8 min
Team Is Under 10% On Influencing Strengths — Is This A Weak CliftonStrengths Lineup? Lead Through Strengths
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- Careers
Influencing Strengths Not Part Of Your Top 5? Chill, You're Not Alone It’s totally normal for you or your team to hope for a balanced distribution of themes across all four domains of strengths: strategic thinking, relationships, executing, and influencing. You may think that you are not as productive and effective if you lack the talent themes from one or more categories. For example, being low or bare on influencing strengths could make you feel you are disconnected, unconvincing, or misunderstood.
The thing is, CliftonStrengths assessment might surprise you. Ideal does not mean evenly spread. In fact, when you look at the database of all people who have taken the StrengthsFinder assessment, you'll see influencing strengths in 15% of the top 5.
If you're doing the math with us, you've already picked up on the fact that each domain does not get a tidy 25% count. So no worries. If you have 5% influencing strengths or 20% on your team, the secret is to work with what you have.
Here's Lisa Cummings to show you how (full transcript of the episode):
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 gotta tell you, it's tough to find something at work that is more energizing than using your strengths at work every day.
Today we are in a season of the show where we are moving into question and answers from you, the listeners. Today's question:
“We're just starting CliftonStrengths with the team, and we noticed a lack of influencing strengths."
So she goes on to ask about how to address this as a team. They have already talked about how to address when you have a "deficiency."
I'm putting that word in quotes, about when you're missing a talent as an individual person, but how do you address these ideas as a team?
Now first, if you're new to CliftonStrengths or the book StrengthsFinder 2.0, when she's mentioning influencing themes, that is one of the four main domains of talent. Some people call these the four leadership domains. Sometimes I call them the four demands on our personal leadership. Beyond Influencing strengths, the other categories are:
Relationships Strategic thinking Executing So the first thing to know is — hey, good news, this means you’re normal!
When you look at the whole database of people who have taken CliftonStrengths — more than 24 million people — that instances of influencing strengths (talent themes) in the top 5 is 15%. So it's not an evenly spread dynamic.
So that is the first thing. If you are on a team and you're trying to make all four domains have a nice tidy 25%, stop trying that. It's not how the human population looks — at least the population inside of this database, which is quite large. And spend a little bit more time learning to work with what you got. Work with what you got. You know what I mean?
Let Desired Outcomes Guide You On How To Apply Your Strengths So, as I think through that, my answer is really to get a little bit more focused on the outcomes at work, rather than obsessing over the strengths.
So one of the things that I see teams do is they do an assessment like CliftonStrengths, and then of course all you want to do is talk about the strengths language and do things like, “Oh, I have the Focus talent, how can I go use Focus as talent? Or you lead through Relator — "How can I go use my Relator today?”
That's totally natural and there's not really anything wrong with doing that. But in a workplace and in a team setting, where I think you'll get extra bang for the buck, is to think about the outcomes you're trying to achieve as a team.
And then think, “In order to reach that outcome, how can I use the talent themes that I have?”
So we're coming at it a little different way, and it's using the themes as your easy buttons to get the outcomes done.
So if I make this a little bit more practical, let's say you have a goal as a team to
Influencing Strengths Not Part Of Your Top 5? Chill, You're Not Alone It’s totally normal for you or your team to hope for a balanced distribution of themes across all four domains of strengths: strategic thinking, relationships, executing, and influencing. You may think that you are not as productive and effective if you lack the talent themes from one or more categories. For example, being low or bare on influencing strengths could make you feel you are disconnected, unconvincing, or misunderstood.
The thing is, CliftonStrengths assessment might surprise you. Ideal does not mean evenly spread. In fact, when you look at the database of all people who have taken the StrengthsFinder assessment, you'll see influencing strengths in 15% of the top 5.
If you're doing the math with us, you've already picked up on the fact that each domain does not get a tidy 25% count. So no worries. If you have 5% influencing strengths or 20% on your team, the secret is to work with what you have.
Here's Lisa Cummings to show you how (full transcript of the episode):
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 gotta tell you, it's tough to find something at work that is more energizing than using your strengths at work every day.
Today we are in a season of the show where we are moving into question and answers from you, the listeners. Today's question:
“We're just starting CliftonStrengths with the team, and we noticed a lack of influencing strengths."
So she goes on to ask about how to address this as a team. They have already talked about how to address when you have a "deficiency."
I'm putting that word in quotes, about when you're missing a talent as an individual person, but how do you address these ideas as a team?
Now first, if you're new to CliftonStrengths or the book StrengthsFinder 2.0, when she's mentioning influencing themes, that is one of the four main domains of talent. Some people call these the four leadership domains. Sometimes I call them the four demands on our personal leadership. Beyond Influencing strengths, the other categories are:
Relationships Strategic thinking Executing So the first thing to know is — hey, good news, this means you’re normal!
When you look at the whole database of people who have taken CliftonStrengths — more than 24 million people — that instances of influencing strengths (talent themes) in the top 5 is 15%. So it's not an evenly spread dynamic.
So that is the first thing. If you are on a team and you're trying to make all four domains have a nice tidy 25%, stop trying that. It's not how the human population looks — at least the population inside of this database, which is quite large. And spend a little bit more time learning to work with what you got. Work with what you got. You know what I mean?
Let Desired Outcomes Guide You On How To Apply Your Strengths So, as I think through that, my answer is really to get a little bit more focused on the outcomes at work, rather than obsessing over the strengths.
So one of the things that I see teams do is they do an assessment like CliftonStrengths, and then of course all you want to do is talk about the strengths language and do things like, “Oh, I have the Focus talent, how can I go use Focus as talent? Or you lead through Relator — "How can I go use my Relator today?”
That's totally natural and there's not really anything wrong with doing that. But in a workplace and in a team setting, where I think you'll get extra bang for the buck, is to think about the outcomes you're trying to achieve as a team.
And then think, “In order to reach that outcome, how can I use the talent themes that I have?”
So we're coming at it a little different way, and it's using the themes as your easy buttons to get the outcomes done.
So if I make this a little bit more practical, let's say you have a goal as a team to
8 min