Review Your Strengths Finder Assessment

The blog today is focusing on “Review Strengths Finder Assessment” that I feel is second step needed to understand your strengths.  I will write a series of blog entries (three) on how to complete and benefit from Strengths Finder.  The series of blogs is based on my own experience as well as some references from the book “Strengths Finder 2.0” by Tom Rath.

In my work as a project manager I find it very valuable to be able to understand my own skills and talents as well as those of the people on my project teams.  To that end I am always looking to increase my understanding and assessing of talent.  At work we were given the opportunity a few years ago to take the assessment and we were asked to take the assessment again. 

Step 2 – Review Strengths Finder Assessment


As I indicated in Step 1 we completed an assessment by answering a set of questions.   Upon completion of the assessment you are provided a report named “Strengths Insight and Action Planning Guide”.   Today I will focus on the first part of the report and the information about the strengths.

Format of report

For each of the five strengths the report details the following:

  • Share Theme (Strength) Description – this is a high level description of the characteristics of the strength.  This is a two sentence description of the strength.  One sentence that describes the main characteric(s) and the second sentence how that strength is demonstrated by this strength.
  • Your Personalized Strengths Insight – this is a longer detailed description of how the strength is present based on the answers you provided in the assessment.  The description will identify and answer the following question in terms of that strength:
    • What makes you stand out?
  • Questions – it provides two questions asking you to assess what part of the description most stands out in your mind and what you hope others see in yourself

My Top Five Strengths

I would like to share with you my five top strengths and how I feel they apply and match both my role as a project manager and how I would describe myself.  For me this is a real strong endorsement of  how accurately this assessment was able to describe my talents.  Here are the top five strengths in the most recent assessment:

  • Individualization – a person that has a gift for figuring out how different people work can work together and I have a particular interest in each person’s unique qualities
    • How it applies to my job: this very well lines up with my role as a project manager as that is one of the skills that I need to use on every project.
  • Learner – a person that desire to learn and continuously improve
    • How it applies to my job:  well I truly love to learn and that is demonstrated by my interest in education (MS in Software Engineering) and also my interest in improving and sharing my knowledge (Sharing by blogging and also as an adjunct instructor at local technical college)
  • Achiever – a person that has great stamina, works hard, likes to be busy and productive
    • How it applies to my job: as a project manager in information technology our job is not usually done in a 40 hour work week.  I like to be busy and have to be careful to over commit and ask for additional work to keep me busy.
  • Maximizer – person that recognizes the strengths of the team and works to make that strength even stronger
    • How it applies to my job:  I am always looking for opportunities to both recognize and acknowledge the team members contributions.  I look for ways to improve and maximize our efforts to build the best product.
  • Arranger – a person that is organized and flexible.  They like to figure out how to arrange all the pieces to get maximum productivity.
    • How it applies to my job:  Well this is probably the definition of the role of a project manager.  One of the traits that we are measured on is how we can organize our teams to be successful

I am sure that you will not have a large interest in my strengths per se but I hope that you can see how helpful it is to know your strengths and how they best fit your job.   For me it confirmed that I am in the ideal role given my strengths.  But it could also identify that maybe your strengths do not fit your current job.  One other note is that by being aware of your strengths you will also become aware of what might be your blind spots (something that may limit you on or be perceived by others.  In the next blog entry I will describe how to put an action plan together for yourself as well as recognize some potential blind spots.

Conclusion

While my awareness of my Strengths was increased the first time I took the assessment I now have a renewed interest in utilizing my Strengths.  I am really glad to know that I am able to utilize my strengths in my current job.  I will have one more blog entry to describe how to develop an action plan.

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Tim Meyer
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