Now let’s tease apart talent a little bit more. When you think about your natural abilities I have found that it’s useful to break them apart a bit into separate categories or “Talent Types”.
The first talent type I often is share is your “ Strengthpath Strategy”. Whether you realize it or not you have fairly predictable consistent ways approaching everything you do. These are your Strengthpath Strategies. These strategies show up with out regard to your profession or career choice. Some of them are more effective or more helpful in some careers than others but they show regardless of your job. Actually they show up at home, at church, everywhere. They are the ways you most naturally and consistently think, behave, and feel. Each can be productively applied in a very wide variety of contexts. The Gallup Organization has developed a terrific Strengthspath Strategy indicator with regard to these talents called Strengthsfinder. You can find it online and it has a link in my blog toward the top of my assessment list. Another good assessment that measures these strategies is one called Realise 2.
The Strengthsfinder assessment will help you identify your unique mix of strategies like Woo, Activator, Ideation, Consistency, and Harmony. There are 34 unique Strengthspath Strategies in the assessment but it actually packages threads of talent in ways they usually show up in people. If you looked at all the threads it would add up to several hundred.
The second talent type is “Strengthspath Temperament”. It can also be thought of as your personality. All of these talent types have some overlap but they are distinct in some ways as well. When I speak of temperament I’m talking about things like your interpersonal style: warmer or cooler. I’m talking about your pacing: fast or slow. I’m talking about how you like information chunked: brief or detailed. I’m talking about your orientation: results or process. Are you an introvert, extrovert, or ambivert? Are you more a thinker or a feeler?
My favorite temperament talent assessments are Myers-Briggs and D.I.S.C. with it’s many variations. They will each give you a helpful window on your unique talents, especially your outlook on life. Each of these tools are also immensely helpful in helping you understand and relate well to others. If you a manager they will help you get the most out of your employees.
The third talent type is “Strengthspath Activities”. You are hard-wired to do some activities very well and others not so much. This is also true for passion, which we will talk about later. The possible activities and combination of activities list is almost infinite or endless. For that reason, there is no official assessment for activities but Marcus Buckingham has developed a very good exercise designed to help you identify your activity talents. He has a terrific little booklet specifically designed to help you do it but you can do the same thing with colored 3x5 cards. If you can, get some green cards and some that are some shade of red. You could do it with all white cards and just sort them as well.
Marcus recommends doing this for a week but depending on your work you might want to do it for a month if you have a wide variety of tasks that aren’t repeated on a weekly basis. As you go through your days write down each task on a separate card. Make sure there is only one task on each card. At the end of the week or month simply sit down and separate the cards activities that make you feel strong, that energize you, from the cards with activities that make you feel weak because the activity drains and depletes you quickly.
Another way to do it is walk through you calendar or day planner and mark each activity with an “S” for Strengthens Me or a “W” for Weakens Me. The cards work better for some people because all activities don’t always end up on our day planner or calendar.
A third way is to make a list of all your work related activities. Use the “S” and “W” beside each item on the list. This is as good of way I know to begin identifying your “Strengthspath Activities”.
The fourth talent type is what I call your “Strengthspath Roles”. Roles are also sometimes called archetypes. Universal Archetypes include “Father”, “Mother”, and “Child”. In Archetype think you can play a role like Father or Mother regardless of gender. You can play the role of child regardless of age. For example, in our family my Dad played the child role most often and most naturally. He is one of the most playful fun-loving energetic people I know. He is forever young at heart. Conversely, even as a young child I was very serious. My first grade teacher commented on it, my wife commented on it on our first date, and I’ve had a manager comment on it during a job review. In Mythology, Story-Telling, and Movie-Making we find roles like “damsel in distress”, “the hero”, “the scape-goat”, “the outcast” and so forth.
These roles are actually quite useful in identifying your “Strengthspath”. Some people are just natural for certain roles. At our Job Search Non-Profit Road 2 Jobs Donna plays the mother role very naturally and some of our clients actually call her mom. My dad plays a father role to some and they see him that way. Some of what we do is actually re-parenting.
In Nicholas Lore’s book The Pathfinder (only in the 2011 revision), he identifies and describes about 60 different roles that often show up in the work place. He offers an inquiry or exercise to help you identify your most natural roles. In 2012, Marcus Buckingham took this idea a step further and narrowed it down to 9 roles that allow you to identify your most natural way of delivering your contributive advantage at work. At the time of this writing I am one 3 people in the United States certified to deliver his program called StandOut as an independent trainer.
StandOut is a wonderful introduction in helping you begin to get on your “Strengthspath”. There is an assessment, a book, and a workbook, along with management tools to enhance the program. It dovetails nicely with the Strengthsfinder Assessment Buckingham co-built while he was at Gallup. What makes StandOut ideal as a gateway to strengths is that it takes most of the 34 strategies found in Strengthsfinder and packages them in to a much easier to grasp and remember 9 roles. It is also designed to be a bit more prescriptive than descriptive.
The fifth talent type is what I call your “Strengthspath Specialized Abilities”. These include talents like music pitch, structural visualization, finger dexterity, and number memory. There are around 19 in all. This work was pioneered by the Johnson O’Conner foundation which actually began in a G.E. plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. O’Conner started out with an associate to identify innate abilities that would help select employees and match them with jobs that fit them well, and increase success and satisfaction. They were so successful O’Conner started a foundation and opened up testing centers around the country. They still exist in most major U.S. Cities today.
Everything I have described so far I describe as an “Indicator”. They range around 70% to 80% accuracy. The Johnson O’Conner indicator I actually call a “Test”. They are done with work samples that are objectively validated. There really is no way to game the Johnson O’Conner Test.
There is an online version of Johnson O’Conner promoted by an organization called Highlands. I am working toward certification in this program this year. If you have children in their late teens I highly recommend either Johnson O’Conner or Highlands before they start college and enter the work place. You could be saving them decades of frustration and even misery at work. And don’t confuse this work sample test with the career tests offered by most high schools and colleges. These career direction tests aren’t in the same class.
If you want to excel at work, you absolutely must identify your natural talents including your Strengthspath Strategies, Temperament, Activities, Roles, and Specialized Abilities. To help you remember all this it spells S.T.A.R.S. And Stars are what people become when they discover develop and deliver their talents at work.
Before I move on, let me briefly mention 1 more talent type. It is based on Harvard Professor Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Concept. Multiple Intelligence is rooted in very well documented research with brain damage, savants, symbol systems and other brain region isolation findings. It has limited but very successful integration in schools both public and private. It runs counter to our current cultural madness trying to convince us that everyone has to be great at math and science. Gardner’s finding actually integrate very nicely with the Johnson O’Conner research but I separate them because Gardner’s work has been utilized mostly in education while Johnson O’Conner’s was born and implemented for the work place.
Gardner’s major insight is that we have been asking the wrong question for the last 100 years. That wrong question is “How Smart Are You”. This question he believes is rooted in erroneous conclusions of generalized intelligence driven by the Stanford-Binet IQ Test and supported by the SAT. Gardner believes that we need to rapidly move from an education system enamored by the “How Smart Are You?” question to an education system enamored by a much different question, “How Are You Smart?” It’s only a re-sequencing of 4 words but I believe it’s a revolutionary concept whose time has come.
Gardner initially identified 7 Kinds of Smart that were supported by brain region analysis. They included what he calls the Math/Logic and Linguistic Intelligence’s glorified by today’s educational system. Gardner goes further to identify Body-Kinesthetic Intelligence, Intra-Personal or Self Knowledge Intelligence, Inter-Personal Intelligence or Social Intelligence, Musical Intelligence, and Spatial Intelligence. More recently he has identified Naturalistic Intelligence and Existential Intelligence for a total of 9.
No comments:
Post a Comment