Lead Through Strengths

StrengthsFinder Legit? Valid? Accurate? If you're wondering, you're actually just like Sara Regan, the Lead Through Strengths facilitator in this interview. Before being exposed to the tool, she was a bit skeptical about it. Usually, before doing some strengths finding with the team, one or two among us are wondering if psychometric tools are accurate. Is StrengthsFinder legit? Is it valid? The CliftonStrengths Assessment has not escaped such skepticism from some of our participants. You're not alone. Many of us come to these tools with a cautious eye. We want to know that it's more than parlor games. We hope for a tool that allows for more than a 4-hour kumbaya team building event at work. Most of the time, skeptical people wonder, "Hmmmm, is StrengthsFinder legit, or is my boss making me go to a gimmicky feel-good-training today?" Other times, it's an industrial organizational psychologist from the HR department who wants to know about the peer-reviewed literature on the tool. Either way, people like having

Lead Through Strengths Facilitator Strother Gaines Shares How CliftonStrengths Can Help With Productivity. When it comes to work or personal goals, it is one thing to plan out all the things you intended to do and another to carry them out as committed. How we manage time, and how consistently or effectively we accomplish the tasks in our calendars, often determine the level of our productivity at work.  Are we prioritizing the important and urgent issues when we need to make that decision? Productivity is tough. Time management and calendars and overflowing to do lists create a lot of angst. Good news! You can use StrengthsFinder to help you do a gut check on your productivity and effectiveness at work. Here’s the transcript of Lisa’s interview with Strother as they further explore this topic. Lisa: You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings and I'm also joined again by Strother Gaines, one of our Lead Through Strength

Your Superpowers At Work - New Ideas For Finding Them And Using Them From Lead Through Strengths Facilitator Strother Gaines  In this episode, Lisa Cummings and co-host Strother Gaines discuss, through analogies and practical examples, the impact of knowing how to wield your superpowers at work. If our previous episode suggested ways of striking a balance between making your strengths known and not sounding arrogant about it, this topic is all about using your superpowers at work with out overusing your power. Listen as Lisa and Strother explore one of the important paths towards professional maturity, through which StrengthsFinder has been guiding so many. You can also watch the video version of the interview on our YouTube channel. Lisa: You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings, and you know, I'm always telling you about how energizing it is to lead through your strengths every day at work. But sometimes, the truth

To Live Your Best Life, Know Your Intention And Be Clear With What You Want  Lisa: What about the conflicts you have in your head as well, so they're not just with others? You know, you fight your own things that you wish you would do, maybe when you're not aligned with the personal leadership you want to demonstrate, or the life you say you want to live, but then you think — I have big bills, or I have practical things, or I need to get this deliverable done.  So I'm just going to work 14 hours a day, just as an interval, I'm just gonna do it for a couple of weeks.  But then it becomes your life.  So when you battle, that sort of thing, you're facing burnout, and really, you're battling you and the baggage that you bring with you roll after roll after roll, it's the same stuff.  What do you do to get inside of your head and let your strengths out in those situations? Strother: It's back to that planning piece.  Again, knowing the intention and being super clear. I think a lot of the times we have these visio

Conversations About Turning Conflicts Into Strengths Collaboration - With Lead Through Strengths Facilitator Strother Gaines In any work environment, especially widely diverse ones where people with different backgrounds, cultures and management styles work together, conflicts between or among employees can arise. At the same time, every customer seems to come to us hoping for better teamwork and collaboration. While conflicts are inevitable, they can actually be an opportunity to exercise strengths so that these conflicts turn into a collaboration.   Listen to Lisa Cummings and Strother Gaines as they navigate this conversation about turning conflicts into strengths collaboration: Lisa: You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings and actually today, I'm back with another episode where Strother Gaines is joining me for a conversation on strengths. And in this one, it is all about conflict and collaboration.  Most people

Lead Through Strengths Facilitator Strother Gaines Shares His Thoughts On How To Not Sound Arrogant When You Offer Out Your Strengths In this episode, Lisa Cummings and co-host Strother Gaines talk about the different ways you can present or offer your strengths at work and how to not sound arrogant in doing so.  How you can be received or appreciated for your contribution at work depends on how you are able to maintain that delicate balance between wanting to be known for your strengths and not coming off as full of yourself. Customers come to us every day feeling excited about their StrengthsFinder results, yet simultaneously being afraid of turning everyone off. They want to know how to not sound arrogant or bratty or braggadocios when they try to get known for their top talents. Here's the transcript of the interview with Lisa and Strother Gaines as they explore the topic: Lisa: You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cum

Lead Through Strengths Facilitator Strother Gaines - Helping You Figure Out What To Do When You Don't Like Your Strengths This episode is all about the situation when you don't like your strengths — or you don't think you like someone else's strengths. It's easy to stereotype one of the CliftonStrengths talent themes, good or bad, when you only take a cursory glance at it. It's also easy for your talent to masquerade as a weakness if you have the volume turned up too high for the situation. Here's the transcript of the interview with Lisa Cummings and Strother Gaines as they explore the nuances: Lisa: You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings.  I'm always saying it's tough to find something more energizing than using your strengths every day at work. And today, the topic of the podcast episode is about those moments when you're asking yourself ⁠—  “Oh, should I not use my strengths at work?”  “Are these not good ones t

We have now reached the ninth and final core concept in our STRENGTHS series, where we’ve been discussing the importance of engaging in strengths-focused conversations with your team over time. If you’ve been following this conversation, congratulations on getting this far! And if you’ve been applying even just some of our tips and taking on our tiny but impactful challenges, then you’re well on your way to becoming experts at finding CliftonStrengths blind spots in your team and building on everyone’s natural strengths! Before we dive into the final topic of this series, here’s a quick recap of the core concepts that we have already gone through. Notice the magic word that the initials of these topics spell (STRENGTH).  S.E.T. (Skills. Experiences. Talents) Troublemaker talents Regulate by Situation Easy Buttons Not an Excuse Gimme That Escalation Takes Time and Intention Honored and Insulted And now, in this episode, we explore the breadth of what we call the Starved and Fed Continuum -- turning our magic

Finding Energizing Tasks At Work We’re almost at the end of our STRENGTHS series, where we discuss a total of nine concepts that will help you implement strengths with your team at work. In this episode, we'll explore one of the most interesting topics in this series: Honored and Insulted.  This topic always generates the liveliest conversations. Why? Because people generally have this special keenness over what might honor or insult their talent themes. If you're a manager and you assign energizing tasks at work, imagine what it could do for productivity and employee engagement. Win-win! Read on to learn how to keep your team motivated using the strengths perspective. If you know what honors their talent themes, then you likely know their personal values. When they work on a team where they can see the fit between the work and their values, they feel more motivated and energized. Imagine a pyramid-like structure, where strengths are at the top, natural talents come next, and values form the base. Strengths a

Our seventh core concept in this STRENGTHS series, “Takes Time and Intention,” may sound like a lame title compared with our previous topics (“Troublemaker Talents,” “Easy Buttons,” “Gimme That Escalation,” etc.), but as we go along you’ll find that there’s a lot more nuance to it than that. You’ll get a deeper sense of why strengths take time, and hence calls for intention along with consistency.  As in any process or situation, patience is a virtue. Something good always awaits, so stay with us! Let’s break this core concept down to its two components. 1. Strengths Take Time Between the two components, time is generally the easier one to commit to. It may mean a little bit of being patient, but the concept is more about asking: “Now what?”  “How do we keep this going?”  After all the strengths blitz you go through with your team -- for example, going through the motion of reading “StrengthsFinder 2.0,” or preparing a budget for a team offsite and then getting together for some retreat or teambuilding act

Our sixth core concept is a perfect build-on to the “Plus One, Minus One” activity mentioned in our previous episode, Concept #5: “Not an Excuse.”  Plus one, in particular, is about mining your team of the things they want to have more of. Then, as you dig deeper into this challenge, it’s amazing what you’ll discover from each of the team member’s responses.  The Story Behind ‘Gimme That Escalation’  In one of the recent training sessions, a guy came forward and expressed what he has written on his wish list.  “I would love to have more escalation calls.”  This statement set off these confused looks and reactions among others in the room.  “Did he just say that right? ‘I want more escalation calls?”   “What is he talking about?”  These people were shocked that the guy was wanting more escalation calls. So of course, they had to ask him for further explanation. According to the guy, he’s the “deepest subject-matter expert in the whole organization on this matter. He’s quite confident that he can very well hand

If you've been following this series, you'll know we've been spelling the word STRENGTHS with nine core competencies that pop out as the most elusive, interesting, or unconsidered when implementing strengths at work. So far, we've had: 1. S.E.T. (Skills, Experience, and Talents) 2. Troublemaker Talents 3. Regulate by Situation 4. Easy Buttons Now we are midway through as we explore our fifth core concept: “Not an Excuse.”  Avoiding Responsibilities? Once in a while, people want to use their strengths like an excuse. Here are a few examples: “I’m an Activator and I don't like to wait. I only work on things where I don't have to wait.”  “I lead through a bunch of Executing talent themes and I like to get things done. And now you're asking me to do some deep thinking and research, and that sounds boring to me. So I don't want to do it.”  “That just doesn't sound like fun to me. I lead through Positivity and I can't do anything that is just way too serious for too long.”  But in the world of work, this is not how

We notice it all the time: when we point out to people their natural talents through meaningful conversations, their success comes more easily. In this episode, we refer to this phenomenon as “easy buttons” — our fourth core concept in this series. Here at Lead Through Strengths, we love seeing people’s potentials. It’s always an amazing experience to help others realize something special about them and saying it aloud to them. This is because people often find it difficult to notice their very own potential. And so the more we hear responses like “Really? That’s a special thing?” or “Oh, I’m good at that?” — the more we find fulfillment that we are into strengths development. Embrace What Feels Easy A lot of people still hold this default assumption that if something feels easy to them, it’s probably easy for anyone else. They think it’s nothing special. They dismiss it as they wouldn’t want to offer a bunch of work that’s ordinary or easy. In effect, they are actually depriving their team of their gifts or

If you want others to experience the best of your StrengthsFinder talent themes, you'll love our third core concept -- regulate by situation.  A Simple Concept? Imagine you’re in front of a mixing board wherein you’re looking at your Top 5 or Top 10 from your CliftonStrengths reports. Each of your talent themes is assigned a fader so that each of them could have its own volume.  To regulate by situation is to adjust your talent theme’s “volume” based on the following: the person you're interacting with  the project and what it calls for It’s much like setting the quantities of your musical instrument or tool based on the song you wrote or the genre you're in.  From Simple To Complex While that seems like a fairly simple concept, it gets a bit more interesting when we apply it to a team context. Having to fiddle five to ten faders in order to manage your own talent themes can already be overwhelming. Imagine how much tougher that would be when aside from watching over your own set of five or ten, you will no

From the S.E.T and “Aspirational You” concepts in the previous episode, we now move towards a seemingly favorite topic for discussion: troublemaker talents! When talking about strengths, curiosity about the other side -- the so-called “shadow side” or “blind spots” -- tends to surface. And that’s exactly why our next core concept is worth discussing. Troublemaker talents are natural talents that have the potential to make you great yet may be causing pain or trouble to you, or to others within the team, due to misapplication, talent overuse, or squashing down of talent.  Note that you may be squashing down a talent or not developing it because you don’t see the necessity. But when it does come out inevitably, it doesn’t come out looking good. Join us explore these “T” talents, and towards the end you will get these takeaways: Some workplace scenarios where troublemaker talents can show up How these scenarios may affect teams and team projects  What you can do as a team in order to address the possible impact

In this episode, we start joining important puzzle pieces together to make your team a genuinely strengths-powered one. When we zero in on the nuts and bolts that make strengths work, we develop the kind of perspective that can build and rebuild teams as often as necessary -- no matter what changes or challenges arise in your work environment. Once you’ve mastered these core concepts, you will have won over the most unconsidered elements in implementing strengths at work. Ready to set sail towards your shared goals as a stronger team? Since you’re here, I take it to mean you’re all set! Let The Total You Shine When it comes to career branding, people usually think showcasing their skills and experiences is enough. For the longest time, it's what we have seen others do: fill resumes and LinkedIn profiles the skills they've acquired along the way. If that’s not enough, then what’s missing? Oh, it’s just what we already have all along: talent! StrengthsFinder views natural talent as the way we do things driven b

Core Concepts for Stronger Teams In this series, you’ll explore 9 core concepts that will help you implement strengths with your team at work. The concepts we chose for you came straight from you - both from listeners of this show and from participants in our training classes. These are the concepts that pop out as most important or elusive. If you know the overlooked or unconsidered angles that can help you make the most of strengths on your team, you'll make big leaps. Keep reading to see the full list. There will be one dedicated podcast episode and blog post for each of the concepts. Stronger Teams This series of nine topics is inspired by Stronger Teams. Stronger Teams is a live, virtual training program we just launched to the public. It all came from that thing you’re constantly asking me about - making it stick. Nearly every day, I get questions like, “Hey, we read the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 and we did a team building day. Now what? How do we keep this going? What do we do next?” Oy vey, I’ve be

I hear a lot of reflections about how to apply your CliftonStrengths talent theme of Achiever to your career. In this series, you get one strength per post so that you can add to the insights from your StrengthsFinder report and make an even stronger alignment between your current job and your strengths. - If you’re exploring this concept as a manager, use this series for career development ideas and even new clues about responsibilities you could give a person with this talent theme so that they can show up at their best. - If you’re exploring this concept for yourself, use this as a chance to build a reputation for your strengths so that you’re more likely to be given assignments that live in your strengths zone. You’ll get three layers to chew on: 1. Career Branding 2. Red Flag Situations At Work 3. Fresh Application Ideas Career Branding When Achiever Is Your Strength You probably already have a reputation for what you know. Think about your personal resume, CV, or your LinkedIn profile, I bet it's full o

I hear a lot of reflections about how to apply your CliftonStrengths talent theme of Activator to your career. In this series, you get one strength per post so that you can add to the insights from your StrengthsFinder report and make an even stronger alignment between your current job and your strengths. - If you’re exploring this concept as a manager, use this series for career development ideas and even new clues about responsibilities you could give a person with this talent theme so that they can show up at their best. - If you’re exploring this concept for yourself, use this as a chance to build a reputation for your strengths so that you’re more likely to be given assignments that live in your strengths zone. You’ll get three layers to chew on: 1. Career Branding 2. Red Flag Situations At Work 3. Fresh Application Ideas Career Branding When Activator Is Your Strength You probably already have a reputation for what you know. Think about your personal resume, CV, or your LinkedIn profile, I bet it's full

I hear a lot of reflections about how to apply your CliftonStrengths talent theme of Adaptability to your career. In this series, you get one strength per post so that you can add to the insights from your StrengthsFinder report and make an even stronger alignment between your current job and your strengths. - If you’re exploring this concept as a manager, use this series for career development ideas and even new clues about responsibilities you could give a person with this talent theme so that they can show up at their best. - If you’re exploring this concept for yourself, use this as a chance to build a reputation for your strengths so that you’re more likely to be given assignments that live in your strengths zone. You’ll get three layers to chew on: 1. Career Branding 2. Red Flag Situations At Work 3. Fresh Application Ideas Career Branding When Adaptability Is Your Strength You probably already have a reputation for what you know. Think about your personal resume, CV, or your LinkedIn profile, I bet it'