5 Things You Should Know: CliftonStrengths Assessment
Five Things About CliftonStrengths Assessment
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is Gallup’s psychological assessment that helps you to improve yourself based on your strengths. Donald O Clifton, Father of Strengths Psychology, and Inventor of CliftonStrengths points out that “your weaknesses will never develop while your strengths will develop infinitely.” So, focus on your strength. Fixating on your weakness is simply barking up the wrong tree and you will get nowhere.
There are 5 things that I would like to share with you.
If you want to be more of who you are, know your strengths! You are not made up of your weaknesses. You are made up of your strengths! And you are unique! There is a 1 in 33 million chance that someone shares the same Signature Themes — or “Top 5” — as you. This is overlooked and often people use the StrengthFinder assessment to try to discover what type of work they should do, rather than to find out how they could be doing better where they are.
- Gallup StrengthFinder identifies your talents, how you are hard-wired, and manifests as your recurring patterns of thought or behavior. A person’s talents are innate and cannot be acquired, unlike skills and knowledge. The assessment helps you identify your 34 talents, from signature themes to dominant themes, to supporting themes and non-talents. The point is not to try to improve on your non-talent because these seldom appear in your behavior. Rather work on your signature and dominant themes because they are unique to you and you use them most of the time. Then, you are ready for the next step and that is to turn your talents into your strengths.
- Over time as you exercise your top talents to developing knowledge, and skills you are in fact developing your strengths, that is your ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific activity. Reflect upon the things that you consistently do well and think how much more you can achieve if you realize that you can apply your talents to do them even better. In doing so you would develop your strength. The key to building a fully developed strength is to identify your most dominant talents, which are likely found within your top five themes, then complement your talents by acquiring knowledge, skills, and investment in time.
- Your talents should not change significantly over time. Gallup’s test-retest statistical correlation studies of the StrengthFinder yield a correlation hovering around 0.7, which means that implies relatively consistent personality traits, that is strengths — over time. This means the effort you put in the develop your strength is never wasted. Instead, you become better over time.
- The StrengthFinder assessment will also categorize you, based on your top talents into one of the four domains: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. These four domains were named by Gallup based on the type of activities that the talent theme will most likely thrive in, although the themes are by no means limited to those activities. And as such is a guide as to what a person’s greatest value-add might be in the team.
Take your assessment at https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx
And if you wish to know how to interpret your report and use it as your self-developmental guide, we are glad to help. Email us at [email protected]
About the Author
Dr JEREMY GWEE
I am currently director and principal trainer in ITOL Asia. My mission is to promote training and occupational learning. I believe that training can be deployed more effectively as an organizational transformational tool. I also believe that through occupational learning everyone is a trainer because everyone has unique experiences, knowledge and skills that enable them to train others differently.
I hold a BA, MBA and doctorate in transformational leadership. I am trained in positive psychology and qualified in ACTA. My approach to training is to equip learners use transformational tools to enable them to make their training more holistic. I employ a variety of tools in the training to fit the needs of the learners. These tools include, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), Gallup Strength Finder and Business Profiling, VIA Character Strength, LEGO Serious Play, The Organizational Zoo, Action Learning, DISC and Points of You.
