Today we move onto the second of Marcus Buckingham’s six steps to putting our strengths to work. Over the previous four posts we have looked at three myths that may have been stopping us living from our strengths. Now we start to focus on really getting clear about what our strengths actually are.

Whilst most people struggle to find the language to talk about their strengths, even those who have taken the Clifton StrengthsFinder need to be aware that the assessment doesn’t identify strengths. It is a great tool and a wonderful starting point for discovering and unleashing our strengths, but the five labels you receive back from doing the assessment are not your strengths. They are signposts to your strengths. As Buckingham says, “Your strengths are defined by your actual activites. They are things you do, and more specifically, things you do consistently and near perfectly.”

Essentially, strengths are made up of three separate ingedients:

1) TALENTS - such as empathy, assertiveness, or competetiveness. Since you tend to be so close to your own talents that you take them for granted, the purpose of the Clifton StrengthsFinder and other personality profiles is to help you step back from yourself and put a label on your talents. These talents are things you’re born with and they stay with you. That’s why your personality-profile results don’t change much during your life.

2) SKILLS - such as knowing the steps involved in giving an injection safely, or how to check a guest into your hotel, or how to do a comparative analysis of your product’s features and your competitors’ products. Skills are not innate. They can be learned.

3) KNOWLEDGE - such as which dosage is correct for a particular patient, or which local restaurant will appeal to a certain guest, or who is your most dangerour competitor in the marketplace. Obviously, knowledge is learned.

So, to summarise, Talent + Skills & Knowledge = Strength.

In the example of the talent of empathy above, here’s how Buckingham suggests these three ingredients might come together to form a strength: “The talent of empathy, the skill of giving an injection safely, and the knowledge of the right dosage for the patient creates the strength of “giving injections that seem painless to the patient”"

In the coming days we’re going to work through ways by which we can truly start to discover what our strengths are. Specifically, in the next post, we’re going to look at the four signs of a strength. Before then though, think through the results from your Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment and reflect on them in the light of the fact that they are signposts and not strengths. What strengths might they be pointing to?

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Strengths. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.