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

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

4. 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

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

6. Why Focus on Strengths

7. 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).

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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. Exercise- Good to Great

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

14. Exercise- Strengths on the Bus

15. Leveraging Strengths/Managing weakness
Mention Balcony and Basements handout

16. 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

17. Additional information
Gallup
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.