CLIFTON STRENGTHS BLOG GER

An interesting interview with Marcus Buckingham

2011-10-30T17:32:00.003-02:00

Marcus Buckingham published the book "Now Discover Your Strengths" together with the creator of the StrengthsFinder, Dr. Donald Clifton. Clifton acquired Gallup Consulting which uses the StrengthsFinder as a centerpiece in its consulting work. Buckingham worked for Gallup for quite some time and left the company at some point to start his own business. In this interview, he reflects on his career, the importance of strengths, Peter Drucker's views on that and his relationship with Clifton.

http://thedx.druckerinstitute.com/2011/09/marcus-buckingham-on-drucker-on-the-dial/

Jose Mourinho, the Greatest Strengths-Based Coach of our Time?

2010-02-23T15:40:00.007-03:00

I found an interesting article on CNN.com about the portuguese soccer coach Jose Mourinho from Inter Milan in Italy. I am not too much into soccer, I have to admit, but Mourinho has been so incredibly successful that he has not escaped even my scant soccer attention. I was pleased to find something confirmed that I had previously read already about him in a different source: an important pillar of Mourinho's success has to do with strengths-based management! Read the article to learn more. I have highlighted the most relevant text in blue color.

Is your boss a 'Special One'?

By Chris Murphy, CNN

(CNN) -- The success achieved by Portuguese soccer coach Jose Mourinho suggests that his players would not just run through a brick wall for him; they'd happily march through an obstacle course full of them to earn his respect.

The self-proclaimed "Special One" is the flamboyant manager of Italian champions Inter Milan who are currently on course to take the Serie A title for the fifth consecutive year.

But if his current Inter squad love him, then his former Chelsea players adore him, after his successful stint at the club between 2004 and 2007 delivered their first English Premier League triumphs in over 50 years.

England international and Chelsea stalwart Frank Lampard says of Mourinho: "I love him as a man and as a manager."

The two sets of players collide in Europe's most prestigious club competition -- the Champions League -- on Wednesday, when all eyes will be on the game's ultimate touchline showman in his first competitive match against his old club.

But how does Mourinho arouse such complete loyalty from his employees? And is he everything a good boss should be? He does and he is, according to sports psychologist Andy Barton.

Respect

"Mourinho's role with his players is the same as it should be in any office," Barton told CNN. "He is very, very supportive of them and treats them as equals. He knows he needs to focus people on what they do well, and then on what they need to do to improve.

"Sometimes in the workplace managers think it is all about being ruthless when that is the least effective way of doing things. Appraisals can turn into a long list of what employees do wrong. That doesn't help at all; it puts them in a negative mind set.

"But Mourinho will always look to turn a positive into a negative. If a team is 3-0 down at half time and the manager starts screaming about all the mistakes they've made it isn't going to help. Instead he'll focus on some of the things they are doing right, and then tell them how they can turn the game around.

"You have to be specific about what is required; that way, the player or employee starts to build up a mental image of what is needed. A good manager is committed to trying to get the best out of an individual, and knowing how each member of staff ticks. Mourinho is a master at that."

Read the remainder of the article at CNN.com (click here)

Being a Strengths-Based Entrepreneur

2009-10-16T09:11:00.063-03:00

I haven't been writing for some time. The reason is that I am quite busy with building up my new company, a distributor of medical products in Brazil (to be seen in the picture below).

It has always been my declared goal to build this company as a strengths-based organization. After years of working in a large multinational company where any strengths-based initiative has to be carefully embedded in the larger context of the company, I have been very much looking forward to this opportunity of building a company from zero.

So how is it going? Well, to share with you some of my experiences so far is the purpose of this post. But let me briefly say a few words to those who may not be familiar with the idea of a strengths-based organization.

What is actually a strengths-based organization? Essentialy, it is an organization that is built around the strengths of each employee.

The importance of focusing on employee's strengths rather than weaknesses is not really new. For instance Peter Drucker emphasized it already in his book "The Effective Executive" (see the quote on the right column in this blog). But the idea of building a whole organization around this idea is -at least to my humble knowledge- something more recent. I understand that it was born out of the extensive leadership research that Gallup conducted in the 90s and whose findings were published in the bestseller "First Break All The Rules" by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.

Gallup identified 12 questions that employees in high-performance organizations consistently answer differently than employees in mediocre-performance organizations. One of them, and possibly the most important one is: "At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?" It seems to be an obvious, almost trivial question, but it turns out to challenge conventional management wisdom in complicated ways when consistently put into practice. Most of the book "First Break All The Rules" deals with this question and its implications, and it has also become a center-piece of Gallup's Consulting practice.

Chapter 7 "Building a Strengths-Based Organization" in the book "Now Discover Your Strengths" of Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton provides a concise "operating manual" for such an endeavor. The authors highlight the following four pillars which I would like to call...

The Four Commandments of a Strengths-Based Organization:

1. "You should spend a great deal of time and money selecting people properly in the first place".

2. "You should focus performance by legislating outcomes rather than forcing each person into a stylistic mold".

3. "You should focus your training time and money on educating [each person] about his strengths and figuring out ways to to build on these strengths rather than on remedially trying to plug his "skill gaps".

4. "You should devise ways to help each person grow his career without necessarily promoting him up the corporate ladder and out of his areas of strength"

I try to follow these four commandments in my work as an entrepreneur. What is my experience so far, what can I share with you?

It takes quite some persistence to keep focused on these four commandments in the heat of the battle of building up a company, especially in Brazil. There are so many things you have to worry about, from regulatory affairs, bureaucracy, implementing the IT system to hiring the right people and of course kick-starting sales. I confess that I frequently wonder whether building a strengths-based organization really should be a priority at this time. Yet, I believe it should be because it is such a great opportunity for competitive advantage.

I find the most important starting point for any strengths-based entrepreneur to "select" her business partners based on complementary strengths as much as circumstances may allow. If that choice is determined by other factors (capital, skills, network), then great efforts should be made in defining each partners' role and contribution based on his strengths.

For example, my business partner's (on the left in the picture above) strengths are spread over "Execution", "Relationship Building" and "Influencing", while my strengths are more concentrated in the fields of "Strategic Thinking" and "Influencing" (I use here the terms of the four demains of leadership strengths as defined in the book "Strengths-Based Leadership"). As a consequence he feels at his best with sales and supplier relations, whereas I naturally gravitate towards general management, marketing, employee selection and development. A blank spot for both of us is talent and patience for repetitive, administrative chores with an eye for detail (which I suspect to be not uncommon for start-up entrepreneurs). Yet the strengths-based mindset has helped us to identify and own up to this weakness and to find ways to compensate for it. Of course, our analysis went beyond these four domains.

Venture capitalists frequently say that, rather than business plans and financial forecasts, they are most interested in the entrepreneurs themselves, their track-record and how they combine as a team. A strengths-based mindset is therefore an excellent basis for entrepreneurs.

So much for "strengths-based partner selection". What about employee selection? Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton highly recommend a "psychometrically sound" and objective system to measure talent. Although they claim that “a number of such instruments exist”, I actually know few of them and anyway they seem to be more of an emerging phenomenon here in Brazil (readers are welcome to correct me and point out to interesting solutions affordable to smaller companies). In my training with Gallup, I was always advised not to use their Clifton StrengthsFinder® as a selection tool (although it seems that Gallup itself uses a tool that has some similarities with it). Unfortunately, at this moment we have neither the time nor the money to build such a sophisticated system, although it nevertheless remains high on our list of priorities.

But what my partner and I do is to dedicate a substantial amount of time to discuss what strengths we should really be looking for. Again, this may sound obvious, but in the heat of the battle and with our eternal lack of time, there is often a temptation to assume that this is clear to both of us anyway and to take short-cuts. Another challenge is to find precise words for strengths, to avoid overly generic descriptions. As we drill down to the real substance of strengths, we are often surprised to discover diverging points of view which -when conciliated- lead us to very interesting new insights. Employees and candidates that were question marks all of a sudden turn out to be much more interesting talent, and “shining stars” are put on our watch list. In a number of cases, we have seen then that these changes in perception were justified by later performance.

There is a learning point that -while not at all new to me- strikes me again and again as a powerful new insight: one has to be very careful not to draw simplistic conclusions about the ideal profile of a sales rep (or any other employee), often based on some stereotype. While there surely are common strengths that make up the top sales men in our industry, these strengths come in people with many different "colors and shapes". For example, one of our better performing sales reps initially left a very reserved impression, almost to the point of being timid and a bit akward. Yet, we discovered that he brought some important customers with whom he had developed excellent relationship over time, through honest communication and living up to his word (Clifton Talent Themes: Responsibility? Belief? Relator?)

A great help for strengths-based selection is behavior-based interviewing. I have written about this elsewhere in this blog. I can recommend the book “High Impact Interview Questions - 701 Behavior-Based Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job”. The title may sound a bit too much like a trivial, “easy answer” self-help book, but many of the questions are really helpful and what you need as an entrepreneur are practical suggestions (like specific interview questions) rather than a lot of theory.

Another important issue for building a strengths-based organization concerns the second commandment about performance measurement, especially when building up an very sales-oriented organization. In Brazil, a very substantial part of the sales force's revenue is usually a sales-based commission. Its obvious problem is that sales people are tempted to drive down prices to make their sales goals. As a consequence, complicated systems of rules are established, such as different price lists with different commissions and sales reps often have to check with their managers whether they can give certain discounts or not.

We decided to pay commission based on a contribution margin (a gross profit proxy). By replacing sales with profit as the key performance measure, we can give much more flexibility to our sales reps with regard to how to achieve their targets and how to do their work in general. This approach may be nothing special in the USA but is rather rarely and timidly chosen here in Brazil for a variety of reasons. For one, a commission based on some "obscure" profit figure is much less transparent for sales reps than a commission based on straightforward sales figure. Therefore, a profit-based commission requires that sales reps trust in the company's ability and honesty to provide accurate profit calculations, which is unfortunately not as common here as elsewhere. Furthermore, there is a cultural element which makes anything related to profit subject to great confidentiality and obscurity here, to the point where sometimes even the owners themselves have only a vague notion of the real profit drivers of their business. Breaking such deep-rooted habits is not easy but represents an opportunity for competitive advantage for a new player.

Finally a few words about the third commandment about training. It is still too early to make major training initiatives for strengths-based selling and the like. But nevertheless, I make consistent efforts to use a strengths-based language in our communication with employees and even service providers, and thus introduce some of the concepts in a rather low-profile, "stealth" way. I really want the strengths-principled to be lived first rather than talked to death. I avoid any specific “jargon” like the Clifton StrengthsFinder’s 34 talent themes and rather refer to the four domains of leadership strengths: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking (read the book "Strengths-Based Leadership" for more on this). They are relevant not only for leadership jobs but also for sales and many administrative jobs. People intuitively understand them without major explanations and they can trigger very interesting discussions.

We encourage people to discover and use their own way of doing things. Unfortunately, there are significant cultural obstacles here in Brazil like in many other Latin American countries. The Brazilian executive coach and headhunter Augusto Dias Carneiro gets it down to the point when describing a deep-seated, often unconcious belief here: “those who work, do not think; and those who think, do not work” (if you can read portuguese, check out this interview with him). Carneiro goes on to say that this mindset often drives expat managers here crazy, for it complicates delegation and a pro-active search for solutions. And it results in a instinctive tendency to "force each person into a stylistic mold" rather than "legislating outcomes", completely against our second commandment.

The good news is that the culture of a company can offset such dysfunctional aspects of a nation's culture, at least partially. But it takes a lot of effort, and similar to the education of children, such an effort is probably most fruitful in the early "childhood" of the company. As a result, a cultural obstacle for larger, traditional companies can turn into an opportuntity for younger companies, and start-up entrepreneurs have the outstanding opportunity to implant a strengths-based culture into their company's DNA right from the beginning. But having said that, it also becomes clear why start-up companies should not treat the vision of a strengths-based organization as a "nice-to-have" posteriority for a more mature stage in the company's life-cycle.

I would like to invite other entrepreneurs, managers or leaders to share their experience in building up a strengths-based organization, especially when you don't have the money to pay expensive consultants and have to "adapat, implement and overcome" Please send me your text to olavi[at]gmx[dot]net

Harvard Business Review Article about Strengths

2009-07-10T20:09:00.004-03:00

I found this article about strengths-based (career) management in HBR. I must say though that for people who are familiar with the Gallup and Buckingham books, there are no major new insights to be found here. But it is a good introductory summary for people who are not familiar with the issue.

http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2005/01/how-to-play-to-your-strengths/ar/1

Maslow and Strengths-Based Management

2009-07-10T14:42:00.030-03:00

This week I have had the pleasure to meet Dr. Edward Hoffman here in Sao Paulo. Dr. Hoffman is a professor at Yeshiva University in New York and author of such interesting books as "The Right to Be Human", the only biography of Abraham Maslow, "Future Visions - The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow" and "Psychological Testing at Work". I first met Dr. Hoffman in cyberspace in the Employee Engagement Network shortly after creating this blog last year. We share many interests but most importantly the joy of being married to a Brazilian woman! For me, this is a very nice example of how small the world has become thanks to Internet, blogs and social networks.

For someone like me, author of a blog that has a lot to do with personality (testing) and concepts similar to Maslow's self-actualization and Drucker's writings, this was of course a most interesting meeting, and with the agreement of Dr. Hoffman, I would like to share with you a couple of key insights.

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was born in New York, the eldest of seven children of Russian immigrant parents. As a young man, he displeased them greatly by choosing to study psychology rather than law.

Maslow was described by Drucker and others as the "the father of humanistic psychology". Drucker said about Maslow's work: "it had a lasting impact on me. I became an immediate convert--Maslow's evidence is overwhelming. But to date very few people have paid much attention."

I quote the front flap of Dr. Hoffman's biography:

"More than any other American-born psychologist in the last half-century, Maslow has powerfully affected the way we think about ourselves. He advanced an entirely original concept of human nature - the hierarchy of inborn needs - that turned psychology on its heels. In contrast to classical approaches that studied human weaknesses and neurosis, Maslow focused on healthy, exceptional, high-achieving individuals."

It is here where I see the most striking parallel to the work of Donald Clifton and the ideas behind the strengths revolution, for Donald Clifton also focused his work on defining what is good about people, instead of what is wrong. As a consequence, he is considered as the grand-father of what became to be known as positive psychology.

The key idea behind the "strengths revolution" is that we should focus much more on developing our strengths than compensating our weaknesses. This may seem obvious or easy, but it often isn't, for we are usually pretty bad at identifying and spelling out our talents, and we underestimate the effort it takes to develop them into real strengths. As far as I know, the American psychologist Donald Clifton (1924-2003) essentially developed this idea, although Peter Drucker seems to have written something similar more or less around the same time. Clifton also developed a taxonomy of 34 talents and a test to assess them. In honor to this man's contribution to these ideas and indirectly to my life, I use his name in the title of this blog.

Yet I am starting to suspect that Donald Clifton may have been influenced by Abraham Maslow's work. And if that was the case, I feel compelled to point this out in my blog. So an important question I made to Dr. Hoffman was whether he is aware of any contact or communication between Maslow and Clifton. But this was apparently not the case. But considering Maslow's influence in the field of psychology at the time when Donald Clifton started his studies, it is safe to assume that Clifton must have read some of Maslow's articles.

Among students of business administration and managers, the most well-known concept of Maslow is probably the "hierarchy of needs" with physiological needs at the bottom, followed by need for safety, belonging, esteem and with self-actualization at the top.

I quote The Economist's "Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus" (p. 268):

"Self-actualization, at the top of pyramid of needs, is the state that has most fascinated followers of Maslow. What is it? Who has achieved it? Maslow helped a bit by giving a list of people he felt had reached self-actualization: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Spinoza and Aldous Huxley..."

"He then helped by further describing what it was that motivated people at this level. These people, he claimed, sought after truth, rather than dishonesty; uniqueness, not bland uniformity; completion, rather than incompleteness; simplicity, not unnecessary complexity; playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery; and self-sufficiency, not dependency".

I am still in the process of learning more about Maslow's ideas, especially with regard to management and self-actualization. But to me, the word "self-actualization" has always had the connotation of realizing one's innate potential, like talents. Thus, I asked Dr. Hoffman to what extent Maslow might have anticipated many of the ideas of Donald Clifton and Peter Drucker with regard to talents and strengths. Somewhat to my surprise, I learned that this was only marginally the case, such as in the idea of seeking uniqueness, not bland uniformity. But overall, developing strengths was not exatly a corner stone of Maslow's ideas about self-actualization.

Next, I asked Dr. Hoffman what he would recommend to a manager or entrepreneur who would like to foster a culture of self-actualization, also referred to as "enlightened management". To my surprise, Dr. Hoffman's top of the mind answer was the importance of workplace esthetics: pleasant, beautiful office buildings and decoration plays an important role to stimulate self-actualization. But of course, there is more to it, most importantly the freedom to effectuate one's own ideas, try things out, make decisions, and make mistakes.

These ideas remind me very much about the findings of Gallup's extensive research about effective leadership as summarized in the book "First Break All the Rules": Great leaders respect the individuality of their employees, their unique "configuration" of strengths and weaknesses. As a consequence, they resist micromanaging, and define desired outcomes rather than the steps how to get there.

That involves an above-average amount of freedom and tolerance to mistakes. It means that a job, especially a managerial job, has to be "large". Let's listen to Peter Drucker in his book "Management" (p.406):

“The most common mistake (in designing managerial jobs) is to design the job so small that a good man cannot grow. … If a job is designed so small that the incumbent can learn everything in a few years, the majority of managers will be frustrated, bored, and no longer working. They will, so to speak, “retire on the job”. They will resist any change, any innovation, and new idea, for change can only be a change for the worse for them and threaten their security. Knowing well that they are not actually contributing any more, they are fundamentally insecure.”

Let's note that this was probably first written around 1973. Now let's fast forward to the year 2004 and read an article in USA Today:

"The majority of workers are what Gallup calls ROAD Warriors — retired on active duty. Gallup says its research has unearthed 12 questions, called the Q12, that separate ROAD Warriors from those who are “engaged” with their work. Engaged workers give more “yes” answers to questions such as “At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?”"

The common theme here: "retired on the job". We could also say "disengaged". Gallup surveys show that only 28% of workers in the U.S. are engaged, and that 17% are actively disengaged. Of course, this has many different reasons, but I believe that an important one is the fact that jobs are too narrow for self-actualization and as a consequence, people retire on the job.

In other words, I see an important connection between Maslow's self-actualization, Drucker's "large" managerial jobs, Donald Clifton's strengths revolution and Gallup's research on employee engagenemt. Note that I am not a scholar in these fields, just a humble manager on a journey in these most interesting intellectual land.

It is interesting to note the many similarities between Gallup's Q12 and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like "I know what is expected of me at work" (Security), "In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work" (Esteem), "My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person" (Belonging), "I have a best friend at work" (Belonging), "This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow" (Self-Actualization).

Gallup uses also a pyramid to group the twelve Q12 questions into four essential groups (see picture on the left; click here for further information).

You may be interested in the Hoffman Vocational Value Scale, which measures job satisfaction and is rooted in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

In conclusion:

Does it surprise that so much is being talked about innovation these days, but so little seems to be accomplished in most conventional companies?

Does it surprise that so many companies these days complain about the shortage of talent and have to "buy in from outside"? Some companies go to great lengths in order to attract talent, from revamping the corporate websites to expensive recruiting events to polishing up their image with all kinds of social responsibility and P.R. "stunts". But I dare to say that most of this really misses the point.

The concepts of self-actualization and enlightened management, as "esoteric" as they may seem to be first, may be more relevant than ever in today's world! However, Dr. Hoffman points out that Maslow's writings on management tend to raise more questions than to give all the answers (see for example Maslow's book "Maslow on Management"). But we should have learnt a lot more about management since Maslow died in 1970, not at least thanks to Peter Drucker and the Gallup research, as well as the avalanche of books about leadership in recent years. The problem now is -as always- to put it in practice!

For further reading about Maslow and strengths, I recommend this post on the Strengths Academy site.

Personality Profiles: Valuable or Not?

2009-06-20T09:12:00.005-03:00

Have a look at this interesting article of Sandra L. Shullman in the latest on-line edition of Talent Management. It offers some interesting thoughts on where personality profiles can be useful (e.g. leadership development) and where they can be misleading, especially when not used correctly (e.g. selection). Overall, I would say that this article is pretty much in line with what has been written in this blog.

More books...

2009-05-31T13:14:00.004-03:00

I am always looking for new books that have to do with discovering your talents and developing them into strengths. I have found two more which I am currently reading and I hope to write a review here soon:

1) "Discover Your Genius: How to Think Like History's Ten Most Revolutionary Minds" by Michael J. Gelb

2) "Fitting in is Overrated: The Survival Guide For Anyone Who Has Ever Felt Like an Outsider", by Leonard Felder, PhD.

MBTI versus Strengths-Based Leadership

2009-05-31T11:03:00.011-03:00

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was the first personality assessment I did in my life and it had an important impact on my self-awareness and leadership development. Later, I came to appreciate the Clifton StrengthsFinder and the Five-Factor-Model, but up until today I often think in terms of the 16 MBTI types and make comparisons.

This blog is about strengths-based management and leadership. But recently, after browsing through one my MBTI books, I was wondering to what extent strengths-based leadership is similar or different from MBTI-based leadership.

For those who don’t know: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a personality assessment based on the late Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung’s work. It has four dimensions:

Intoversion vs. Extroversion: the source of our energy
Sensing and Intuition: how we gather information
Thinking and Feeling: how me make decisions
Judging and Perceiving: how we approach life

“These four scales are used to sort into 16 types; the types themselves are are characterized by certain values, preferences or cognitive styles. Information about a person’s type is then used for career guidance, team building and other activities associated with organizational development.” writes Dr. Robert Hogan in “Personality and the Fate of Organizations” (p. 28).

And he goes on like this: “Most personality psychologists regard the MBTI as little more than an elaborate Chinese Fortune cookie. … Nontheless, psychological consultants have discovered that the business community has an endless appetite for MBTI-based feedback.”

There seems to be quite some discussion among academic psychologists and MBTI supportes to what extent the MBTI is scientifically proven to work, and the Feeling-Thinking dimension seems to be particularly controversial. I am not an academic psychologist, so I have little to contribute to this discussion here. If you would like to learn more about this, click here. Academics like Hogan and Costa&McCrae prefer to work with the Five-Factor-Model, which still has many similarities with the MBTI.

While I often had some difficulty to assess myself or other people with regard to the 16 MBTI types, I had less problems with the Five-Factor-Model. For example, introspection, an important "ingredient" of self-awareness and therefore leadership development, is considered a quality of introversion in the MBTI literature. More recent Five Factor research however shows that introspection has more to do with a high "Openness to new Ideas", which is somewhat similar to the Intuition-Sensing dichotomy in the MBTI. For these and other reasons, I prefer to use the Five-Factor-Model in my work as a manager and personal coach.

Anyway, this post is not about a comparison between the MBTI and the Five Factor Model. Instead, it is about a comparison between the MBTI and the Clifton StrengthsFinder, and more importantly, about a comparison between leadership based on the MBTI vs. strengths.

I define strengths-based leadership as the principles and practices of a leader who wants to make best use of his employee’s strengths in their everyday work. Gallup research has shown such employees are much more engaged with their work, which in turn has a very positive effect on customer satisfaction and shareholder return.

What would be MBTI-based leadership? I would think that it is actually very similar: I would define it as the principles and practices of a leader who wants to respect people’s individual differences (based on the insights gained from MBTI), leveraging their strengths and compensating their weaknesses. I would dare to say that the MBTI literature tends to emphasize equally strengths and weaknesses, whereas the StrengthsFinder literature emphasizes more the development of strengths.

Thus, at a first look, I don’t see too much of a difference between the two leadership styles. There is at least one important difference, though, that has more to do with logic of the MBTI and StrengthsFinder, rather than the leadership style based on them: In the MBTI, especially if you work with the 16 types, there is a tendency to some sort of black and white thinking: you are either an introvert or an extrovert, for example. The MBTI folks would probably aknowledge that this is a simplification necessary for the workplace environment, and that in fact people usually are on a continuum between the two sides, rather than on opposite ends. There is a risk however that this nuance is forgotten once people receive their label “INTJ” or “ESFJ” in a typical MBTI training at the office.

What I have always found fascinating about the StrengthsFinder is that people can have “contradictory” combinations of talents: at the same time someone can have Intellection, which tends to me more of an introvert talent, and Woo, which is clearly an Extrovert talent. Another one can have Adaptability or Activator, which are more of a Perceiver nature, and Focus, which is more of a Judging nature. Someone can have Empathy, which is more of a Feeler talent, and Analytical, which is more of a Thinking talent. Such combinations really exist. And this may explain why some people have difficulty in finding their place among the 16 MBTI types.

As a consequence, the 34 talent themes of the StrengthsFinder are more complex than the 16 MBTI types, not only for the simple fact that 34 is more than double than 16, but more importantly, because the 34 talent themes can have more complex and sometimes counter-intuitive combinations. This is certainly a challenge for consultants who have limited time in a typical leadership workshop, and who have to deal with managers or employees who may have limited patience for too much complexity around personality. The 16 MBTI types are already quite an amount of information to absorb, let alone the 34 StrengthsFinder talent themes and their myriad combinations.

Nevertheless, in my practical experience, I have seen that the 34 Clifton StrengthsFinder talent themes can also be successfully taught in a short time to a broader audience of employees. As a leader, however, you need to develop an advanced understanding of the 34 talent themes, their combinations and implications on workplace performance. That requires time for studying and practicing, which is probably not the most common privilege of managers these days.

Another important consideration is the question whether or not to select people for MBTI type or talents. Gallup, the owner of the Clifton StrengthsFinder, advises against using this tool for recruiting purposes. The main reason is that talents are not the same as strengths, and what you need on the job are well developed strengths. I would say that the same logic applies to the MBTI. If someone is an INTJ, for example, he has certain talents, which he may or may not have developed into real strengths. I am not sure what the MBTI supporters advise with regard to using the MBTI for recruiting, and I would not be surprised if there were different oppinions. But from what I have seen in the literature, the MBTI is very much used for team building and –I would assume- for the selection of team members. From there, it is only a small step to using it for the selection of new hires. I think that this could be a bit dangerous.

Values in Action

2009-05-28T15:02:00.004-03:00

A guest post by Warren Davies

If you read Matthias's blog, chances are you're pretty sold on the idea of focusing your life around your strengths. You probably understand that it is strengths, not weaknesses, that are your greatest areas for growth and development, and that you'll be more satisfied when doing activities that make use of your strengths.

You'll probably also be familiar with the StrengthsFinder approach to strengths, based on Gallup's extensive analysis of over 2 million interviews. What I'd like to do today briefly, is introduce you to a different model of strengths - Vales In Action.

Values In Action, or VIA, is the brainchild of positive psychologists - researchers whose aim is to make a scientific study of things like happiness, character, and optimal functioning. Because of these foundations, the focus is slightly different than the performance-oriented StrengthsFinder. The focus is on developing character and virtue.

There are 24 strengths in VIA, as opposed to the 34 in SF. These are grouped into six virtues - Wisdom/Knowledge, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance and Transcendence. Developing the strengths under each category is the route to developing that particular virtue.

A different method to discover these strengths was used than in SF. in SF, interviews were analysed to discover the emerging themes. With VIA, a literature search was conducted, of all major scientific, philosophical and religious texts from all around the world. The strengths of character endorsed by the various schools of thought were compared to a strict criteria; those strengths that met the criteria were kept, those that didn't we're abandoned.

After this, extensive research was done to test the validity of the model. Surprisingly high correlations were found between countries in their endorsement of these strengths. Despite the amazing variety of culture we have on our planet, we all seem to display similar virtues. Strengths like kindness and fairness are the most endorsed throughout the globe, and some studies have even found correlations even with tribal cultures. These results suggest a common character, a common humanity.

As well as helping us to learn about our own species, the model has shown great practical benefit too. In several studies, participants who discovered and used their 'signature strengths' (similar to the SF concept of signature themes) in their daily life found themselves growing increasingly happier. In my undergraduate project, I discovered that using the VIA signature strengths was a way to become more engaged in a task, to find that state of flow, otherwise known as being 'in the zone'.

There are many commonalities as well as differences between the two models. I discuss these in an article on my own site, http://generallythinking.com/blog/?p=506">Values In Action VS StrengthsFinder; take a look at that if this brief introduction has triggered your curiosity. Also, you can take a test to discover your VIA signature strengths for free, at Martin Seligman's http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/">Authentic Happiness website.

If you're looking to live a more strengths-based life, you'll enjoy the idea of looking at your strengths from another perspective, one focused on good character and virtue, to compliment the performance-focus of StrengthsFinder. And if what they're saying in the papers is true, maybe more virtue in the world is just what we need.

A technical note by Matthias: for reasons unknown to me, you may experience some difficulties when clicking on some of the links mentioned above. If that is the case, try clicking on the refresh button of your browser, or try typing the letters "www." in front of the address where they are missing.

New Book: Primal Management

2009-05-10T18:24:00.009-03:00

Through this blog, I have had the pleasure to meet very interesting people. One of them is Paul Herr who has just published a new book with the title "Primal Management". In there, Paul writes about the importance of overcoming weaknesses which is a bit at odds with the strengths-management's focus on strengths. But as I have always said, this blog is also a place for critical thoughts about strengths-based management. With the permission of Paul Herr, I would like to copy here a brief excerpt of our email conversation with some of his concerns:

"Strengths are obviosly vital to building a confident, high self-esteem workplace. However, there is more to the story.

The culture (people around us) define which skills and abilities are desireable and worth acquiring. According to my theory, our brains automatically track the tribe's optimal skill portfolio, and skills that are missing from our portfolios create painful psychological wounds that can only be healed by acquiring the missing skill. This, I suggest is nature's version of tough love--master the survival skills of the tribe, or else!

So strengths are vitally important, but healing psychic wounds is important too. For example, I managed to perform admirably in math, even though I don't have an aptitude for it. Mastering this difficult skill healed one of my psychic wounds."

Read more on Paul Herr's views in his comment in this blog.

Talent SpeedReading II: How to do it

2009-05-08T13:48:00.024-03:00

In my previous post, I made the case for (and against) talent speedreading, the art of quickly identifying other people's talents and strengths, as well as weaknesses. Now, let's proceed to the practical part: how to do it.

First of all, you need to define a vocabulary, a taxonomy or some sort of theory about talents. The Clifton StrengthsFinder is an obvious choice for talent speadreading, but it is not the only one.

For example, Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger wrote a book with the title "The Art of SpeedReading People" which also inspired me to write this post. Their system is based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an inventory of personality type which has its roots in the theories of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

As I outlined elsewhere in this blog, the study of personality (both the theories about it and your own personality) is most helpful in understanding your strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the MBTI and the Tiegers' book provide many helpful insights into identifying talents.

In this post, I propose to work with the 34 talent themes of the Clifton StrengthsFinder.

Next, you should develop a thorough understanding of these 34 talent themes. You should know them inside out. Books like "Strengths-Based Leadership" or "Discovering Your Sales Strengths" provide important insights and examples.

But even if you have a very good but theoretical understanding of these 34 themes, it may be difficult to properly identify them in the "heat of the battle" of a typical working day. Some talents can be confusingly similar, like Strategic and Deliberative, Intellection and Connectedness, Woo and Positivity, Relator and Individualization, Command and Self-Assurance, Adaptability and Arranger.

Therefore, I would like to propose a "shortcut" based on the four leadership domains presented in Gallup's new book "Strengths-Based Leadership":

Executing:
ACHIEVER, ARRANGER, BELIEF, CONSISTENCY, DELIBERATIVE, DISCIPLINE, FOCUS, RESPONSIBILITY, RESTORATIVE.
Influencing:
ACTIVATOR, COMMAND, COMMUNICATION, COMPETITION, MAXIMIZER, SELF-ASSURANCE, SIGNIFICANCE, WOO
Relationship Building
ADAPTABILITY, DEVELOPER, CONNECTEDNESS, EMPATHY, HARMONY, INCLUDER, INDIVIDUALIZATION, POSITIVITY, RELATOR.
Strategic Thinking:
ANALYTICAL, CONTEXT, FUTURISTIC, IDEATION, INPUT, INTELLECTION, LEARNER, STRATEGIC.

I have found these four domains very useful not only for quickly assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a team but also those of individuals. And it helps to avoid to fall into some common pitfalls, such as confusing the strength of "Relationship Building" with the strength of "Influencing", or confusing the strengths of "Strategic Thinking" (and "Talking") with "Execution".

I confess that I myself often confused these domains which led me to be surprised when meeting very friendly salespeople (Relationship Building) who had difficulties in closing sales (Influencing), or when meeting rather tough if not arrogant people (Influencing) who were then presented to me as very successful sales people.

And people who excel in Strategic Thinking can leave a great impression but do not necessarily get a lot done later on (Execution). On the other side, execution strength is of questionable value if the wrong things get executed in terms of strategy or ethics (the current economic crisis provides ample evidence of this). Also, I have seen effective employees (but weak in Strategic Thinking) going through some embarassment when being exposed to a senior management meeting deliberating strategies. The business literature is full of examples and discussions about this phenomenon. Read Ram Charan's book "Execution" or Jack Welch's "Winning" for example.

There are other ways of clustering the 34 talent themes which can also provide important clues to speedreading talents. Gallup itself used a slightly different version of the four domains in the past. Have a look a this interesting page on the Clifton StrengthsFinder Blog.

On that same blog, by the way, you can find an interesting list of short paragraphs for each talent, like "Significance-loves to make a difference" or "Command-loves to make their own decisions". Memorize these 34 paragraphs and they will come to your mind when you see them in the behaviour of the people you try to speedread. Yes, you have to memorize these things, in the same way people used to learn by heart Shakespeare quotes or Bible verses in the past. TalentSpeedreading requires quite an effort, it is not just a quick fix.

So enough about theory, let's move on! Let's say you conclude that a person has many talents in Relationship Building and Execution, but not in Influencing and Strategic Thinking. So what's next?

Well first of all, let's appreciate that with this information alone, we know quite a lot already, at least for the workplace environment.

But you can drill down deeper from here and try to figure out which talents might be behind this person's strength in Relationship Building: Empathy, Includer, Relator?

Thinking in terms of the four domains also makes it easier to distinguish between "similar" talents like Positivity (Relationship Building) and Woo (Influencing). If you are not sure whether someone has Positivity or Woo, but feel that he is much better at Relationship Building than at Influencing, then you want to bet on Positivity. The same logic applies to:

Deliberative (Executing) and Strategic (Strategic Thinking),
Connetctedness (Relationship Building) and Intellection (Strategic Thinking),
Adaptability (Relationship Building) and Arranger (Executing), and again:
Positivity (Relationship Building) and Woo (Influencing)

So you observe people. You talk with the peers of the people you observe. And of course, you speak with the people whose talents you want to identify. However, you want to focus more on actual behavior than words.

A simple approach of doing this is to ask simple questions like "Tell me about what you really enjoy doing at work" or "Tell me what you do best" or "Tell me about your biggest success story" and so on. Again, there might be a risk that the answers to these questions are "manipulated" to be socially desirable, especially if you are a manager talking to an employee, and even more so if either one of you is new on the job. In order to get a feeling whether these answers are real or "faked", you should ask for specific details, like "tell me about a time when...". You may want to read my post about Behaviour-Interviewing for Strengths for more on this.

At last, let me say that I realize that all these suggestions are just shortcuts based on enormeous simplifcations. This is always dangerous when dealing with something as complex as human nature and talents. But I believe that this does not mean that we should not try. Dr. Jerome Groopman, author of the excellent book "How Doctors Think" writes something very interesting about the importance of shortcuts in another very complex field: medicine (p. 35 f.):

"Reasearch shows that most doctors come up with two or three diagnoses from the outset of meeting a patient - a few talented ones can juggle four or five in their minds. All develop their hypotheses from a very incomplete body of information. To do this, doctors use shortcuts. These are called heuristics.

... Shortcuts are the doctor's response to uncertainty and demands of the situation. They are the essential working tools of clinical medicine, where a doctor must combine thought and action.

... The problem is that medical schools do not teach shortcuts. In fact, you are discouraged from using them...

... Of course, a doctor must know physiology and pathology and pharmacology. But he should also be schooled in heuristics - in the power and necessity of using shortcuts, and in their pitfalls and dangers."

When reading this, I feel tempted to exchange "doctors" with "managers", "medicine" with "management", "patients" with "employees" or "colleagues", "medical school" with "business school" or "textbooks".

Thus, I hope that this post may help some fellow managers to develop some vital "shortcuts" in the area of strengths-based leadership!

Talent SpeedReading I: Benefits and Risks

2009-05-07T08:00:00.031-03:00

Click here if you would like to skip this first part about Talent SpeedReading and go directly to the second part: "How to Do it"

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to identify the talents of people in a quick and easy way ("speedread"), without hiring consultants or without even doing the Clifton StrengthsFinder with all of them? I believe that seasoned leaders, executive coaches and recruiters develop this strength over time. But how about the rest of us? How about a manager who has just discovered the Clifton StrengthsFinder and wonders how he can speedread the talents of his employees?

Before exploring how this could be done, we might want to ask what speedreading talents may be good for, or whether it might not be dangerous in some way.

Gallup's research shows that employees are much more engaged when they can do what they do best everyday. Furthermore, more engaged employees lead to several positive outcomes, from higher customer satisfaction to higher shareholder value creation.

My own experience as a manager shows that focusing on your people's talents has a big and fast impact on results. However, I also learned that it is an illusion to believe that you can engage all of your employees or get them enthusiastic about a strengths-based approach, especially in the short run. But even if your strengths-based management efforts are effective with only 33% of your people, that will make a difference!

You can invite a consulting company like Gallup to help you identifying the talents of your people in a systematic way. That may require a considerable financial investment, though. You could also buy a couple of books that give you the StrengthsFinder access code and invite your employees to the Clifton StrengthsFinder online assessment which would (or could) reveal their Top 5 talents.

The problem with both of these approaches, but especially the second one is that your employees may be skeptical about all of this. Conciously or often even unconciously, they may not answer all the questions in the StrengthsFinder survey in the most honest way. They may have a certain "self-image" that they hold dear but that is distorted from their real self. Or they may tend to give "socially desirable" answers. This is a common problem with all personality assessments where people have to answer questions about themselves.

This is where Talent SpeedReading comes in: not only could it save money and time but it can also avoid the "social desirability" problem, if (and this is a big if!) you listen to the judgment of the peers of your talent speedreading "target", and do not form your opinion entirely on your own observations (and biases). Some researchers (click here for source) point out that two raters are consistently more accurate in rating a subject than the subject is him/herself.

So far, I have highlighted the benefits of Talent SpeedReading for employee engagement and in order to avoid the "social desirability" problem common in most self-reported personality or talent assessments. But there are other benefits:

In most organizations, both business and non-business, you need to have quite some political skills to get anything done. An important pillar of such skills is the ability to identify your political allies and adversaries and to "read their minds". You have to know their motives, their strengths and their weaknesses. The ability to speedread their talents (and weaknesses) is certainly most helpful here. The simple concept proposed in part II of this post can provide you with some important insights: is someone strong in Strategic Thinking but poor in Execution, for example? Or is he strong in Relationship Building but not necessarily as strong in Influencing?

And then, Talent SpeedReading is certainly also very helpful when talking with friends and family, and especially when talking about career-related advise.

At last, a word of caution though: I am not sure whether Talent SpeedReading is a good idea for recruiting purposes. It may be better than nothing, but then again, any structured interview is probably better than asking some random questions.

In another post in this blog, I discussed the perils of using the 34 talent themes of the StrengthsFinder for recruiting. In short words: when you recruit, you should look for strengths, not talents. Remember: talents are "raw material" and they may not yet be productive strengths. As a manager, you may not have the time to develop the talents of a new employee into the strengths you need.

So you have to think through the strengths that you really need in the position that you are recruiting for. And this is not an easy task. It is like thinking through the real objectives you have in business or in your own life. They may seem obvious at first, but the more you think about them, the more you may discover how complex they actually can be.

For instance, objectives can be in conflict with each other which may require you to make some tough choices: the personal objectives "financial gain" and "work/life" balance are often at odds, for example. The same is true for strengths: don't get into the trap of looking for superman, full of strengths and with no weaknesses (see the Peter Drucker quote on the column on the right side)!

Coaching em base de talentos no Brasil

2009-05-04T22:55:00.017-03:00

O termo coaching para executivos já não é mais nenhuma novidade. Já faz algum tempo, que isso se tornou “moda” entre os executivos do Brasil e do mundo. Porém, o coaching em geral ainda tem uma tendência de enfocar demais nas debilidades. Dos talentos, se fala pouco, pois, se presume, erradamente, que eles se tornam em pontos fortes sem muito esforço.

Você já parou para pensar se os pais do Ronaldo, o Fenômeno, tivessem insistido que ele trabalhasse mais nas debilidades, por exemplo estudando mais, ao invés de desenvolver seus talentos no futebol? Ele seria, talvez, hoje, um empregado, frustrado, ao invés de um atleta realizado e rico.

Isso é um exemplo, do perigo em focar demais nos pontos fracos, tentando ser uma pessoa que você nao é, alguém que não acredita ter verdadeiros talentos a serem desenvolvidos.

Depois de ter estudado muito este assunto e ter me certificado em coaching em base de personalidade (Big Five Workplace Profile da CentACS nos EUA) e coaching em base de talentos/pontos fortes (com a Gallup University nos EUA), ofereço coaching profissional em Campinas e Sao Paulo para um numero limitado de clientes.

Nosso coaching será assim: você descobrirá seus talentos e os converteremos em um plano de ação. Isso mesmo, os desenvolveremos em verdadeiras pontos fortes! Prepare-se, pois isso exigirá muito disciplina e prática!

Se interessou pelo assunto? Leia mais neste link. Ou leia o famoso livro da Gallup "Agora Descubra Seus Pontos Fortes", já disponível em português!

Building a strengths-based organization if you are not the CEO

2009-03-29T22:03:00.018-03:00

When I read many of today’s management books, including some of the Gallup and Buckingham books, I often get the impression that they were written for someone with CEO-like powers to initiate a major (strengths-based) initiative in her organization.

But what do you do if you are a manager of a smaller business unit within a larger corporation? What if neither your superior nor your HR manager knows what a strengths-based organization is all about, but you nevertheless wish to build one in the area of your responsibility?

Depending on the context, this can be quite a tricky task, requiring careful thought and political intelligence.

For one, creating a strengths-based organization can take several years, depending on the size and complexity of your organization. However, if your career is on a relatively fast rise, it is safe to assume that you will change jobs every four to five years, sometimes even faster than that. Depending on your circumstances then, there is a risk that you may not have enough time to complete the task.

And most likely, you won’t handpick your successor, so there is a high risk that she may not buy into your strengths-based ideas and revert to a more conventional management style. That would not only be a waste of your organizational change efforts, even worse, it could be quite an unpleasant shock to your employees, creating cynicism at best, and outright frustration and employee turnover at worst. As a consequence, you may have to consider adopting a lighter or "stealth" version of a strengths-based organization.

Furthermore, you need to ask yourself how much freedom you have to implement a major organizational change initiative. Or in other words: how rigid are corporate HR policies, organizational values, or the opinions and supervision of your superiors? Remember: it is not without a reason that Gallup titled its first major book about strengths-based management and related issues with “First Break All The Rules”. Many of the findings of Gallup’s multi-year studies fly into the face of the kind of conventional wisdom found in most companies.

The following ideas are an adaptation of Guy Kawasaki’s recommendations for internal entrepreneurs in his book “The Art of the Start” (p. 20 f.), mixed with my own experience as a manager:

1. Put the company first: building a strengths-based organization is not about your personal glory, but about the betterment of the company and the engagement of its employees. Always keep that in mind!

2. Stay under the radar: managers in conventional (=most) companies are mainly concerned about maintaining the status quo and protecting their interests, and that certainly includes also the HR managers. A strengths-based organizational change initiative may worry many managers, including the HR manager, no matter how great it would be for employee engagement. Don’t expect them to applaud you. On the contrary, expect them to sabotage you, silently or openly, and all the more so if you are successful.

One idea to stay under the radar is to downplay the scope of your initiative, for instance by pretending to do only a"strengths-based selling" training, instead of declaring a major "cultural revolution".

3. Give hope to the hopeful: “inside every corporate cynic who thinks that “this company is too big to innovate” is an idealist who would like to see it happen”. And that may be especially true for innovation targeting employee engagement. Find these people and enlist them.

4. Anticipate, then jump on tectonic shifts: a new CEO or General Manager, a new HR manager, a rapid deterioration in sales, profits, customer satisfaction or employee engagement may create an opportunity and/or pretext for your efforts.

5. Build on what exists: many conventional companies have adopted a competency-based selection and development approach. Well developed competencies are pretty much the same as strengths, and you may take advantage of some tools and concepts which have been developed here.

Remember that strengths are not the same as talents, and it is not recommendable to use the 34 talent themes of the Clifton StrengthsFinder for recruiting purposes, for instance. Building a strengths-based organization requires you to think through the strengths needed in your organization, which is not an easy task, and the definitions of competencies in your company may come close to some of the strengths you are looking for.

It is probably also wise to use the competency-based jargon in your company, instead of introducing a new strengths-based one, thereby confusing employees and creating conflict with the HR people and superiors.

6. Collect and share data: prepare for the day when your strengths-based initiative will be “uncovered” and questioned: there is hardly any better proof than having statistics that show how customer satisfaction, employee engagement, sick days, workplace accidents, or any other HR-related productivity measure have improved since you launched your initiative!

New Book: Strengths-Based Leadership

2009-02-03T07:54:00.008-02:00

As someone who read most of the Gallup and Buckingham books, I read this latest Gallup book with greatest interst. Although it was not quite what I expected, I still recommend it with four out of five stars. Here is why (only four, not five):

For one, I expected more real-life stories of business, political, historical and other leaders, of how they discovered their talents and developed them into strengths. But the book gives you only brief descriptions of four current leaders of profit and a non-for-profit organizations.

But what bothers me most is that once again, Gallup titles something "strengths-based" while it should more appropriately be called "talent-based". For those who are not familiar with this "jargon": Gallup considers talents to be like raw materials, which need to be developed into real strengths through hard work. When opening this book, I was hoping to learn something new about strengths, maybe whether Gallup research has developed some sort of taxonomy/vocabulary of 20something leadership strengths, similar to 34 talent themes. I bet they have, but the book won't tell you.

When I saw that half of the book consists of descriptions and recommendations for each of the 34 talent themes, I was concerned to find a "refurbished" version of the other Gallup books. But I was positively surprised that many of the recommendations are quite useful, "novel" and specific about leadership.

The two most interesting Gallup research insights I found in the book are:
1) "according to our latest research, the 34 StrengthsFinder themes naturally cluster into [...] four domains of leadership strengths[s]" which are
Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking. For instance, I was surprised to learn that Significance and Competition are considered to be Influencing talents, rather than Executing.

2) the four most commonly mentioned words of why people follow leaders are Trust, Compassion, Stability and Hope. I quote the book: "To our surprise, many of the "usual suspects" like purpose, wisdom, humor and humility were nowhere near the top of the list". Well, that certainly surprised me as well.

These two insights together with their conclusions alone make the book worth buying and reading, even if you are quite familiar with the Gallup literature already. And the book will give you an access code for the StrengthsFinder 2.0 on-line assessment, which is certainly very interesting, especially for people who have not taken the StrengthsFinder yet.

5 REASONS TO FOCUS ON STRENGTH AT WORK

2009-01-24T12:28:00.004-02:00

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of best universities. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com

All of us have our strengths and weaknesses. Most of us give a lot of importance to our weaknesses and try to overcome them so that we may become more competitive at our work place. But have you ever tried focusing on your strengths and those of your colleagues at your work place? Did you know that this strength-based management had its benefits too? Here are some reasons to focus on strengths at work.

You feel more connected with your team and colleagues when you place more focus on their strengths than on their weaknesses. Once you know the strengths of a person, you know how to interact well with that person and how to build on those strengths. Usually, the only topic that keeps you connected to your colleagues would be ‘the boss’ as most of you may find it difficult to relate to stuff outside work. But knowing each others strengths and focusing on them allows you to see your colleagues in a positive light and build a better bond with them.
You feel motivated by your strengths. We achieve so much more when we focus on our strengths. They give us a sense of self-worth that we feel happy. When you focus on employee strengths, they feel motivated too. Their self-esteem goes up and they feel happy to be a part of a team in which their strengths are recognized and emphasized.
You can use colleagues’ strengths to complement and supplement your own thus building a very good team. For example, you maybe good at developing long-term strategy. You can complement this strength with the researching skills of a colleague to come up with the best strategies. A colleague may be good at public relations. You may support her in building relationships within your team. This will go a long way in motivating her. So focusing on strengths will build a strong team that can handle almost any challenge that arises.
You will save the time and energy that has to be put into improving your weak areas, by focusing on your strengths. Trying to improve in an area where you are weak may promote you from poor to mediocre. But is it worth it? Why not focus on a skill at which you are excellent and try moving to masterful. This can be more enjoyable and save you the boredom at work. You can better your strong points and leave it to the others to help out in areas where you are weak. This saves everybody a lot of time.
Your work will become more fulfilling and it will reflect in all aspects of your life. A high level of confidence within you and a friendly atmosphere at your work place make life that much more pleasant and stress-free. Focusing on weaknesses gives rise to fears and insecurities. These fears are non-existent when we focus on our strengths. Try focusing not only on your strengths but also on your colleagues’ and watch the positive change come into play at your work place.

It is not possible to be an all-rounder but it is possible to be the best at certain things the way that only you can be. The same holds for your staff and colleagues. Give strengths a new focus and see if it doesn’t work.

The Big Five / Five Factor Model and the Clifton StrengthsFinder®: An Overview

2008-11-06T18:01:00.013-02:00

In my post further down, I have outlined my thoughts on the importance of the Five Factor Model (FFM) for all people on their "strengths quest". Now, I would like to offer my purly unscientific thoughts on how the Clifton Talent Themes could correlate with the WorkPlace Big Five ProFile. This is my own opinion and does not represent the views of Gallup or Dr. Howard. I have however found inspiration in an unpublished paper that Dr. Howard shared with me as well as in an unpublished study made by Gallup with 300 college students. Please take it as a discussion basis and let me know your thoughts about it.

The way this table should be read is like this: let's say for example that you have a very strong Ideation and Activator talent, but your Focus, Strategic or Analytical are rather weak. In this case, chances are high that your Big Five ProFile may result in a low value for C (a C- or C- -). However, if you have Ideation, Activator, Focus and Strategic all equally strong, chances are high that you are a C= ("balanced"), and highly situationally so. It means that there will be moments where your Activator may "ride" you in a C- direction and there are other moments where your Focus and Strategic drive you in a C+ direction. It could be for example that you are rather C- ("flexible") in your private life, but rather C+ ("focused") in your professional life; or the other way round.

The Big Five / Five Factor Model and the Clifton StrengthsFinder®: An Introduction

2008-11-06T17:51:00.024-02:00

The basic idea of Donald Clifton, Peter Drucker and other authors of the “strengths movement” is that we should focus more on developing our strengths than on fixing our weaknesses. One of the biggest obstacles in this quest is our lack of vocabulary for strengths. To quote Peter Drucker:

“Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer”

In order to find a remedy for this, the academic psychologist Donald Clifton worked many years on creating something like a taxonomy of 34 talents, along with an assessment of 180 questions that allows to identify those 34 talents. This on-line assessment is owned by the Gallup organization. If you buy a book like “Strengthsfinder 2.0” or “Now, Discover Your Strenghs”, you will get an access code that allows you to do the full online assessment but it will give you only your Top 5 talents.

That’s a pity because in my opinion you need to know your top 10 to 12 talents in order to really get a solid understanding of your talents and possible strengths. The only way to get access to your full 34 talents is by hiring Gallup’s consulting services which is something that only companies can do, but not individuals for themselves (at least as far as I know).

The good news is that the StrengthsFinder is by far not the only “way to Rome”. There are many other assessments available these days which are often personality-based assessments. As I have written elsewhere in this blog there seems to be quite some controversy among academic psychologists about how to define and measure personality, and to what extent personality really explains workplace performance. Dr. Hogan is one academic who defends very much the importance of personality for workplace, team and leadership performance. He writes in one of his books (p. 19):

“Well-developed assessment procedures are quite helpful – they can be used to predict occupational performance in virtually any job, or to predict training performance in virtually any curriculum (…) . The bad news, however, is that the vast majority of commercially available assessment procedures today are poorly developed and the information they provide is dubious (…). Professional training is required to distinguish between a competent assessment procedure and a fraud.”

Hogan writes about the MBTI, one of the most famous personality assessments based on Jung’s theory (p. 28):

“Most personality psychologists regard the MBTI as little more than an elaborate Chinese fortune cookie – each of the 16 MBTI types is described in a chirpy and upbeat fashion as having important and distinctive qualities. Nonetheless, psychological consultants have discovered that the business community has an endless appetite for MBTI-based feedback. Since 1975, the MBTI has become one of the bestselling psychological tests of all time.”

But even Daniel Goleman's concept of emotional intelligence (EQ) does not get good grades from Dr. Hogan:

“The EQ movement has taken the world of leadership training by storm; it has become vastly popular and quite profitable. Academic psychologists regard this development with dismay, noting that Goleman’s concept is internally inconsistent, and that the various methods available for measuring it will not pass technical scrutiny.”

Look, I am not an academic psychologist, but I am one of these managers who has an endless appetite for all new ideas in the intersection of psychology, organization and business strategy. And I have found that the personality of leaders and employees matters a lot. Furthermore, I consider talents and strengths as one of many traits of our personality. So I have been reading a lot in the last years and the purpose of this blog is to share with fellow managers what I have learnt and what has worked for me:

Of all the tools I have used and/or studied, I have found that the Clifton StrengthsFinder and the Five Factor Model (FFM, in business circles more often referred to as the “Big Five”) are the two most powerful tools for me as a manager, and they also seem to be scientifically solid, especially the FFM.

The FFM is one of those “inventions” that seem to be new, but its basic idea is actually quite old. It is beyond the scope of this blog post to explain you the interesting history of the FFM. Please consult Wikipedia for an interesting description. Let me just say so much: other than most other personality assessments which are usually a fruit of someone's musings on human nature, the FFM started with a appealingly simple question: let’s take a dictionary and filter out all attributes that describe personality, the assumption being that our language which has evolved over hundreds of years has incorporated most observable traits of human nature. Then, let’s try to define groups of attributes that describe similar things. Finally, let us continue this exercise to see what is the minimum number of such groups we need in order to describe personality. Hogan (p. 26):

“The FFM argues that individual differences in social behavior, and the the structure of personality measurement data, can be adequately described in terms of five broad dimensions (called Adjustment, Ascendance, Agreeableness, Prudence and Intellect/Optimism). … There is evidence to suggest that scores on measures of the FFM are heritable and stable over time (Costa & McCrae 1988) Finally, the FFM provides a common vocabulary for talking about personality. With the FFM, a new sheriff came to town, instilling a measure of order in a notoriously lawless group discussion.”

Note that there are many versions of FFM-based assessments out there. The classic one is the NEO PI-R of Costa&Crae, another one is the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI).

But for the business world, the most interesting one may well be the WorkPlace Big Five ProFile™ developed by Pierce and Jane Howard (husband and wife). I highly recommend their excellent book "The Owner's Manual For Personality at Work" because it is not only a very well written introduction to the FFM and its relevance for managers and employees, but because it is also a major eye-opener for all of us who seek to discover our talents and strengths.

I had the privilege to participate in CentACS' (the company of the Howards) Big Five Workplace Certificaion program in the beginning of October. It is a three and a half day training which –among many other benefits- certifies you to purchase the Workplace Big Five ProFile (TM) as well as the NEO PI-R and use it with other people. Note that none of these two assessments you can just buy somewhere on the internet or on Amazon.For, according to US law, you need to fulfull certain criteria in order to purchase and conduct certain psychological assessments.

Having said that, I don't want to hide the fact that I have found a free on-line FFM-based test on http://www.personalitytest.net/

I should warn you though that I do not know the “inner workings” or the authors of this test, and when I did it, some results were very similar to the results of my WorkPlace Big Five Profile, while others were at the complete opposite (for example, I have a very high O, while that other test suggested that I have an extremely low O).

The Workplace Big Five offers several advantages for managers: first of all, it is legally water-proof. The Howards have made great efforts to eliminate anything that could be in conflict with US laws with regard to recruiting and human resources management. For example, the dimension N, sometimes called Neuroticism, is translated with “Need for Stability”, as it is obviously quite problematic to label your employees on a scale of neuroticism. Some questions in the NEO PI-R deal with political views or preferences, which is unacceptable for a workplace related tool. Furthermore, The Howards also translated many of the sub-dimensions of the Big Five into more relevant language for business.

While Gallup advises against using its StrengthsFinder as a selection tool, the Howards encourage the use of the WorkPlace Big Five for selection and staffing decisions. That is quite an interesting and important difference.

There is a lot that “Strengths-Seekers” can learn from the FFM and especially the Work Place Big Five ProFile. I would like to expand on this more in future posts and as always would like to invite Blog readers to comment on this here, too.

Have a look at this article which also discusses the link between the FFM and the Strenghtsfinder.

Reinventing Drucker's "Management by Objectives" through Strengths?

2008-09-06T21:12:00.010-03:00

One of the remarkable common points between Peter Drucker's thinking and "First Break All the Rules" (FBATR) is captured by the following quotation:

"So this is their [= the great managers'] dilemma: The manager must retain control and focus people on performance. But she is bound by her belief that she cannot force everyone to perform in the same way.
The solution is as elegant as efficient: Define the right outcomes and then let each person find his own route toward those outcomes." (FBATR, p. 110)

I find this principle surprisingly similar to Peter Drucker's famous "Management by Objectives (MBO)" which "was popular in the 1960s adn 1970s" but "which is now largely ignored" (according to The Economist's "Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus" p. 122). According to Drucker, MBO was crucial to give an enterprise the unity of direction and effort of a management team. But it was also a way of "empowering" your employees (a buzzword which Drucker never liked too much):

"The greatest advantage of management by objectives is perhaps that it makes it possible for a manager to control his own performance. Self-control means stronger motivation: a desire to do the best rather than do just enough to get by." (Drucker in Management, p. 439)

Again, there is a remarkable parallel to "First Break All The Rules" here (p.111 f.):

"this solution [= defining the right outcomes] encourages employees to take responsibility. Great managers want each employee to feel a certain tension, a tension to achieve. Defining the right outcomes creates that tension."

But Buckingham and Coffman ask a very good question:

"If defining outcomes rather than methods is so elegant and so efficient, why don't more managers do just that? ... Every manager has his own reasons, but in the end it is probably the allure of control is just too tempting. "

This "allure" of control is best described by Drucker when he writes about the "top man in a company - especially in a small or fair-sized company that has been growing fast -" when the time for change in his role and behavior arrives:

"What is demanded of the top man is indeed a great deal. He has to accept that he no longer can be the virtuoso performer. Instead he has to become the "conductor". Where he prides himself... on knowing everybody in the company, on knowing every customer, on knowing everything that went on, and on making every decision and solving every problem, he now has to manage by objectives for managers and through their self-control. Where formerly he was the court of last resort - and very often the court of first resort as well - he now has to have a management structure. Where he "knows how to do everything", he now has to let people do it their own way." (Management, p. 779)

Yet, I believe that the temptation to control is not the only obstacle for a strengths-based reinvention of management by objectives. It is often quite difficult to define the right objectives. Drucker's "acid test" is this:

"These [performance] measurements need not be rigidly quantitative; nor need they they be exact. But they have to be clear, simple, and rational. They have to be relevant and direct attention and efforts where they should go. They have to be reliable - at least to the point where their margin of error is acknowledged and understood. And they have to be, so to speak, self-explanatory, understandable without complicated interpretation or philosophical discussions." (Management p. 440)

Well, if it was only that easy! As a real-life manager, I find defining the right objectives and keeping them simple quite a challenge in my daily work. And maybe I am not the only one who feels that way. For after a while, Drucker himself downplayed the significance of MBO with the following argument:

"MBO is just another tool. It is not the great cure for management inefficiency... Management by objectives works if you know the objectives: 90% of the times you don't."

This quotation is from the above mentioned "Guide to Ideas and Gurus." Unfortunately, I could never track down the original source. I am afraid it may not be the correct quotation, as I found a slightly different version in the internet:

 "Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't"

Either way, I find this observation both sad and hilarious at the same time. For I have researched the literature about defining the right objectives and measuring performance and among other ideas studied the Balanced Scorecard; yet, I often felt that when you try to put these ideas into practice, they are soon everything else than "self-explanatory, understandable without complicated interpretation or philosophical discussions".

Therefore, my question goes to you, dear Bloggers: what experiences have you made with regard to this? What can you recommend?

Talent-based interviewing

2008-09-05T16:50:00.006-03:00

You may be interested to read (and contribute to?) this interesting discussion in the Employee Engagement Network.

One of the central tenets of Gallup's Consulting practice is that focusing on employee's strengths (rather than weaknesses) is key to achieve high employee engagement which in turn drives ultimately shareholder value. The Employee Engagement Network discusses strengths-based as well as other means to achieve this important objective.

Norwich Union changes focus from competencies to strengths

2008-08-31T14:52:00.008-03:00

Have a look at this interesting article of Karen Stefanyszyn, head of organizational development at Norwich Union, the largest insurer in the UK. It touches issues like strengths-based interviewing and selecting for strengths which I would like to discuss in this blog.

This article is on the website of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology. There is also a section about "Strengths at Work" where you can find some other interesting articles.

The Fallacy of Strengths-Based Leadership

2008-08-31T01:10:00.008-03:00

This blog can also be a space to voice critical opinions about strengths-based management and leadership or to send links to such opinions. I found this blog post of Dan McCarthy as well as this one of Breanne Potter very interesting (which does not mean that I fully agree with them as you can see in my comments).

The link between your StrengthsFinder talent themes and your career in business

2008-08-30T23:05:00.019-03:00

"Almost every person who takes the Gallup StrengthsFinder profile asks the same questions: what's the right career for me? What should I consider doing now? What is my best fit".

Such is the promising beginning of an article in the Gallup Management Journal (GMJ) "Building a Career on Your Strengths" (click on this link, but you need to have a subscription to the journal). I definitely am one of the persons asking these questions. And one year after my "strengths Epiphany" and lots of studying, I still feel somewhat in search of the deeper career-related implications of my talents.

The problem I find with many of the strengths books as well as that GMJ article is that they usually give you only very generic advise, such as "move from strength", "consider the possibilities", "define the expectations", "candidly consider your "fit"", "define an action plan", "build a constituency", "measure your performance".

All right, very nice and well. But somehow quite theoretical. The best help I have found so far to discover and define my business related strengths is the book that I recommended in one of my previous posts: "Discovering Your Career in Business" by Anthony Butler and James Waldroop.

But what I have discovered only these days is their website, where you can do one "business career interest" assessment for free, which will basically tell you how well you score on their "Entrepreneurial Attributes Scale Score (EAS)", or in other words, how similar your self-description is to that of entrepreneurs.

If you are willing to invest 95 USD, go directly to their main website and purchase their CareerLeader. I am not associated with these guys and have no financial interest in doing so, but I highly recommend doing this assessment, which will take you about 45-60 minutes (if you are fast). This assessment will inform you about your two or three top business interests (which I find an interesting proxy for business-related talents) out of the following selection:

Application of Technology
Quantitative Analysis
Theory Development and Conceptual Thinking
Creative Production
Counseling and Mentoring
Managing People
Enterprise Control
Influence through Language and Ideas

The final report will explain to you what these interests mean, it will inform you about your business related strengths (!) and weaknesses, what jobs and career paths you should consider, what kind of organizational culture would be a better fit for you and your strengths, and last but not least what motivates you in your career.

For example in my case, it turns out that I am "extremely interested in Influence through Language and Ideas" (has anyone seen my Blog lately?) and that I "also have a notable interest in Theory Development and Conceptual Thinking". That is quite accurate! And for your comparison: my strongest talent themes are Maximizer, Significance, Strategic, Intellection, Ideation, Input, Command, Activator. The only thing that one might expect here would be Communication, which is not in my Top 10.

Admittedly, I could have guessed these two interests without taking the test for 95 USD and could have read the general comments about them in the book for 18 USD. But I find the online test and report still worth the money for the highly individualized report you get, the cautions about dangers to your career, the many interesting "how to" links it includes, and finally it is kind of cool to get a written confirmation of your own"strengths-based career musings".

Like all these tests, you have to enjoy them with certain caution and the authors of the report repeatedly emphasize that they can of course not guarantee you career success even if you follow their advise, as success depends on so many different factors. Yet, I find that this online tool has provided me the most "crispy", specific and actionable insights into my business related strengths so far. And if you don't like reading books, this report is quite comprehensive!

Strengths-based leadership development program at Wharton

2008-08-30T11:58:00.006-03:00

Check out this program at Wharton. It is quite expensive but seems to be interesting, and I find it encouraging to see that strengths-based leadership is taught at an ivy-league business school like Wharton!

One of the best strengths-based selections of the 20th century

2008-08-27T13:10:00.046-03:00

Our talents are "recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings and behavior". As such, they describe very much our preferred work-style. Once you are promoted to into a management function, it is very likely that your work-style strongly influences your leadership style. For example, if you have always preferred to work independently, you may tend to give more independency to your employees as well.

In the book “First Break All The Rules”, the authors even suggest to select employees based on how their talents match with your leadership style (p. 101):

“Think about who you are as a manager and who will mesh with your style. Do you prefer short-term goals and expect to check in regularly with each person to monitor incremental progress? If so, you need to surround yourself with direct reports who yearn for structure and detail and regular updates, the thinking talent discipline. Or are you the kind of manager who likes to hand off as much responsibility as possible, who sets long-term goals and then expects employees to orient themselves toward those goals without much help from you? If so, your direct reports will need the thinking talent focus, which we described previously.”

This sounds like good advise, but in real life it may not be so practical. In your career, unless you build up your own company, you are likely to move from one department to another department, from one company to the another, or even from one country to another and you will always encounter new employees with different talents which may not be to your liking. So what do you do? Fire them all, just because they don’t match with your leadership style? Or adapt to them, thereby compromising on how you work and lead best?

This is a really tricky question. For one, it is obviously an ethical one. Can it be right to dismiss someone just because he needs more structure while your working and leadership style craves for independence, delegation and empowerment? It seems to be very unfair, and yet I believe it happens all the time. Only that people won’t talk about a mismatch between talents and leadership style; more likely, you will hear things like "he just does not seem to fit any longer into the team", "she just doesn't seem to get it", "he seems to be unable to deal with the inevitable changes", and so on. I have no scientific evidence, but I would not be surprised if the number one root cause for dismissals was a mismatch between a manager’s leadership style and the employee’s working preferences, and both have a lot to do with talent.

Apart from the ethical concerns, there are also practical concerns. These days, as a manager you are expected to deliver quick results. Thus, there is little time to overhaul your team to make sure that it matches with your leadership style! But if you don’t change them, you will have to adapt. If you are blessed with Individualization or Maximizer, you have a chance to do this well. But otherwise, you will probably soon feel quite uncomfortable. For soon, this kind of mismatch will manifest itself in many unpleasant ways, from misunderstandings, frustrations, to disengaged employees and key people leaving the company.

The conclusion that I draw from this is that the wisest thing to do is to think twice before accepting a new job; and to choose a new assignment based on how well your leadership style matches with your possible new employee’s working preferences and the company’s overall culture and strategy. That may sound a bit like wishful thinking given the competitive rivalry that often exists about getting the next promotion. However, consider this: Emmett Murphy and his associates studied 18’000 managers and 562 large and small organizations in the United States and around the world. In his book “Leadership IQ” he comments on a very important activity of successful leaders, selection (p. 30) along with this most interesting anecdote of when Marshall selected Eisenhower to be the General for the European campaign:

“Hearing that [=Eisenhower’s answer to a probing question of Marshall], Marshall knew he had the right man. Eisenhower, on the other hand, wasn't quite as confident. He did accept the position, but only after more thought and discussion. He carefully and objectively analyzed the leadership needs of the European campaign and finally agreed to consider his own candidacy. With reservations that reflected his strategic humility, he came to agree that Marshall was right:

In spite of his limitations, he could do the job. And, of course, he did the job brilliantly and later went on to serve two terms as President of the United States.

For Marshall and Eisenhower, a well-executed selection process led to one of the best selection decisions of the twentieth century. Each played an active role in the process: Marshall decided that Eisenhower was the right person for the job, and so did Eisenhower.

…

Marshall and Eisenhower demonstrated the central goal of the selection process: Put the right person in the right place doing the right job at the right time. Selection is a pragmatic and collaborative process. Both the prospective employer and the prospective employee share the responsibility for making a wise decision. It is as unwise to take a job for which you are unsuited as it is to hire someone you know cannot succeed. Too often, people feel that the selection process is one-sided, and that the "more powerful" person is making all the decisions. Our research revealed that people with high Leadership IQ believe exactly the opposite: They see themselves as decision makers in all situations. Like Eisenhower, they are more concerned about making a choice themselves than whether someone else will offer them that choice. When asked to chronicle their growth and development, the exceptional leaders we studied consistently focused on the process of making an active selection as the pivotal event at every stage of their life histories. Even though they acknowledged the occasional relevance of luck, they invariably attributed their successes to their readiness to make choices. Being in the right place at the right time is important, but only for those ready to act on opportunities.

I find this story "beautiful" from a strengths- and Maximizer point of view! And note that Emmett Murphy’s book is not part of the “Gallup/Buckingham strengths canon”.

So how do you choose a new job or assignment based on your talents and strengths? In one of my next posts, I will offer some ideas. But at this point, I would already like to recommend a good book, which -although it does not declare itself to be a "strengths-based" book- uses a lot of strengths-based concepts, such as its "Business Career Interest Inventory" test to discover nothing less than your career related strengths!

Book: "Discovering Your Career in Business", by Timothy Butler and James Waldroop

I found also this article/blog of Rajababu Nivraaj quite interesting.

Selecting for Strengths: Sales Rep in the Pharmaceutical Industry

2008-08-25T22:24:00.016-03:00

Last week, I asked the question: What strengths should we recruit for in sales representative in the pharmaceutical industry? Allow me to suggest some answers today. This fits nicely into the posts further down.

As I mentioned, Novartis did some interesting research on this subject and part of its findings are publicly available in an interesting presentation that can be found in the following link:

http://www.sloansalesconference.com/media/2008/keynote_-_Greg_Schofield_-_Novartis.ppt

According to this presentation, highly successful sales reps in Novartis have the following strengths:

· They purposefully probe and listen.

· They adapt their message to each Doctor

· They are not shy to using rather direct closing techniques with doctors

· They create call continuity, for example by taking good notes, by reviewing them before the next visit, and by defining goals and key messages for each visit.

· They are relationship focused. As such, they make sure that they deliver what they have promised and they never answer a doctor's question if they are not sure about the answer.

· They coordinate with teammates who visit the same doctor to make sure that they don't miss important information and adapt their messages and approach to what their colleagues have said.

· They have a strong will to win.

What talents themes of the Clifton StrengthsFinder (R) can you identify behind these strengths? In short, I would say:

1. Individualization or Connectedness or Empathy

2. Responsibilty and/or Relator

3. Discipline or Input

4. Command or Belief

5. Competition or Significance

The ability to probe and listen can come from various talents, but the ability to adapt the message to each Doctor suggests Individualization. Yet, I have also seen great sales people with Connectedness who are also able to “connect” their message to all they have learned about the doctor. And Empathy is certainly also very useful: if you feel that the doctor is nervous or angry, you may want to ask to come back in a week to make your presentation.

Behind “relationship focused”, I see the talents Relator and Responsibility. Relator may be obvious, but Responsibility is very important for med reps because doctors hate it when the rep promises something (like bringing a study or sample on his next visit) and then does not keep it. That is unlikely to happen for someone with strong Responsibility.

For “creating call continuity”, I see Discipline or Input. Discipline can be a thinking and striving talent; people with Discipline like structure and routine. They don’t mind taking notes and reading them before the next visit. People with Input often like collecting information and can create the habit (=strength) of taking notes of everything important or interesting. I myself have Input very strong and I can testify how strong the urge to take notes can be: if it was not so unethical (and inefficient), I would almost like to record every important conversation!

Input can also create the desire to coordinate with teammates to make sure that they don’t miss important information.

People with Command or Belief are “not shy to use direct closing techniques with doctors”, such as asking “Doctor, would you mind trying this new therapy with only five patients until my next visit?”, or “Doctor, can I leave this important study here for your reading and we talk about it in my next visit?”. Command may be obvious, but Belief may be less so. Yet, I have heard and read again and again that people with strong belief in what they are selling (or teaching) are powerfully persuasive. And I get the impression that a lot of the better performing med reps have high Belief. If the talent Connectedness manifests itself also in strong convictions, it can have a similar persuasive effect like Belief.

The obvious answer for “strong will to win” is Competition. To a lesser extent, Significance may also serve here.

Now that we know this, what are we going to do with it? If I understand Gallup and Marcus Buckingham correctly, we should not try to select for these talents. For one, as we have seen, different talents can result in similar strengths.

So instead, we should select directly for these strengths. Behavioral based interviewing can be helpful here. Asking questions like…

“Tell me about a time when you turned a doctor’s no into a yes!” or

“How important is it for you to win? To be the number one?” or

“Do you believe that one can persuade all doctors in the same way?” and if no, “Tell me why not?”, “How do you adapt your persuasion to different doctors?”

In the last question, you do not want to hear obvious generalities like age, gender, medical specialty, but deeper things like the emotions perceived in the doctor, the doctor’s presumed deeper interests or fears, and so on.

I would like to invite YOU to propose more behavioral-based questions in a comment to this blog. What would be your favorite questions and what answers would you want to hear?

Can we use the Clifton StrengthsFinder for recruiting? If not, how should we select new employees for strengths?

2008-08-24T13:37:00.018-03:00

My business is in Diabetes Care (products more than services). Last year, we started exploring innovative ways of providing a much better diabetes education as a way to differentiate ourselves from the competition. One of the key questions was: what profile should our diabetes educators have?

It was around that time when I did the StrengthsFinder myself for the first time and soon also invited my managers to do it. We were all so fascinated with the outcome that we could not help thinking in terms of (the StrengthsFinder) talents when we tried to define the ideal profile of our diabetes educators.

However, Gallup does not recommend using the StrengthsFinder (or its 34 talent themes) as a selection tool, as it is supposed to be a tool for self-understanding and coaching. I confess that I could not quite understand this in the beginning as I was (and still am) so convinced of the connection between talents and performance.

But over time, I understood why it would not be a good idea indeed to select for talent: because talents (according to the definition of the Gallup books) are more of a "raw material", not necessarily of great use for a business yet. Talents often need to be developed into productive strengths through targeted practice, repetition, experience. And that takes time, sometimes a lot of time; time which you usually don't have as a manager trying to hit the road running with a new strategy.

Let me give you an example: let's say you you are in a business that sells mostly to mid-sized business, often run by the owner himself. You come to the conclusion that your sales force is too conventional, too much product- and relationship oriented. You believe that you sales force needs to become more service- and solution-oriented; a true business partner with a profound knowledge of the customer's industry trends and needs.

That may require quite some strategic and entrepreneurial thinking. If you would limit your new profile to the StrengthsFinder talent themes, you may come up with talents like Strategic, Ideation, Futuristic. But recruiting for these talents only is no guarantee that a sales rep will have the desired level of entrepreneurial thinking, as this kind of strength may require many other elements, such as industry experience, some management training, product knowledge.

So you are much better off recruiting directly for the strengths you need, in this case entrepreneurial thinking or business acumen good enough to be a real business partner of your customers.

The other important disadvantage of recruiting for (the StrengthsFinder) talents is that different talents can result in a similar strength: for instance, for a Diabetes educator, the strength to adapt a recommendation to a customer's unique personality and situation is of tantamount importance. The obvious StrengthsFinder talent for this is Individualization, but I have also found some people with Connectedness and Empathy very good in this. If I selected only for Individualization, I would miss interesting candidates with Connectedness and Empathy.

So eventually, I got convinced of selecting for strengths, not for talents. But which strengths? The beautiful thing of the StrengthsFinder is that it offers you a nice taxonomy of 34 talents along with the vocabulary so that you can speak the same language with your managers. But when we started to talk about strengths, we found ourself lost in a similar way as we did with talents before learning about the StrengthsFinder. My team and I had a hard time spelling out what strengths we were really looking for and inevitably resorted again and again to using the talent themes vocabulary.

Soon, I decided to ask Gallup for help. They use a system called SRI. I forgot what the abbreviation stands for. The SRI makes use of what is probably Gallup's biggest strength: asking intelligent questions to lots of people and drawing important conclusions from the answers. So what they usually would do is to interview 100 or more of your employees who do the job for which you want to create the strengths profile. And with your help, they identify the high performers in this group of 100 (or more). Then they would compare the answers of the high performers with the rest of the group to find out whether there are certain questions that the high performers consistently answer differently than the rest of the group. A nice example is written in the book "Discover Your Sales Strengths": if you ask sales people the question how they feel when clients doubt what they say, the high performers feel bothered, while the mediocre or underperforming sales people would say that they don't bother.

I am a layman with such interviewing, or quantitative or qualitative research, but I find this approach most interesting. However, I also see some problems:

First of all, Gallup is everything else than cheap and so usually only large companies can afford this SRI.
But apart from the cost, the fact that you need a larger number of people to interview also makes it difficult for smaller companies to do an SRI. If you have your own small business or are a manager of a smaller business unit in a large company, you may not have 100 employees and at least 20 high performers.
And even if you are a large company or have 100 employees, you still may have a problem when you realize that things are not going well and that the root cause of this is a mismatch between the strengths of your employees and what the company really needs. In such a situation, you want to define the strengths required for the company’s new strategy or vision, but how do you do this if few of your existing employees seem to have these strengths? The SRI won’t help you here.
A similar problem can occur if you want to develop an innovative new service, something that has not been done before in your company. That was my case with the Diabetes educators. But I didn’t have any Diabetes educators with whom we could do an SRI! So what do you then?

Gallup was very forthcoming in finding a solution to my needs, also because they were intrigued by the idea of improving diabetes education; but they pointed out that they had to adapt and improvise in order to come up with a solution.

Ever since, I have been thinking about ways how small companies (or small business units in big companies) can define the strengths that they need for their jobs, their strategy and their culture; especially so if they are in a turn-around situation or want to venture into innovative new fields. This is not an easy job because defining the right strengths does not depend only on the job description, but also on the company's overall strategy and vision, as well as your leadership style. I will explore these issues in more detail in the next post.

I have been searching the literature for something like a taxonomy of strengths. I haven't found a lot so far. When I came across the book “FYI – For Your Improvement” by Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger, I read with great interest their list of 166 competencies such as “action oriented”, “command skills”, “listening”, “patience” and “humor”. If I understand the strengths literature correctly, the term “competency” is a bit muddled in that it can be talent, strength, knowledge, skill or a blend of them. Still, this list is the closest thing of a strengths taxonomy that I have found so far. I wonder whether anyone of you has experience with this? Do you know of any other "strengths taxonomy" or similar?

Have a look also at these talent-based interview questions of Jay Forte.

What are the right strengths for your company's strategy and culture?

2008-08-24T12:56:00.008-03:00

In the previous post, I have raised the question about how companies, especially smaller ones, should define the critical strengths they need for their unique strategy and culture.

This is not a simple question, as there is no universal talent profile for sales people, customer service people, accounting people and son on. The book “First Break All The Rules” makes it very clear that the strengths required for the same job can be very different depending on the organizational culture and strategy (p. 100):

“In the early nineties Gallup began work with two of the largest retail brokerage firms in the United States. Both companies wanted help in selecting brokers. And both of them defined the role in exactly the same way – the broker was not paid to be a money manager, doing financial analysis, picking stocks. Instead he was paid to be a money gatherer, identifying high-potential prospects and the persuading them to invest their money in this firm. He was a salesperson.

Although the definition of both roles was the same, each company organized itself differently. One was extremely structured. Each broker spent months learning how to represent the same suite of meticulously packaged products, and regular refresher courses helped keep him from straying too far from the company’s mandate.

By comparison, the other company was wildly entrepreneurial. Licensed brokers were told, “Here’s a phone, here’s a phone book. I want to see 500,000$ in assents under management by this time next year. Best of luck.

Both strategies had their strengths. And as it turns out, both strategies have proven very successful. However, both could not be executed by the same kind of person. Although the job title was the same – “broker” and the job description was the same – “gather money” – the talent profiles were significantly different.”

For the structured company, the critical striving company was Achiever and the critical thinking talent was Discipline. For the entrepreneurial company, the critical thinking (and striving) talent was Focus, ideally in combination with the thinking talent Strategic.

The quotation above is one of my favorite parts in the book "First Break All The Rules". I find the connection between business strategy and employee's strengths most fascinating. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that a mismatch here is worse than a mismatch between a job's required strengths and the employee's strength. I have been researching the internet and literature for more insights into how to match strengths with your company's strategy and culture, but I haven't found a lot so far. Therefore, I would like to ask you whether you know any valuable sources of information or have made your own experience?

Behavior-event interviewing for strengths?

2008-08-23T16:50:00.018-03:00

A friend of mine brought the concepts of “Behavioral Event Interviewing (BEI)” or “Behavioral-based Interviewing” to my attention. I confess I have never heard these terms before, although the concept itself was not new to me. The concept is well explained by Tamara E. Holmes in an article that you can find for free on the NFIB (“The Voice of Small Business”!!) website: http://www.nfib.com/object/IO_16988.html

“Under the technique's premise, it is not enough to know that a prospective employee is fluent in Spanish. Instead, you would want to find out how the person has used his or her bilingual capabilities in the past.

The premise behind behavioral-event interviewing is that past behavior predicts future performance. Just as a credit report is used to predict how a loan applicant will handle money in the future, examples of past accomplishments and behaviors can help hiring managers get an idea of how a potential employee will perform in the future.

Unlike interviewing techniques that focus on hypothetical situations and ask applicants what they would do in a given situation, behavioral event interviewing focuses on what applicants have done. The danger of using hypothetical situations to gauge an applicant's ability to handle the job is that the applicant is better able to give the answers he or she thinks you want to hear. Also, applicants might want to believe that they would act in a certain manner when, in reality, they would not.

When coming up with questions for the interview, consider the way each is phrased. You'll want to use open-ended questions that require more than a "yes" or "no" answer.

For example, starting a question off with the phrase "Tell me about a time when…" prompts the applicant not only to describe a situation that fits your criteria, but also to walk you through the resolution of the situation. Such a discourse not only allows you to hear about the situation, but it forces the applicant to talk more. As a result, you're better able to gauge his or her communication skills, which can also help you make your hiring decision."

Indeed, these recommendations are very similar to the interviewing tips in “First Break All The Rules “ on page 215 ff. (“The Art of Interviewing for Talent”).

I find it interesting that the concepts of a behavioral-based interviews can be applied to a strengths-based interview. I am not a psychologist, but I understand that personality and behavior are two different concepts: while personality does not change a lot once we are adults, our behavior can change. Of course, our behavior is very much influenced by our personality, but I always got the feeling the “behaviorists” tend to be those who say that “managers are made, not born”, while the personality folks rather tend to say “managers are born, not made.” And it is my understanding that talents are an aspect of our personality. How good can it be then to use behavioral-based interviewing to find strengths?

My friend who is an experienced "Talent Manager" working for a large company in the US says:

"Strengths are personality based, and the issue is they have not found a correlation between personality and sales ability or high performance outcomes in teams in competitive environments. But yes, behaviors do make a difference to performance. So the Strengths people have turned the strengths into behaviors that relate to your industry for you (I think). So it is a bit muddled, but might work! I just come from a business and academic background and prefer not to have my work based on a foundation of strengths or personality. However, there is a school of thought that believes personality predicts performance. The most well known person is Hogan, and Hogan Assessment Systems."

This seems to be a very interesting but also controversial field. If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you google "behavioral-based interviewing", because there is a lot of interesting information out there. There are also a few good books in Amazon. Check out also the following document:

http://www.asisvcs.com/bellsouth/pdf/710057.pdf

Dear Bloggers, if you know more about this, have experience or know interesting website, please put them in a comment to this post!

Are There Other Strengths Assessment Tools?

2008-08-19T23:53:00.004-03:00

Does anyone know whether there are any other assessment tools (than the Clifton StrengthFinder) based on Donald Clifton's Strengths Psychology or any other "strengths philosophy"?

An Interesting Group About Strengths

2008-08-19T18:12:00.003-03:00

Visit Strengths School

We are Marshall

2008-08-19T15:16:00.007-03:00

Have you seen this movie? As a European, I don't understand too much about American football, but this movie caught my attention, maybe because there are so many interesting talents/strengths at work in Jack Lengyel (played by Matthew McConaughey) , the new coach who takes over after the whole football team dies in an airplane crash. What do you think are Lengyel's strongest talents?

Product Description from Amazon.com (Click on the Title of this Post to Learn More About this Movie)
Football is a game that knocks you down, then expects you to get back up. Life hit the West Virginia town of Huntington and its Marshall University even harder. When it did, Jack Lengyel came by to help pull them onto their feet by taking the job no one wanted: rebuilding the Marshall football program only months after a plane crash wiped out Marshall's beloved Thundering Herd. Matthew McConaughey portrays Lengyel, the energetic, compassionate coach of inexperienced players whose chances of victory are slim and none. They'll go with the slim. And as they do, their true-life story of heart, healing, and football will thrill and inspire you. It's game day. Time to play till the whistle blows!

How to Develop Individualization?

2008-08-19T11:44:00.006-03:00

"People who are especially talented in the Individualization theme are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. They have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively." Definition from the Clifton Strengths Finder Report

In my experience in sales and marketing, I have observed that some of the best sales people have strong individualization. This helps them to listen very carefully to their clients, observe seemingly minor yet important details and adapt their messages to their clients deeper needs.

One colleague and one of the best sales persons I have ever met once explained to me that sometimes he walks into a client's office and just perceives that the client is stressed about something. Although he would have carefully prepared this sales call, he would immediately "abort mission", talk about trivialities and ask the client whether he could return next week.

I have seen similar talents with some people strong in Connectedness who seem to have developed this talent into a strength that seems similar to Individualization: they somehow figure out what makes each person tick and connect their message to what they have observed in the client.

Dear Bloggers, have you observed this as well? What advise would you give someone who hast just discovered that he has Individualization and now wants to develop this talent into a real strength in sales?

Your Opinion Matters

2008-08-18T16:04:00.004-03:00

This blog is brand-new! It has been created a few days ago in August 2008. The authors of this blog would like to know what you think about it, what you like, what you dislike. We also welcome suggestions for new posts, such as Strengths-related issues that you would like to be discussed in this blog.

Many thanks!

Do You Know a Talent Coach?

2008-08-18T12:36:00.007-03:00

Are you looking for a coach who can help you developing your talents into strengths, someone who believes in and has experience with the Clifton's Strengths Psychology? Then please post a comment and don't forget to say where you live and how you can be contacted.

Or are you such a coach? Then please feel free to post a comment, describing your coaching philosophy, the city or cities where you work and how you would like to be contacted! Feel free to put a link to your website or blog!

What are the Ideal Strengths for a Medical Visitor?

2008-08-17T20:02:00.005-03:00

What strengths should we recruit for in sales representative in the pharmaceutical industry? Are the strengths needed for this job any different from typical sales strengths? Do we have any solid evidence for this?

Novartis has done some interesting research on this subject and part of its findings are publicly available in an interesting presentation that can be found in the following link:

http://www.sloansalesconference.com/media/2008/keynote_-_Greg_Schofield_-_Novartis.ppt

According to this presentation, highly successful sales reps in Novartis have the following strengths:

They purposefully probe and listen.
They adapt their message to each Doctor
They are not shy to using rather direct closing techniques with doctors
They create call continuity, for example by taking good notes, by reviewing them before the next visit, and by defining goals and key messages for each visit.
They are relationship focused. As such, they make sure that they deliver what they have promised and they never a doctor's question if they are not sure about the answer.
They coordinate with teammates who visit the same doctor to make sure that they don't miss important information and adapt their messages and approach to what their colleagues have said.
They have a strong will to win.

What talents can you identify behind these strengths? Do you agree with these strengths, or do you believe that some of them are misleading while other more important strengths are missing? What interview questions would you ask and what answers would you want to hear in order to find these strengths?

BELIEF (Creencia) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:55:00.004-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Belief talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Creencia?

ARRANGER (Organizador) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:51:00.005-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Arranger talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Organizador?

ADAPTABILITY (Flexibilidad) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:50:00.002-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Adaptability talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Flexibilidad?

ACHIEVER (Logrador) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:49:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Achiever talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Emprendedor/Logrador?

FOCUS (Enfoque) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:48:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Focus talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Enfoque?

RESPONSIBILITY quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:47:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Responsibility talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Responsabilidad?

MAXIMIZER (Excelencia) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:46:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Maximizer talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Excelencia?

COMPETITION quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:45:00.002-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Competition talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Competitivo?

SIGNIFICANCE quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:44:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Significance talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Significancia?

INCLUDER quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:43:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations and proverbs with regard to the Includer talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Inclusion?

COMMUNICATION quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:42:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Communication talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Comunicacion?

CONSISTENCY (Equidad) quotations & movies

2008-08-17T19:39:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Consistency talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Equidad?

EMPATHY quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:38:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Empathy talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Empatia?

POSITIVITY quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:37:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Positivity talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Positivo?

WOO (Carisma) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:36:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Woo talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Carisma?

RELATOR quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:35:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Relator talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Relación?

INDIVIDUALIZATION quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:34:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Individualization talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Individualizar?

ACTIVATOR (Iniciador) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:33:00.003-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Activator talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Iniciador?

HARMONY (Armonía) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:32:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Harmony talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Armonía?

SELF-ASSURANCE (Autoconfianza) quotations & talents

2008-08-17T19:31:00.002-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Self-Assurance talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Autoconfianza?

DEVELOPER (Desarrollador) quotations & talents

2008-08-17T19:30:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Developer talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Desarrollador?

CONNECTEDNESS (Conexion) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:29:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Connectedness talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Conexion?

COMMAND (Mando) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:28:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Command talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Mando?

DISCIPLINE quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:27:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Discipline talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Disciplina?

RESTORATIVE quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:26:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Restorative talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Restaurador?

ANALYTICAL quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:25:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Analytical talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Analitico?

DELIBERATIVE (Prudente) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:24:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Deliberative talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Prudente?

CONTEXT quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:23:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Context talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Contexto?

LEARNER (Estudioso) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:22:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Learner talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Estudioso?

INPUT (Inquisitivo) quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:20:00.002-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Input talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Inquisitivo?

FUTURISTIC quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:19:00.001-03:00

Please post your favorite quotes and proverbs with regard to the Futuristic talent!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Futurista?

IDEATION quotations & proverbs

2008-08-17T19:12:00.002-03:00

Please post your favorite quotations or proverbs that have to do with Ideation!

Le gustaría escribir una cita o proverbio que hable sobre el talento Idear?

ARRANGER books & movies

2008-08-17T15:46:00.007-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Arranger?

ADAPTABILITY books & movies

2008-08-17T15:45:00.003-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend for someone strong (or weak) in Adaptability?

ACHIEVER books & movies

2008-08-17T15:44:00.008-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Achiever?

FOCUS books & movies

2008-08-17T15:44:00.002-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Focus?

RESPONSABILITY books & movies

2008-08-17T15:43:00.002-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Responsability?

MAXIMIZER books & movies

2008-08-17T15:42:00.004-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Maximizer?

COMPETITION books & movies

2008-08-17T15:42:00.002-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Competition?

SIGNIFICANCE books & movies

2008-08-17T15:41:00.002-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Significance?

INCLUDER books & movies

2008-08-17T15:40:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Includer?

COMMUNICATION books & movies

2008-08-17T15:38:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Communication?

CONSISTENCY books & movies

2008-08-17T15:37:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Consistency?

EMPATHY books & movies

2008-08-17T15:36:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Empathy?

POSITIVITY books & movies

2008-08-17T15:35:00.000-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Positivity?

RELATOR books & movies

2008-08-17T15:34:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Relator?

INDIVIDUALIZATION books & movies

2008-08-17T15:33:00.005-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Connectedness?

ACTIVATOR books & movies

2008-08-17T15:33:00.002-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Activator?

BELIEF books & talents

2008-08-17T15:32:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Belief?

HARMONY books & movies

2008-08-17T15:31:00.003-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Harmony?

SELF-ASSURANCE books & movies

2008-08-17T15:30:00.002-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Self-Assurance!

DEVELOPER books & movies

2008-08-17T15:29:00.005-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Developer?

COMMAND books & movies

2008-08-17T15:29:00.002-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Command, apart from military movies?

DISCIPLINE books & movies

2008-08-17T15:28:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Discipline?

RESTORATIVE books & movies

2008-08-17T15:27:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Restorative?

STRATEGIC books & movies

2008-08-17T15:26:00.004-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Connectedness?

ANALYTICAL books & movies

2008-08-17T15:26:00.002-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Connectedness?

DELIBERATIVE books & movies

2008-08-17T15:25:00.004-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Deliberative?

CONTEXT books & movies

2008-08-17T15:24:00.005-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Context (apart from History Channel)?

LEARNER books & movies

2008-08-17T15:23:00.004-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Learner?

INPUT books & movies

2008-08-17T15:22:00.003-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Input?

FUTURISTIC books & movies

2008-08-17T15:21:00.004-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Futuristic?

IDEATION books & movies

2008-08-17T15:19:00.001-03:00

What books and movies would you recommend to someone strong (or weak) in Ideation?

Spanish - English Translation of Talents

2008-08-17T14:13:00.008-03:00

Analítico = Analytical

Armonía = Harmony

Autoconfianza = Self-Assurance

Carisma = Woo

Competitivo = Competition

Communicacion = Communication

Conexion = Connectedness

Contexto = Context

Creencia = Belief

Desarrollador = Developer

Disciplina = Discipline

Empatía = Empathy

Emprendador/

Logrador = Achiever

Enfoque = Focus

Equidad = Consistency

Estratégico = Strategic

Estudioso = Learner

Excelencia = Maximizer

Flexibilidad = Adaptability

Futurista = Futuristic

Idear = Ideation

Inclusión = Includer

Individualizar = Individualization

Iniciador = Activator

Inquisitivo = Input

Intelectual = Intellection

Mando = Command

Organizador = Arranger

Positivo = Positivity

Prudente = Deliberative

Relación = Relator

Responsabilidad = Responsability

Restaurador = Restorative

Significación = Significance