I would like to add this quote as a source of inspiration:
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.– Peter Drucker.
Once people have clarity about their strengths they can use these more productively to tackle weaknesses and minimize the impact of weaknesses. This is 1 way of managing your weaknesses.
Working on them is only needed when they are destructive to you and those around you. Being negative, being fearful, being in self-doubt are weaknesses that can be tackled. By knowing and using your strengths! Doing this will automatically make you more positive and confident.
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Strengths Metaphor – The Boat
In coaching, I use the metaphor of a boat to describe the role of weaknesses and strengths. The boat with you as the captain represents the whole of you. As the captain, you are in control, you take decisions, and you make choices. The boat represents all of your weaknesses and strengths. You are on a continuous journey in life – looking for goals to achieve, life happily, have a great job, find meaning….
Your weaknesses are the holes, the bumps, the scratches and rust spots in the body of the boat. Some holes need to be tended to in order for the boat not to sink. The other weaknesses are good to know about so you can find people who have the talents and strengths to counter these. In team setting this is very important. What would a team be able to do if they all had the same strengths, were cut out of the same wood, would all agree with the team leader?
Now, it is not by tending to your weaknesses that your boat will move forward. Without a strong mast and sails – your strengths – the boat will not move anywhere.
So having your sails out to make the boat move forward is what will make the difference. Without them, you would be stalling and just float but not move forward. And your values are important as well. Your compass represents your values. They will guide you in making decisions. What direction to take.
After having acknowledged your weaknesses and what they mean in terms of reaching your goal, strengths research is powerful work that is accomplished to reach your destination.
Once the client is aware of his/her strengths, leveraging and digging out underused strengths is the next chapter.
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What are Strengths and how can we find them?
When I ask my clients about their strengths, they give me a list of their skills. They may sum up what they are good at in terms of subject knowledge – languages, IT-skills, organizational skills, programming, etc… This is however only part of the answer. Skills can be learned and acquired. Strengths are innate characteristics; they are part of the person you are, part of your DNA.
Below I describe 2 assessments that can be used to determine your strengths: Clifton StrengthsFinder TM (6)and VIA Character Strengths (7). There are many other assessments that are equally useful. (Realise2 / SWOT analysis).
And since a coach is good at asking powerful questions, the longer road – asking powerful questions – is another method in finding out about your strengths. This is more empowering. It allows for the client to ponder and self-reflect. If the client has time to do this, this is a great tool as well.
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Clifton StrengthsFinder TM
Looking for your inherent talents, what you value most, what is really important to you and motivates you, is a harder nut to crack. Together with your skills, your talents are part of the equation that defines strengths.
According to Gallup Consulting – “Strengths are the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific activity. The key to building a strength is to identify your dominant talents, then complement them by acquiring knowledge and skills pertinent to the activity.”
Strengths = talents + skills + knowledge
Understand what strengths are. Strengths have recently been defined as activities that make you feel strong. Everyone has certain talents, knowledge, and skills that make them feel successful and unique.
Talents are aptitudes, personality traits, or interpersonal characteristics like assertiveness, curiosity, empathy, or strategic thinking. These are often things you are born with.
Knowledge is information based on facts and personal experience, like symptoms for a specific illness, the structure of a good speech, or how to take care of a horse.
Skills are learned activities or tasks that you can do well, such as presenting a speech, playing a sport, or creating a spreadsheet.
Strength starts with an innate talent. A talent becomes a strength when it’s refined by skills, knowledge and practice and then consciously applied to something that needs doing – e.g. a job. A strength is the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a specific given task.
The core here is to discover your talents first. As Benjamin Franklin so eloquently stated: “Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?”
Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder™ measures the presence of 34 talent themes. Talents are people’s naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. The more dominant a theme is in a person, the greater the theme’s impact on that person’s behavior and performance.
The themes have unique names such as Maximizer®, Achiever®, and Learner®. Below is the list of 34 talents. You can find out your top 5 talents by taking the StrengthsFinder test.
(See the list of talents in Appendix 1)
Research found that it serves a team well to have a representation of strengths in each of these four domains. Instead of one dominant leader who tries to do everything or individuals who all have similar strengths, contributions from all four domains lead to a strong and cohesive team.
Leaders with dominant strength in Executing know how to make things happen. They know how to catch an idea and make it a reality.
Leaders who lead by Influencing help their teams reach a much broader audience. They are always selling the team’s ideas inside and outside the organization.
Those who lead through Relationship Building are the essential glue that holds a team together. Leaders with exceptional relationship building strength have the unique ability to create groups and organizations that are much greater than the sum of their parts.
Leaders with great Strategic Thinking strengths are the ones who keep us all focused on what could be. They are constantly absorbing and analyzing information and helping the team make better decisions. Leaders with strength in this area continually stretch our thinking for the future.
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VIA (Values In Action) Character Strengths
Dr. Martin Seligman, pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, defines strengths as strengths of character and virtues. They are positive psychological traits of human beings.
Through his research Dr. Seligman together with Dr. Peterson (Professor University of Michigan since 1986 and member of the Positive Psychology Steering Committee) discovered that personal strengths and virtues were more universal than they – or their colleagues – expected. One result was their list of two dozen character strengths, grouped within six broad areas of virtue.
The Criteria
What qualifies as a personal character strength, and how do you know if one is really yours? In “A Primer in Positive Psychology” (2007) (8), Peterson explains:
“I believe that people possess signature strengths akin to what Allport (1961) identified decades ago as personal traits. These are strengths of character that a person owns, celebrates, and frequently exercises. In our interviews with adults, we find that almost everyone can readily identify a handful of strengths as very much their own, typically between two and five.
Peterson goes on to present a list they used in 2004 summarizing their “possible criteria for signature strengths”:
- a sense of ownership and authenticity ("this is the real me") vis-a-vis the strength
- a feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first
- a rapid learning curve as themes are attached to the strength and practiced
- continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength
- a sense of yearning to act in accordance with the strength
- a feeling of inevitability in using the strength, as if one cannot be stopped
- the discovery of the strength as owned in an epiphany
- invigoration rather than exhaustion when using the strength
- the creation and pursuit of fundamental projects that revolve around the strength
- intrinsic motivation to use the strength
Peterson sees strengths as having the potential to improve, the more you use them. And the more we use them, the happier and content we will feel. In all aspects of our life.
The list of Character Strengths is divided into the 6 groups of virtues according to the VIA Institute on Character. (See list of VIA Strengths in Appendix 2)
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Powerful Questions
As a coach, one of the most important competencies you have is to ask powerful questions. Through questioning, you can find the strengths in your clients. This is my preferred approach. However this approach takes some time and sometimes a client is pressed for results.
Some of the questions you can ask:
- What activities have you been able to learn rapidly and understand quickly?
- When have you welcomed and enjoyed the challenge of learning something new?
- What quality do you like best in yourself?
- What are you most proud of?
- Can you describe a “high-point” moment in your life? A time that is memorable and stands out?
- How would people describe you when I would ask them about your qualities?
- What have people always appreciated in you?
- What weakness do people say you have? What strengths could be over-used here?
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Core Quadrant Model by Daniel Ofman(9)
You can use tools such as Daniel Ofman’s Core Quadrant Model (explained below).
What are your weaknesses, allergies and challenges in the core quadrant by Daniel Ofman? They lead you to your Core Quality, which is one of your strengths.
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Other ways to find your strengths
- Take a personal inventory. List activities you enjoy and that come easily to you. Identify tasks that energize you.
- List your values and beliefs. Identify knowledge you have that others around you do not.
- Look at past performance reviews. Note what your supervisors or colleagues praise you for.
- Ask others. Friends, family members, and colleagues can often point out things we do well that we may assume came naturally to everyone but are really special strengths we alone possess.
- Other assessments such as Realise2 / SWOT analysis / MBTI…
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“I know my Strengths. What now?”
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Debriefing exercises with your coach
Debriefing your findings with a coach helps to make sense of the results. The value in taking any assessment flows directly from:
- Thoughtful reflection
- The meaning you make of the results
- The action you decide to take next
By having your strengths listed in front of you, nothing will happen if you don’t do anything with them.
Here are a few action points and questions you can reflect on in order to explore the data by yourself:
- What was your first reaction to your results?
- What new discovery(ies) have you made about yourself?
- What surprised you?
- What delighted you?
- What frustrated you?
- What do people appreciate you for? Is this the same as your strengths?
- How do you feel about knowing your strengths?
- What do these 5 strengths mean to you? How would you define them – knowing who you are?
- Are you using them to the fullest at your job/in your life/ at home/with friends?
- What strength resonates most with who you are? What not? Why?
- How can you use your strengths to overcome challenges in your life?
- Where might strengths be overdone?
- How can these strengths be used to reach your goal(s)?
- What strengths are you not using (in the Wheel of Life parts)?
- What strengths may help in overcoming weaknesses?
- How can you use your strengths more often?
Write your top 5 strengths down and keep them with you – know them and look at them every day. The best way your strengths will come alive is by being aware of them on a daily basis. Pay attention to how your strengths show up, what people notice about you, what they seek you out for. These are clues to your signature strengths.
Select a strength to focus on and use it throughout the week. Take note of what you did in a journal:
- when, where and how you used that strength and how it made you feel.
- Select a strength and use it in a different way during 1 week.
- Be aware that overuse of your strengths can create weaknesses and pitfalls!
- With a partner, talk about one of your strengths, how you use it and how it helps to make you successful, more confident and fulfilled.
- What can you do to amplify your strengths?
- How can you use your strengths in order to achieve a goal of yours?
- How can you combine 2 strengths?
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Enhance your well-being/grow at work/at home by taking a few actions
- Use your strengths in a more assertive, pro-active way for instance. Use your Strength with its complementary opposite. Keeping your strength in balance is important. (This is explained in more detail in the tool below - “Core Quadrant by Daniel Ofman)
- Write strength statements. Theses statements capture, in one sentence, what it is that makes you feel strong. Try to identify three areas of strength to focus on. Be as specific as possible. For example, "I feel strong when I am coaching my team to meet project goals" or "I feel strong when I write a clear report outlining potential steps for my organization to take."
- Use your strengths in the workplace. Keep your strength statements in a place where you can see them as you work. Each week, try to find another way that you could play to your strengths as a leader in your organization.
- Identify how each strength can be used in your current role as a leader.
- Find specific activities that play to your strengths. These activities often leave you feeling confident, energized, and eager to do it again.
- Modify your role so that you use your strengths instead of your weaknesses.
- Invest in your strengths. Find ways to further develop the skills and knowledge you have. Participate in training, workshops, and conferences. You can also read books or blogs that deal with your leadership area.
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Your strengths can be used for Leadership growth
If you want to be an effective leader, you must know what the people around you need and expect from you. Gallup polled more than 10,000 followers to see why they follow leaders or have high esteem for leaders. Followers have a very clear idea of what they want and need from the most influential leaders in their lives.
To be a great leader, having these 4 characteristics is important:
- Radiate Trust
- Act with Compassion
- Maintain Stability
- Create Hope
Use your strengths to communicate and connect with your followers.
How can you use your strengths to build these characteristics?
- Trust – Trust is the foundation of leading. On a team where there is high trust, employees are more engaged and speed and efficiency in the workplace is increased. Respect, integrity and honesty are the outcomes of strong relationships built on trust.
- Compassion – Employees want to know that their manager or leader cares about them as a person. Employees who have compassionate leaders are more engaged, more productive and have more engaged customers.
- Stability – The best leaders are the ones employees can always count on in times of need. Employees need to know that their leader’s core values are stable. Nothing creates stability as quickly as transparency. Employees need to have a basic sense of confidence about where their career is headed and how the university is doing financially.
- Hope – Hope gives employees something to look forward to and it helps them see a way through chaos and complexity. Knowing that things can and will be better in the future is a powerful motivator. When hope is absent, people lose confidence, disengage and often feel helpless. Hope may be the one area where leaders have the most influence. Leaders spend almost all of their time reacting to the needs of the day instead of initiating for the future. When leaders choose to initiate, they create hope.
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Your strengths can be put to use in enhancing your Interpersonal Skills
When you find yourself in a difficult situation or run into a situation where you have a hard time dealing with the behavior of others? How can you use your strengths to solve this?
Daniel Ofman’s theory on Core Quadrants presents a method for identifying and strengthening your positive characteristics.
Each core quadrant comprises four concepts: core qualities, pitfalls, challenges and allergies.
Core Qualities
A core quality is an individual’s specific strength, something he/she is good at, or for which he/she is often praised by others. To the person him- or herself it is a matter of course: anyone can do it. It is an inherent quality that can either be suppressed or developed.
Examples:
Decisiveness, considerateness, carefulness, courage, orderliness, flexibility
Pitfalls
We live in world of duality. There is no light without darkness. Every Core Quality can get distorted. Every Core Quality has a dark side. A pitfall is a transformation of a core quality; not the opposite, but ‘too much of a good thing’. The positive aspect goes too far, turning a strength into a weakness. It is your strength on “steroids”.
This is your behavior when people say to you: “Don’t be so…!
Yet there is a positive quality behind every weakness. The underlying core quality can be found through this negative label (pitfall). You can ask of what quality this strange annoying behavior is too much.
A pitfall can also be found by looking at the way people label you. Whether you like it or not, or disagree or fight back by playing it down.
It helps learning from criticism. Feedback from others may really reveal your pitfall.
Examples:
Someone who acts inflexibly may have decisiveness as a core quality.
Someone with an unyielding attitude may be a go-getter at the core.
N.B.: this concerns behavior: an individual is not really inflexible, but he or she behaves inflexibly.
What you need to look for here is a balancing quality that your Core Quality needs in order not to get distorted. You want to shy away from your pitfall.
This brings us to your Challenge.
Challenge
A challenge is the positive opposite of a pitfall. Having identified the negative, transformed behavior, one can start looking for the challenge.
You can find your challenge by answering the following questions:
“What do I miss most in myself?”
“What do I admire in others?”
What is really crucial is to nurture both your Core Quality and Challenge at the same time. Not either one of them.
If you are decisive and your challenge is patience, then being decisively patient or patiently decisive is how you want to be. Balancing both.
You will not have to be worried about your pitfall any longer because this will dissolve when you act balanced.
What is counterproductive is fighting your self. Stop being against your pitfall. This doesn’t help. It is fighting your weakness, draining your energy.
Saying to yourself not being so pushy, rigid, distant…will not help. It is more helpful, fun and effective to focus on developing your challenge. This is another strength-based approach.