, a year after I started working as a manager of managers I joined a new leadership team as I moved from leading customer-facing feature teams to partner-facing platform teams.

It was a time of rapid growth, and the organization I joined had been heavily impacted by the toll of change. I was their their fifth director in less than a year, managing around twelve teams with eighteen direct reports.

I was the first in a series of more experienced—hah!—directors to join at the time. When a team comes together to accomplish the goal, there’s always the question, “Alright, what do we have to work with?”

Enter Gallup’s Strengthsfinder.

There’s a myriad of personality or potential tests out there—Meyers’ Briggs; the Big Five; Culture Index; DISC; DiSC; etc. Yes, there are two “disc” tests that are quite different in results and what’s measured.1

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Strengths-based leadership

Strengthsfinder is the best one—for me—because it is focused on strengths. It removes the loaded language of weakness. Rather than trying to “fix” ourselves, each other, or beat ourselves up about it, this philosophy is focused on getting better at what you’re naturally best at.

Don’t fight against yourself for being you.

Find a way to make those unique lenses & skills shine.

Not only that, there are measurable effects when focusing on strengths-based performance & ways of working:

• 19% higher sales

• 72% lower turnover

• 29% higher profit

• 23% higher employee engagement

• 7% higher customer metrics

• 10% higher citizenship and volunteerism2

Not only that, it feels good to learn and see what you’re good at.

First Results

My first results were interesting, because of how I appreciated seeing them out front. I’ve whittled down the many pages describing each of the strengths into some short snippets that defines what they are.

1. Achiever: Driven to accomplish goals and results

2. Learner: Seeks new ideas and skills to cultivate growth

3. Arranger: Organizes for optimal productivity

4. Context: Leverages past insight to guide advancement

5. Intellection: Thinks innovatively to drive breakthroughts.

Apart from taking the test, there were two additional aspects to bringing our new leadership group together: a group coaching session and an individual coaching session.

Group coaching session

The team gathered at a houseboat moored in Weesperzijde part of the Amstel canal in Amsterdam. We met, talked, were shown the space, and grabbed our coffees.

After settling in, we laid the six-ish of our results and mapped them out to the four domains, or themes, our strengths fell into. It was the moment to collectively think and ask ourselves:

• Where are our gaps?

• How can we offset the gaps?

• What are we working on, or needing to get done, that can fully play into our strengths?

Of the four—executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking—we were nice and broad across. It was a great exercise…but one that needs far more than a single session to make impactful change of behavior.

Individual coaching session

This was extremely disappointing.

I came in and the first thing the coach said is, “oh, your results were really weird for a person in Tech. I haven’t seen results like these from people much.”

Great.

The rest of the session, I sought some sort of answer or practical guidance on how to best use this newly Named labels. I didn’t come out with any additional information—having done most of the research we discussed already, myself.

Today’s session

I wanted to document what I went through before as I enter the next session. My strengths have shifted since 2017, and there’s been a few notable events that have happened in the 7-years since.

1. Ideation

2. Intellection

3. Strategic

4. Input

5. Arranger

I haven’t whittled these down, but they are interesting. I’m fully in the Strategic Thinking domain this time’round—with ideation, intellection, strategic, and input.

We’ll be having a group session with Rachel de Jong, a Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths coach and a UX content designer currently at Instacart, where she was a founding member of the content design team. Since 2018, she has coached hundreds of people in tech and design through their StrengthsFinder results.3

and both have shared how exciting previous sessions have been with Rachel—a very different approach to analyzing & understanding the Strengthsfinder results.

My previous experience—while valuable—had little impact in my day-to-day life or understanding how I can lean into these Named strengths.

I’m excited for today’s session; eager for the conversation and hoping for different outcomes.

Before & After

I thought this was also an interesting exercise in writing a before and after sort of post for, potentially, other events I attend. In a few weeks, I’ll be heading over to Raleigh Founded North Street for an event presented by Raleigh-Durham Start-up Week called How to Use Social Media to Get More Sales.

It’ll be six hours of learning, well, how to use social media to get more sales. A before piece could be detailing what I’ve tried, and how I’ve gone about things so far—or just a general lamentation slash rant on the need to use social media in that way.

If yo want to join on October 17th, there’s still time to sign up!

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