Improving Your Individual Performance with CliftonStrengths
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Good morning. Happy Wednesday. Last week, I did a poll on LinkedIn about what type of content people want to see as I look forward to the next year.
And so the top two coming in both at 32 percent were improving individual performance and strengths and how to use them. So let me talk about strengths really quick. What it is, talk about a few of the common questions I hear about this and how it ties to improving personal performance. Strengths is the CliftonStrengths Assessment by Gallup.
Used to be called StrengthsFinder. I am a CliftonStrengths certified coach. I've been working with teams, leaders, individuals, all looking to improve their performance over the past 7 to 8 years. So let me talk to you about what the heck that is, how it ties to individual performance improvement.
The Strengths Assessment is the number one assessment in the world for identifying what your strengths are.
There are 34 strengths that have been identified through many years of research. And the assessment will identify for you what order those strengths fall in for you. So [00:01:00] something to think about with strengths is that it's not necessarily telling you like, Hey, you're really great at all of this stuff.
What it's actually telling you is that those are your natural ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, acting. And when you develop them and you know how to use them really productively, they can be incredible strengths. There's two different assessments.
So there's the top five and there's the full 34. The top five assessment, a great way to get started. If you can, spring for the full 34 because the amount of times I hear from people that take their top five and they go, Oh my gosh, I would have assumed that futuristic would be my top five.
It could be your number six and you're never going to know. Another question I get a lot from people who've taken it in the past is.
It's been two years. Should I take it again? What they've seen is that people's strengths actually don't change much over their lifetime.
It is not statistically probable that you would see something that's at the very bottom, like number 30, Move up into your top 10.
So really, if [00:02:00] you just took it two years ago, there's not really a reason to retake it. However, I would never discourage someone from retaking it if you wanted to, just to see if things have changed. Just know that likely things have not changed all that much.
The last question I get a lot is, what the heck do I do with this? There's many things you can do with your assessment results. It is really the tip of the iceberg. There's so many ways to dig in. Gallup has tons of reporting you can look at.
There's a really great podcast that explains each strength in depth. I'll put the link to that in the post. You can do individual coaching with someone like me, who is a certified coach who will help you explore more deeply what those things mean, how they apply to you, how you use it to be really successful and how you overcome some of the blind spots and barriers.
I'd love to know, How have you used strengths to boost your individual performance, since that is the thing that it seems like most people were curious about?