Overcoming Doubts: The True Power of Strengths Assessments | 003

Consuela Muñoz: In this episode, we really want to talk about what it's like to start the process of developing your strengths, from taking the assessment to how do you move forward in a strength program, and what that can be and how that can be good and not so good for everybody. So you may be excited yourself, I was I was really excited to take this assessment and see where we went from there. The thing about taking strengths is it's not stopping there. It's not just taking the assessment. That's where you start. But then it's what are you going to do with that information? How are you going to grow your strengths? How are you going to develop and build from there. Now, people may have some reservations, they may be concerned about privacy issue and not want people to know about them, they may have been in a similar situation where they had to do an assessment of some kind, and had a really negative experience. And so a little cautious about doing something like this, that may have been you. A lot of other assessments, you know, someone might come in, you do the assessment, and you get your results. And then it goes on the shelf, and you don't do much with it might be able to say, Oh, this person's that or this person's, you know, this other thing, but not really taking the time to develop them. The identifying adjust where you start developing, that's where the true power comes in. And so there can be some concerns about that. There are lots of different assessments. And course, as a Strengths coach, I'm really biased towards the Clifton Strengths Finder assessment, obviously. But I have seen different ones throughout the time, you know, MBTI, insights, different assessments, you know, there are some assessments out there, you'll find out what color you are, I once worked with a team that wanted to do the strength assessment and was really excited about the report, but also was in love with another report. And I believe it was either called the dope test or the bird test. But either way, you took this assessment, which was less involved and a little more superficial, to find out what kind of bird you were. So you could be a dove, an owl, peacock, or an eagle. So while it's kind of fun to know what kind of bird you are, it's not really as helpful when you're looking at your career and what you want to do. It gives you an idea that top level of where you might do things and how you might do things. But how do you grow from there? If you find out you're this bird or that bird, how do you grow from there? How do you use that information? To better develop your team? How do you use that to get people engaged? Now, I think she kind of wanted to do that, because she was an eagle. And she wanted everybody to know that she was a leader and she was an eagle. But it's not as useful, right. And that can give people a little, a little bit of a start or caution when they want to approach these things.

Now doing strengths. And the way that I want people to focus on them is really developing, how do you understand what your strengths are, and really start to develop them. I had an individual on my team who was really excited, she led from influencing she worked in sales, and she's like, Oh my gosh, everybody on my team is probably influencing. Now influencing is one of the least likely domains for individuals to lead from, right. It's not as often people are not having their strengths show up in that area. But she's like, Yeah, we're on sale. So we're probably all there because that's where she led from. And what was interesting is when we did the assessment with her teams, there was only one other person on the entire team that also had lead from influencing. So even though everybody was in sales, they didn't lead from influencing. So sometimes there can be this, you know, the stereotype or this thought that, well, if you have this kind of strength, then you'll do this kind of work. Or if you have these strengths, you should do this work. And that's not what it is at all. Truly, it's understanding what your strengths are, and how can you use your strengths to get done what you need to do to achieve the results that you need to do. And so as we're working with this team, and we're doing this team building, and she's, you know, there's her and one other person from influencing and as they're working together, it's not just that high level, right, like leading from influencing is one thing, but what are the individual strengths? And then each person, even if someone has the same strength as you how do you each use that strength because each person has a different set of top five strengths. And that synergy and those top five strengths really influences how your specific version of that strength operates. And understanding that is where the real power is. And as you understand that, that's where you can really get engaged. Now, I told you a little bit about that first strength program I did. So as we got people into the strength programs 12 weeks, we asked for a commitment People were in there, they had volunteered to go in there.

But I had one individual from day one that was kind of reserved, she was a reserved about the whole process. I'm not a leader. So I don't know if this is going to be useful because I start out talking about everybody's a leader, they just have to know how they lead. And she was kind of resistant to that. In addition to that, she was pretty much disengaged with her job. She showed up, you know, wearing different shades of grey from top to bottom, she barely spoke in any of our group sessions, she kind of wanted to hide or blend in and just kind of be a part of the thing. But it's a group session, we're meeting a person, I'm really working with her as we keep going. Now, fast forward to the end of our 12 week program. It's our last day on the last day, we kind of have a little bit of celebration and some takeaways and all that kind of, you know, fun stuff, right? And she comes walking in and man did she looked good, she just looked amazing. She was walking in like she owned the place, it was really a great thing to see. And so you know, a lot of the women in the group are commenting on this, like, Wow, you look amazing. Let's go on, you know, all this. And she said this in the last couple of weeks, people were coming up to her and saying, Oh, my gosh, what are you doing? Did you lose weight? Have you changed your hair, they didn't know what was different about her. But they knew something was they knew something was different about her, but they couldn't, you know, it was like improved. And it was amazing. But they couldn't put their finger on it. And the difference was that she went from being disengaged in her work and her her personal life to being completely engaged, actively engaged in the work she was doing. And now she wanted to fully participate in she was vocal and sharing. And it basically shown from within, like she glowed from inside out with how engaged and how full, she felt about life. And even with that amazing transformation, because she really did just embody that engaged person. She was really being actively engaged with her work. And notice that they had kind of a gap, like, here's a gap, she knew how to talk about her strengths, she went to her supervisor and said, Hey, I'm looking and I see we have a real issue here, this could be a problem for us. These are my strengths. And I really think that if I were doing this, I could help us and it could save us some money and we wouldn't run into some trouble down the road. They were so they they bought into what she had to say so much that they created a role for her and promoted her into that role. That is the power of going from being disengaged to engage that is a power of truly understanding your strengths. And using them purposely to achieve what it is that you want to achieve to achieve things you may have never thought that you could achieve.

So I know that you may have some reservations about just another personality assessment. But it's so much more than that. These strengths. These are your natural strengths. These are things that you were born with. And sometimes they're so natural to you. You don't even realize that you're able to do something that other people just can't do. It just seems obvious to you, you would do it this way. And so understanding that that's where the real fun begins. That's where the real results start to roll in. If you're listening this and you want to know, what are your strengths, or how can you get started with working with your team to really get them fully engaged. You can go to Consuela munoz.com forward slash lead and find out how you can get started with your strengths.