StrengthsFinder & Utilizing Talent Increasing Productivity and Engagement Through Leveraging Talent & Understanding Your Strengths and the Strengths of Others

Agenda What is StrengthsFinder Understanding Strengths Benefits of focusing on strengths Leveraging Strengths Talents and domains

What is StrengthsFinder? An online personal assessment test that identifies individual talents Developed by Gallup in 2001 The assessment measures natural talent using 34 Talent Themes These Talents can be grouped into 4 Domains Influencing Executing Relationship Building Strategic Thinking Focus on the Top 5

What are Strengths? The ability to consistently provide near perfect performance in a given activity Strengths grow our natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving Strengths are discovering what you naturally do best Talents are naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied Knowledge and skill – by refining our dominant talents with skill and knowledge we can create strengths: the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a given activity

Why Focus on Strengths

Why Focus on Strengths? Additional research finds people who know and use their strengths every day are more likely to experience positive emotions (energetic, well-rested, happy, respected) and less likely to experience negative ones (stress, worry, anger, sadness).

Benefits of Knowing Your Strengths Creates self-confidence Improves skills Increases sense of accomplishment Increases productivity Decreases stress Improves collaboration

Where Do Strengths Come From? Talent + Investment (In Knowledge and Skill) = Strength Talent: A natural way of thinking, feeling, or behaving. A natural aptitude or skill. Investment: Time spent developing talents, skills and knowledge Skill-The capacity to perform the functional steps of an activity Knowledge-What you know, whether factually or through awareness gained by experience

Leveraging Strengths “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

Leveraging Strengths If you struggle at something, the amount of work to become a MASTER is significantly more than if you are GOOD at something and want to become a MASTER

Exercise- Good to Great

There are 34 Talent Themes Grouped Into Four Domains None of the Four domains or 34 strengths are more or less important than another

Exercise- Strengths on the Bus

Leveraging Strengths/Managing weakness Mention Balcony and Basements handout

In Summary Those who embrace their strengths… Know the strengths of those around them Use their strengths to overcome obstacles Invent ways of capitalizing on their strengths in new situations Excel because they more fully develop and apply their strengths and talents Build their lives around their strengths In Summary

Additional information Gallup https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/ Complete the Strengths 2.0 Survey $10 for top 5 talent themes 1 hours long question/assessment Results Signature Themes Report. A  full description of my top five themes. Strengths Insight Guide.  Personalized insights into how my strengths work together. Strengths Insight and Action-Planning Guide. Ways to use my strengths. Action-Planning Tool. A way to create my own personalized action plan. Strengthsfinder 2.0. A downloadable e-book that explains the science behind the strengths assessment and provides more details about using your strengths to your best advantage.