Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham, http://www.strengthfinder.com
As I often say, the most important core competency is self-awareness and
there are many assessments out there for us to use to help us discover
and/or validate the innate strengths we bring to our work and lives. I offer
Marcus Buckingham’s work as a great example of one such assessment.
Many years of research conducted by The Gallup Organization suggest that
the most effective people are those who understand their strengths and
behaviors. These people are best able to develop strategies to meet and
exceed the demands of their daily lives, their careers, and their families.
StrengthsFinder is an online measure of personal talent that identifies areas
where an individual’s greatest potential for building strengths exists. The
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 my “top five and they certainly validate
the strengths my clients say I bring to my work!
I thought you might find them interesting and could prompt you to
discover yours! I highly recommend that you buy the book, do the
assessment and focus your career transition strategy around your
strengths!
Connectedness
Things happen for a reason. You are sure of it. You are sure of it because in
your soul you know that we are all connected. Yes, we are individuals,
responsible for our own judgments and in possession of our own free will,
but nonetheless we are part of something larger. Some may call it the
collective unconscious. Others may label it spirit or life force. But
whatever your word of choice, you gain confidence from knowing that we
are not isolated from one another or from the earth and the life on it. This
feeling of Connectedness implies certain responsibilities. If we are all part
of a larger picture, then we must not harm others because we will be
harming ourselves. We must not exploit because we will be exploiting
ourselves. Your awareness of these responsibilities creates your value
system. You are considerate, caring, and accepting. Certain of the unity
of humankind, you are a bridge builder for people of different cultures.
Sensitive to the invisible hand, you can give others comfort that there is a
purpose beyond our humdrum lives. The exact articles of your faith will
depend on your upbringing and your culture, but your faith is strong.
It sustains you and your close friends in the face of life’s mysteries.
Relator
Relator describes your attitude toward your relationships. In simple terms,
the Relator theme pulls you toward people you already know. You do not
necessarily shy away from meeting new people—in fact, you may have
other themes that cause you to enjoy the thrill of turning strangers into
friends—but you do derive a great deal of pleasure and strength from
being around your close friends. You are comfortable with intimacy.
Once the initial connection has been made, you deliberately encourage
a deepening of the relationship. You want to understand their feelings,
their goals, their fears, and their dreams; and you want them to understand
yours. You know that this kind of closeness implies a certain amount of
risk—you might be taken advantage of—but you are willing to accept that
risk. For you a relationship has value only if it is genuine. And the only way
to know that is to entrust yourself to the other person. The more you share
with each other, the more you risk together. The more you risk together,
the more each of you proves your caring is genuine. These are your steps
toward real friendship, and you take them willingly.
Individualization
Your Individualization theme leads you to be 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. You hear the one-of-a-kind
stories in each person’s life. This theme explains why you pick your friends
just the right birthday gift, why you know that one person prefers praise in
public and another detests it, and why you tailor your teaching style to
accommodate one person’s need to be shown and another’s desire to
“figure it out as I go.” Because you are such a keen observer of other
people’s strengths, you can draw out the best in each person. This
Individualization theme also helps you build productive teams. While some
search around for the perfect team “structure” or “process,” you know
instinctively that the secret to great teams is casting by individual
strengths so that everyone can do a lot of what they do well.
Communication
You like to explain, to describe, to host, to speak in public, and to write.
This is your Communication theme at work. Ideas are a dry beginning.
Events are static. You feel a need to bring them to life, to energize them,
to make them exciting and vivid. And so you turn events into stories and
practice telling them. You take the dry idea and enliven it with images and
examples and metaphors. You believe that most people have a very short
attention span. They are bombarded by information, but very little of it
survives. You want your information—whether an idea, an event, a
product’s features and benefits, a discovery, or a lesson—to survive. You
want to divert their attention toward you and then capture it, lock it in.
This is what drives your hunt for the perfect phrase. This is what draws you
toward dramatic words and powerful word combinations. This is why
people like to listen to you. Your word pictures pique their interest,
sharpen their world, and inspire them to act.
Input
You are inquisitive. You collect things. You might collect information—
words, facts, books, and quotations—or you might collect tangible objects
such as butterflies, baseball cards, porcelain dolls, or sepia photographs.
Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you. And yours is
the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting. The world is exciting
precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity. If you read a great
deal, it is not necessarily to refine your theories but, rather, to add more
information to your archives. If you like to travel, it is because each new
location offers novel artifacts and facts. These can be acquired and then
stored away. Why are they worth storing? At the time of storing it is often
hard to say exactly when or why you might need them, but who knows
when they might become useful? With all those possible uses in mind, you
really don’t feel comfortable throwing anything away. So you keep
acquiring and compiling and filing stuff away. It’s interesting. It keeps your
mind fresh. And perhaps one day some of it will prove valuable.
Now, Discover Your Strengths!
Dahl & Associates 