One of the most valuable things a boss has done for me in recent memory is to have me take the CliftonStrengths Finder. Ever since I was a kid reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, or a pre-teen taking quizzes in Seventeen magazine, I have been enthralled with the possibility my future looks like and discovering more about what makes me tick.
For instance, I’m also a huge Myers-Briggs fan (INFJs unite!) and recommend the website 16Personalities to anyone and everyone.
What made CliftonStrengths different for me was the context it was shared in. My small team was butting heads on a few fundamental things. All smart, capable people, my boss shared our strengths in a quasi Venn diagram that showed how we all overlapped as well as what unique superpowers we brought to the table.
This insight did three incredibly valuable things:
- Validated each of us that we were important to the team.
- Highlighted exactly where we had unique strengths the team could leverage and helped identify new areas of collaboration for those of us with mutual strengths.
- Showed that even the people we found difficult to work with brought strengths to the team.
My Top 5 dominant strengths are Ideation, Learner, Strategic, Individualization, and Input.
Four out of my five top strengths are in the same domain: Strategic Thinking. Hello?! That was a crazy aha moment in and of itself and incredibly validating. It also made it clear that being strategic thinking is reflexive. Even if I wanted to suppress it, why would I if it is this dominant? It’s better to find a way to use it.
Of these, Individualization is the only one in another domain, Relationship Building. The results explained why I’m energized by new problems and new information, why I see several paths where others see one, and why I notice what makes each person different. It also clearly explained points of friction and changed how I treat my own limits.
I found the Top 5 to be so insightful, I purchased the full CliftonStrengths results with all 34 strengths and this also gave me all 34 of my boss’s strengths! Comparing our sequences replaced guesswork with understanding: we share the same two thinking themes, so knowing where our profiles diverge lets me adjust how I communicate instead of wondering how something might land.
Now I know what I bring to a team and what I need beside me, and I can say both plainly.
This helped me identify strengths in others and to pair people based on what they are built for rather than who is available. It also gave us a neutral language for our differences, so a cautious question or a fast decision could be read as a working style rather than a personal judgment.
The benefits didn’t stop at work. I found that, at home, I was able to better articulate why I am the way I am.
I’m a thinker, a dreamer, and someone who can put themselves in the shoes of others. This naturally dovetails with my aforementioned INFJ self, which 16personalities calls The Advocate, a person who is “fueled by a profound internal passion. Stimulated by deep, reflective thought and an enormous amount of empathy, they dedicate themselves to the pursuit of purpose.”
Understanding that my strengths are my superpowers at work helped me determine what makes them strengths as a mother, partner, daughter, and person in general. It helped me articulate things to others that I realized they might not see. And perhaps even more important, it helped me realize where I could relax and relinquish control to others whose strengths excelled in areas mine did not.
When you accept that having strengths and superpowers also means having weaknesses, you realize that it makes more sense to find ways to compensate for those weaknesses through more than self-admonishment. I’m a former gifted kid, the eldest daughter, a perfectionist through and through.
Failure was never an option. But I’ve learned failure is also inevitable.
The last few years have had many ups and downs, and the moment I stopped pretending I had everything under control, that life was perfect, was the moment I started relearning what made me “me”. This means remembering how smart and capable I am, leading me to this precise moment in time as someone who knows their strengths, their value, and their competitive advantage. The journey has not been easy, but the feeling of knowing myself is one that brings tremendous gratitude and peace.
If you aren’t familiar with how CliftonStrengths works or what your own strengths are, I highly encourage you to check out Gallup’s website and subscribe to their emails. Honestly, I enjoy and look forward to their content, and in this day and age, that’s quite a statement.