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Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D.

 

Recommendation: •••••

 

Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com

 

 

Powerful

Last year, I recommended highly Marcus Buckingham’s book, First, Break All the Rules. Buckingham is back this year with Now, Discover Your Strengths. I’ve given this book the first Outstanding rating (•••••): buy it now!

The Gallup Organization continues to grow and refine its data on successful management, a project that’s gone on for 25 years. Readers of First, Break All the Rules may have wondered what to do next, and Now, Discover Your Strengths tells us.

Many executives focus self-improvement attention on their areas of weakness. Buckingham rejects this approach, and proposes spending more time finding ways to develop individual strengths and talents. Weaknesses can be avoided, rather than tackled with an agenda for acquiring skills that are unlikely to be retained.

One reason I liked this book is that I’ve always felt successful people capitalize on their strengths, and this book confirms that hypothesis. Unlike the Myers-Briggs tool that assigns an individual into one of sixteen personality types, Gallup has developed a StrengthsFinder® Profile that is structured in “themes”. Buyers of Now, Discover Your Strengths can go online and complete a StrengthsFinder® Profile, that will identify your top five themes. Once you’ve identified your top five themes, the book can help you develop those themes into strengths. Some organizations will want to use this widely, and utilize the themes as a common language, clumsy as it may be (not all the theme names are of the same type; some refer to category like Empathy, others refer to person like Achiever, others refer to quality like Adaptability). While the Myers Briggs Type Indicator places an individual into one of sixteen personality types, the 34 themes of the StrengthsFinder® Profile can generate huge numbers of possible top-five theme combinations. The section on how to manage a person with a particular theme can be highly useful since it contains practical ideas on how to deploy someone with this theme as a developed strength. We also enjoyed this quote, “The best human resources departments must learn the language of business. They must be able to explain mathematically the subtle but significant effects of human nature on business results. Only then will they prove themselves as valuable as the other departments and garner the respect they truly deserve.”

Here are all 34 themes:

Achiever

Activator

Adaptability

Analytical

Arranger

Belief

Command

Communication

Competition

Connectedness

Context

Deliberative

Developer

Discipline

Empathy

Fairness

Focus

Futuristic

Harmony

Ideation

Inclusiveness

Individualization

Input

Intellection

Learner

Maximizer

Positivity

Relator

Responsibility

Restorative

Self-assurance

Significance

Strategic

Woo

 

 

When I completed the profile, my top five themes were: Input, Strategic, Achiever, Responsibility and Connectedness. I’m still trying to figure out what that means for me and whether I’m developing those skills in my work.

Skeptics of the methodology may appreciate the appendix that describes the underlying research and what is being done to refine the instrument.

Steve Hopkins, January 22, 2001

 

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