Hi,

My name is Sam Gillick and I work as the Network and Communications Coordinator at LEAD International. As part of my role, I will contribute to the LEAD blog from time to time about our activities. On this occasion, I want to share with you the experience the LEAD International team had with StrengthsFinder.

What is StrengthsFinder?

In 1998, Donald O. Clifton, Tom Rath and scientists at Gallup created an online StrengthsFinder test. This used the theory that each individual’s key strengths can be identified (and utilised to show where they can excel more easily and where they might struggle), in a virtual setting. The theory can be applied to the workplace by giving people tasks they are most suited to rather than what their job description might normally allow. This should then maximise the potential of the team. For example, a group of scientists make a remarkable discovery but struggle to tell the general public of its implications since none of them possess the communication strength. However, their administrative assistant possesses that strength and could be the ‘voice’ of their discovery.

According to Gallup, there are 34 strengths. Some are obvious as to their meaning (communicator, analytical) and others might be less so (woo). Find the full list here. The current online test shows each participant their top five strengths, although it stores the data collected on all 34.

Why did we do the online test?

As part of our team-building and team-development work within LEAD International, we are looking at ways to be more productive. By knowing our own strengths and those of others in the team, we can start to use the best people for the right tasks and learn from each other in the process.

What did we find out?

As it happens, the LEAD International team are quite diverse in regards to their strength sets. There was a spread across all the groups of strengths (Control, Acting/Achieving, Thinking, Communicating, People, Values), both across the team and within each individual’s top five. The most common strength (held by six people) was empathy with four other strengths almost as common (five people). Also, out of the 34 strengths, only nine did not feature among our collective top strengths; not bad for a small team!

What did we do with this information?

“So, what now?” you may ask. We held a meeting to discuss the results. Our Director (Learning), Gillian Martin Mehers, helpfully created a table to show the results, marking the five strengths per person in separate columns with crosses. Each person’s top strength was marked with a large cross.

We tried to guess who had which strengths (the names were covered to start with) and then, when we found out who had what, we broke off into small groups of three to give each other examples of when we had observed manifestations of each other’s strengths. This helped us all to realise the benefits of our colleagues’ strengths and also to understand them as people.

Finally we created a short list of tips for working with our strengths. For example, I have restorative among my top five and would like people to give me as much contextual information as possible about any problem they come to me with so as to facilitate the solving of that problem. In this way, we created a sort of cheat-sheet to working with each other. It will be interesting to see it in action!