My Journey with StrengthsFinder
One day in 2009, I decided to walk into the bookstore to browse. Right near the entrance of the bookstore, on the table with “New Arrivals” was a book that caught my attention – “StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath“. A quick flip of the book revealed that this was a book by Gallup. In my previous work engagements, I had been in contact with some of Gallup’s staff who had also kindly sent me some books for reading. The two books – “Human Sigma” and “Follow this path” – were both intriguing reads.
Browsing the book, I found that the book resonated with me, and the strengths-based approach made so much sense to me. We need to focus on strengths, not weakness! So I promptly bought the book, and took the assessment.
As one of the self-improvement junkies, I’ve taken many tests online. While most were just for fun, I particularly loved the MBTI and DISC profiling tools. So StrengthsFinder was (then) just another assessment to add to my belt of self-awareness. After completing the assessment, I read the report and was so impressed by it that I promptly bought another copy and handed it over to my best friend. We then shared our reports with each other, mused over our findings, and never really spoke about it again.
It was an extremely sad under-utilisation of one of the best inventory tools ever. Of course, I didn’t know it then. Few years later in 2012, our church decided to use this as a development tool for our leaders. They found it so useful (even without any formal training whatsoever), that they bought out all the “StrengthsFinder 2.0″ books when one of the major bookstore chains “Borders” closed down in Singapore.
So the group of us took the assessment, and we come together for a facilitation session on how to organise our ministry leadership using our strengths. One of the first questions I was asked was “What are your top 5 strengths?” My reply was “I don’t remember, let me check my report.”
How To Maximize Your StrengthsFinder Report
Simple Step 1: Memorise your Top 5 StrengthsFinder Talent Themes (In order)
Before we can do anything with our Talent Themes (which are developed into strengths), we must first remember what they are. It would be difficult to recognise when a particular theme is being used when we don’t even remember what they are.
If you need some help at the beginning, here are some helpful approaches
- Typing them out in your phone as a note
- Downloading the StrengthsFinder App and saving a screen shot of your top 5 talent themes as your home or lock screen.
Simple Step 2: Read your reports and highlight the sentences that describes you
This step will help you to think more about what you feel is you, and what you do not feel is you. Overall, it helps create greater ownership and awareness of your own themes. Start with the “Signature Theme Report” as this provides you with the generic descriptions of each talent theme. When you are done, do the same for your “Strengths Insights Report” which provides you with a personalised description of your talent themes.
Simple Step 3: Share your report with 3 friends
In personal development, there is something called the Johari Window, and it looks something like this:
The general idea is to expand the Quadrant 1 – Known by Self – and that is done via a few processes:
- Feedback Solicitation
- Self-Disclosure/exposure
- Other’s Observation
- Self-Discovery
- Share Discovery
Sharing your report with your friends does a few things for you
- It increases self-disclosure. There may be things in the report you feel are true to you that your friends may disagree. By sharing this with your friends, they will get to know you more.
- It solicits feedback and increases self-awareness. There may be things in your report that you do not feel describes you, but your friends will tell you otherwise. Often times we are so immersed in our own way of thinking and doing things, we don’t even realize we are doing it!
- It creates shared-discovery. As we share with our friends, and explore our different understandings, it often times helps lead us to new conclusions that neither side on its own could have come up with. This new discovery can be extremely insightful and enlightening.
Simple Step 4: Create Action Steps
With your reports comes the “Action Planning Guide”. You may be tempted to do a quick read and put it aside….. Don’t!
Print it out, and go through each item for each of your top 5 themes. Pick up about 3 Action items per theme that you want to focus on. Put all 15 action items (3 for each of the 5 themes) into a single sheet of paper, and put it where you can see it. This makes you more conscious of it, and helps you to hone your talents and develop them into strengths.
Many people are wondering what to do after they receive their reports, but now you have 4 simple steps to utilize your StrengthsFinder Report.
Simple Step 1: Memorise your Top 5 (In Order)
Simple Step 2: Read your reports and highlight the sentences that describes you
Simple Step 3: Share your report with 3 friends
Simple Step 4: Create Action Steps
