Understanding Your
Strengths
Strengths Based Leadership
December 2011
Understanding Your Strengths
Discovering Your Best Self
Objectives
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To understand your
strengths
To learn how to use
your strengths to lead
more effectively
To understand how to
build and leverage
your team’s strengths
Great leaders have exceptional clarity about who they are – and who they
are not. Success lies in your ability to discover your strengths and to
organize your life so that these strengths can be applied.
Talent is any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be
productively applied. For example, if you are instinctively inquisitive…this
is a talent.
A strength starts with an innate talent. A talent becomes a strength when
it’s refined by skills, knowledge and practice and then consciously applied
to something that needs doing – e.g. a job. A strength is the ability to
provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a specific given task.
What does is feel like when you are in the strengths zone?
“One should waste as little
effort as possible on
improving areas of low
competence. It takes far
more energy to improve
from incompetence to
mediocrity than it takes to
improve from first-rate
performance to
excellence.”
~Peter Drucker
To make the most out of employee strengths at the university, managers
need to know the strengths of each employee. Then they must create
opportunities (align their strengths to the responsibilities and
expectations of their roles) for employees to use them.
In your role as a leader/manager, you will need to focus on who each
employee is and tailor your actions to each individual employee. Each
employee is wired a little differently. If you are to keep your talented
employees and spur each of them on to greater performance, you will
have to discern how each one is unique and then figure out ways to
capitalize on this uniqueness.
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Understanding Your Strengths
Reflection
As Leaders we are often caught up in the day to day hustle of our everyday
lives and we don’t have time or we don’t take the time to self-reflect. Take a
few moments to complete these statements about yourself:

The time I am at my best is…
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The best thing about me is…
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What I enjoy doing most is…
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The best time in my life is/was…
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I enjoy learning about…
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The best job I ever had was…
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The best project I’ve ever been involved with was…
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The best leader I’ve ever worked for is/was…
Getting the Most Out of Your Strengths Finder Results
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What was your first reaction to your Strengths Finder results?
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What new discovery have you made about yourself?
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What surprised you?
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Understanding Your Strengths
ACTIVITY
Theme
Key Words and Phrases
1.
Activity…Synthesize you
themes…
2.
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3.
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Review your 5
signature strengths
and highlight words
and phrases that
resonate with you.
Select one strength
to focus on today.
Add the strength and
the key words or
phrases to the chart
on the right.
With a partner, talk
about one of your
strengths, how you
use it and how it
helps you be
successful
4.
5.
When/Where I recently used my strengths:
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Understanding Your Strengths
The Four Domains
Executing
Influencing
Relationship Building
Strategic
Thinking
Achiever
Arranger
Belief
Consistency
Deliberative
Discipline
Focus
Responsibility
Restorative
Activator
Command
Communication
Competition
Maximizer
Self-Assurance
Significance
Woo
Adaptability
Developer
Connectedness
Empathy
Harmony
Includer
Individualization
Positivity
Relator
Analytical
Context
Futuristic
Ideation
Input
Intellection
Learner
Strategic
Research found that it serves a team well to have a representation of strengths in
each of these four domains. Instead of one dominant leader who tries to do
everything or individuals who all have similar strengths, contributions from all
four domains lead to a strong and cohesive team.
Leaders with dominant strength in Executing know how to make things happen.
They know how to catch an idea and make it a reality.
Leaders who lead by Influencing help their team reach a much broader audience.
They are always selling the team’s ideas inside and outside the organization.
Those who lead through Relationship Building are the essential glue that holds a
team together. Leaders with exceptional relationship building strength have the
unique ability to create groups and organizations that are much greater than the
sum of their parts.
“The most
important aspect of
leading is knowing
oneself.”
~ Mervyn Davies
Leaders with great Strategic Thinking strengths are the ones who keep us all
focused on what could be. They are constantly absorbing and analyzing
information and helping the team make better decisions. Leaders with strength
in this area continually stretch our thinking for the future.
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Understanding Your Strengths
Why People Follow
If you want to be an effective leader, you must know what the people around you
need and expect from you. Gallup polled more than 10,000 followers to see why
they follow. Followers have a very clear idea of what they want and need from
the most influential leaders in their lives:
“A leader is someone
who can get things done
through other people.”

Trust – Trust is the foundation of leading. On a team where there is
high trust, employees are more engaged and speed and efficiency in the
workplace is increased. Respect, integrity and honesty are the outcomes
~Warren Buffett
of strong relationships built on trust.

Compassion – Employees want to know that their manager or leader
cares about them as a person. Employees who have compassionate
leaders are more engaged, more productive and have more engaged
customers.

Stability – The best leaders are the ones employees can always count on
in times of need. Employees need to know that their leader’s core values
are stable. Nothing creates stability as quickly as transparency.
Employees need to have a basic sense of confidence about where their
career is headed and how the university is doing financially.

Hope – Hope gives employees something to look forward to and it helps
them see a way through chaos and complexity. Knowing that things can
and will be better in the future is a powerful motivator. When hope is
absent, people lose confidence, disengage and often feel helpless. Hope
may be the one area where higher level leaders have the most influence
at the university. Leaders spend almost all of their time reacting to the
needs of the day instead of initiating for the future. When leaders choose
to initiate, they create hope.
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Understanding Your Strengths
ACTIVITY
How can I use my strengths to build:
Trust:
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Compassion:
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Stability:
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Hope:
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Understanding Your Strengths
“The path to great leadership starts with a deep understanding of the strengths you
bring to the table. A leader needs to know his strengths as a carpenter knows his tools.
What great leaders have in common is that each truly knows his or her strengths and
can call on the right ones at the right time. This explains why there is no definitive list
of characteristics that describes all leaders.” ~Don Clifton
Insights…
Consider ways for you to thoughtfully coach yourself – something all leaders need to do. So
take five minutes and enjoy the inspirational quotes and reflect on the questions that
follow. Your thoughts and insights will hopefully help you grow in your capacity as a leader.
How do your strengths help you be successful in your current role?
Do you have an opportunity to do what you do best every day?
Briefly describe what you were doing the last time you felt like you were in the “zone”. How often in
the past month have you felt that way?
What actions can you take to create a stronger connection of your strengths with your leadership
role?
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Understanding Your Strengths
Application Ideas for Your Work
As you think about why people follow, use three words to describe the leader that has the most positive
influence in your daily life. What do you need and expect from them and why do you follow them?
1.
Successful leaders surround themselves with the right people and build on each person’s strengths. The
best leaders are not well rounded but the best teams are! Identify strengths for team members
(discover what’s right with people and then build on it)

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Do your employees have the opportunity to do what they do best every day?
In the last three months my manager and I have had a meaningful discussion about my strengths.
Sometimes strengths can be used to resolve conflict between team members. When you find team
members are experiencing conflict, ask yourself the following questions:
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What is each of their top 5 strengths?
How do their strengths complement one another?
In what ways might their relationship be strong?
If they don’t see themselves as effective partners, what might be causing the frustration?
What could you help them focus on to keep them moving forward?
As you develop both individual and team goals consider the following questions:
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What are your individual goals for the year?
What strengths can you leverage towards those goals?
Looking at your strengths and the strengths of your team, how might you work together most
effectively?
How can you continue to use strengths in staff development this year?
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