Leading from a Place of Strength.
What I learned from Taking the CliftonStrengths Assessment.
As part of my professional development, I recently decided to work with a career coach. The decision came after identifying long-term goals for my career, namely a desire to develop stronger teams and take on a leadership role within an organization. To get there, I recognized I would need to become more comfortable owning my domains of expertise, cultivate a deeper self-awareness of my strengths and how to communicate these, and ultimately develop my leadership style.
After speaking to colleagues about their experience with career coaches, I chose to work with Tomer Yogev of The Big Joy Theory. Tomer and his wife are executive coaches based in Chicago who help leaders hone their authentic leadership presence so they can embody trust, confidence, and ultimately joy. They do this by assisting clients in identifying their strengths and learning how to communicate their value to others.
In preparation for my first session, Tomer asked me to take the CliftonStrengths Assessment, formerly known as the StrengthsFinders test. Don Clifton formed the test in 1999 to answer a simple question, what would happen if we studied what was right with people rather than what was wrong with them? The 30-minute assessment comprises 177 paired statements that aim to "identify specific traits and a framework for developing [these] traits." Since its development, more than 27,158,744 people worldwide have leveraged it as a tool for their personal and professional development.
At the core of the test is a simple formula, Talent x Investment = Strength. Talent is a natural way of thinking, feeling, or behaving. Our talents develop into strengths through practice, developing skills, and building our knowledge base. While we possess all 34 strengths to varying degrees, our top five represent the ones we have dedicated tremendous time to cultivate.
My top five strength results were: Relator, Discipline, Learner, Intellection, and Maximizer.
Each strength exists within one of four domains, a grouping that describes how they work together to accomplish goals. These four domains are executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. The executing domain is a set of strengths that describe how a person turns ideas into reality. The influencing domain explains how you take charge and persuade others. Lastly, the relationship domain describes how you build strong relationships with others, while strategic thinking demonstrates how you absorb and analyze information.
Here's a short description of my top five strengths and their accompanying domain:
Relator | Relationship-Building: You enjoy forming genuine and mutually rewarding relationships that allow you to build close, long-lasting connections that foster trust and confidence.
Discipline | Executing: You create structure and bring predictability to turmoil by developing systems to ensure precision and increase efficiency.
Learner | Strategic Thinking: You use your passion for learning to add value to your own and others' lives. You enjoy reflecting on what you know and need time to examine new information.
Intellection | Strategic Thinking: You are driven by your mental activity, often deriving pleasure from intelligent conversations and time deep in thought.
Maximizer | Influencing: You focus on strengths to stimulate personal and group excellence, often seeking to transform something from good to great.
My top ten strengths broken down across the four domains.
My first instinct when learning something new is to go into a research hole, and this time was no different. Before my next coaching session, I had read through the descriptions of each strength, underlining keywords that stood out to me. I listened to a few podcasts where guests reflected on identifying and developing their strengths. Lastly, I asked my close friends and family whether these strengths were accurate to their experience of me and how they saw them present in my life.
As I began to learn more about a strengths-based approach, I noticed a shift in how I understood myself and others.
This learning coincided with my work in therapy, where I've been unpacking harmful narratives I've inherited around introversion, gender, and neurodiversity. There I've learned how easy it can be to internalize oppressive beliefs and develop a self-view rooted in lack when navigating a white supremacist-patriarchal-capitalist culture. As my familiarity with positive psychology and a strengths-based approach grew through therapy and coaching, I became better equipped at strengthening my self-esteem through investing energy to develop my strengths and differences. Rather than measuring myself by dominant attributes and consistently falling short, I could direct my attention to recognizing and cultivating the strength in what was uniquely my own.
In my second session with Tomer, he shared that often we focus on what we've done in our roles when writing a resume, updating our LinkedIn, or interviewing. Yet he imparted an invaluable lesson - it's not about what we do, but how.
Through understanding our strengths, we not only learn to communicate our approach to work. We also establish a filter to determine whether a role or organization is the right fit for us. For example, my strength of discipline is integral to how I approach my personal and professional life. It's natural for me to create systems, to develop Gantt charts and agendas for weekly house check-ins, and I thrive in spaces where I can bring order and predictability. Suppose an organization prefers a culture of adaptability and improvisation, or there's a lack of clarity around outcomes and how to achieve them. My discipline strength can go underfed and undervalued in such a space if there is resistance to developing these structures and systems.
By deepening our self-awareness of what we do well, we also begin to shed light on the areas where we need support. I found this area particularly helpful as I imagine assembling a team and working together. A team is not made of individual superheroes but ideally a collection of diverse strengths and perspectives that support and enhance one another. As someone who values predictability, I've learned my strength can make me rigid and lead me to overlook how others thrive on the freedom to innovate and adapt. For this reason, I've learned to have adaptable friends and team members who balance my need for predictability with a willingness to be present to possibilities.
Another helpful concept Tomer introduced was the distinction between raw and mature strengths. Raw strengths are often self-serving and sometimes less informed or practiced. However, experience and reflection mature our strengths and orient us towards others. When we find ourselves in stressful situations or workplaces, we're inclined to exhibit strengths in a raw form as a self-protective measure. The sentences below describe how my discipline strength shows up in its raw and mature forms:
Raw: If my world is out of order, I'm a mess.
Mature: When someone's world is a mess, I can help restore order.
By recognizing the contexts and practices that nurture our strengths, we can develop methods to identify organizations that help take our strengths from raw to mature.For my professional development, I selected Discipline, Intellection, and Maximizer as three strengths I wanted to develop. While these strengths were able to mature in other spheres of my life, I had yet to bring them into my professional life and career. This week's homework was to identify practices I wanted to do more of, continue doing, and do less to help each strength mature. I found sitting down to reflect on these questions helpful, as it allowed me to identify measurable steps towards becoming who I want to be.
One ritual I committed to was writing a bi-monthly public blog, where I would share a topic I'm exploring and my learning process.
My closest friends can attest that my favorite thing to do is learn something and share it with others, whether it's constructions of gender in Islamic theology or how to set up a Roth IRA. In an interview, I was once asked what got me up in the morning, to which I responded the opportunity to learn something about myself or the world around me and share it with others. My hope for this blog is to do just that.
I recommend taking the CliftonStrengths test if you’re looking for an opportunity to deepen your self-awareness and develop tools to achieve excellence. The test is $19.99 for your top five strengths and a basic introduction, or $49.99 for your full 34 and a more in-depth explanation of these. I’ve taken both and found more value in the full set of 34 strengths for its actionable steps and things to watch out for.
Some people I think who would benefit from this are professionals early in their career, college students interested in personal growth, managers interested in leveraging their teams' strengths, or people making a career transition and looking to communicate the value they bring and ensure organizational fit.
If you want to learn more about a strength-based approach, here are some free resources:
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