Table Of ContentISBN: 978-1-59562-035-4
Copyright © 2001 Gallup, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Gallup®, Clifton StrengthsFinder®, Gallup Press®, Q12®, and StrengthsFinder® are trademarks of Gallup,
Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. The Q12 items are protected by copyright
of Gallup, Inc., 1993-1998. All rights reserved.
Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. (1924-2003)
The Father of Strengths-Based Psychology and Creator of the Clifton
StrengthsFinder®
The Clifton StrengthsFinder is the culmination of more than 50 years of Dr.
Donald O. Clifton’s lifelong work: leading millions of people around the world
to discover their strengths. In 2002, Dr. Clifton was honored by an American
Psychological Association Presidential Commendation as the Father of
Strengths-Based Psychology.
CONTENTS
IMPORTANT Information About Taking Clifton StrengthsFinder
Introduction: The Strengths Revolution at Work
The Revolution
Two Million Interviews
I. The Anatomy of a Strength
Chapter 1. Strong Lives
The Investor, the Director, the Skin Doctor, and the Editor
Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, and Cole Porter
Three Revolutionary Tools
Chapter 2. Strength Building
Is He Always This Good?
Knowledge and Skills
Talent
II. Discover the Source of Your Strengths
Chapter 3. StrengthsFinder
The Traces of Talent
The StrengthsFinder Profile
Chapter 4. The Thirty-Four Themes of StrengthsFinder
Achiever
Activator
Adaptability
Analytical
Arranger
Belief
Command
Communication
Competition
Connectedness
Consistency
Context
Deliberative
Developer
Discipline
Empathy
Futuristic
Harmony
Ideation
Includer
Individualization
Input
Intellection
Learner
Maximizer
Positivity
Relator
Responsibility
Restorative
Self-Assurance
Significance
Strategic
Focus
Woo
III. Put Strengths to Work
Chapter 5. The Questions You’re Asking
Are There Any Obstacles to Building My Strengths?
Why Should I Focus on My Signature Themes?
Is There Any Significance to the Order of My Signature Themes?
Not All of the Phrases in the Theme Description Apply to Me. Why?
Why Am I Different from Other People with Whom I Share Some of the Same Themes?
Are Any of the Themes “Opposites”?
Can I Develop New Themes if I Don’t Like the Ones I Have?
Will I Become Too Narrow if I Focus on My Signature Themes?
How Can I Manage Around My Weaknesses?
Can My Themes Reveal Whether I Am in the Right Career?
Chapter 6. Managing Strengths
“Fidel,” Sam Mendes, and Phil Jackson
One By One
Chapter 7. Building a Strengths-Based Organization
The Full Story
The Practical Guide
Appendix: A Technical Report on StrengthsFinder
Acknowledgments
IMPORTANT Information About
Taking Clifton StrengthsFinder
Your ebook retailer will provide you with your unique, one-use-only access to
take the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment that is included with this book. To
take the assessment, go to www.strengthsfinder.com. Navigate to the bottom of
the page where you will see the cover image for Now, Discover Your Strengths.
Follow the instructions, and when prompted, enter your access code.
Introduction: The Strengths
Revolution at Work
Guided by the belief that good is the opposite of bad, mankind has for
centuries pursued its fixation with fault and failing. Doctors have studied disease
in order to learn about health. Psychologists have investigated sadness in order
to learn about joy. Therapists have looked into the causes of divorce in order to
learn about happy marriage. And in schools and workplaces around the world,
each one of us has been encouraged to identify, analyze, and correct our
weaknesses in order to become strong.
This advice is well intended but misguided. Faults and failings deserve study,
but they reveal little about strengths. Strengths have their own patterns.
To excel in your chosen field and to find lasting satisfaction in doing so, you
will need to understand your unique patterns. You will need to become an expert
at finding and describing and applying and practicing and refining your
strengths. So as you read this book, shift your focus. Suspend whatever interest
you may have in weakness and instead explore the intricate detail of your
strengths. Take the StrengthsFinder Profile. Learn its language. Discover the
source of your strengths.
If by the end of the book you have developed your expertise in what is right
about you and your employees, this book will have served its purpose.
The Revolution
‘‘What are the two assumptions on which great organizations must
be built?”
We wrote this book to start a revolution, the strengths revolution. At the heart
of this revolution is a simple decree: The great organization must not only
accommodate the fact that each employee is different, it must capitalize on these
differences. It must watch for clues to each employee’s natural talents and then
position and develop each employee so that his or her talents are transformed
into bona fide strengths. By changing the way it selects, measures, develops, and
channels the careers of its people, this revolutionary organization must build its
entire enterprise around the strengths of each person.
And as it does, this revolutionary organization will be positioned to
dramatically outperform its peers. In our latest meta-analysis The Gallup
Organization asked this question of 198,000 employees working in 7,939
business units within 36 companies: At work do you have the opportunity to do
what you do best every day? We then compared the responses to the
performance of the business units and discovered the following: When
employees answered “strongly agree” to this question, they were 50 percent
more likely to work in business units with lower employee turnover, 38 percent
more likely to work in more productive business units, and 44 percent more
likely to work in business units with higher customer satisfaction scores. And
over time those business units that increased the number of employees who
strongly agreed saw comparable increases in productivity, customer loyalty, and
employee retention. Whichever way you care to slice the data, the organization
whose employees feel that their strengths are used every day is more powerful
and more robust.
This is very good news for the organization that wants to be on the vanguard
of the strengths revolution. Why? Because most organizations remain startlingly
inefficient at capitalizing on the strengths of their people. In Gallup’s total
database we have asked the “opportunity to do what I do best” question of more
than 1.7 million employees in 101 companies from 63 countries. What
percentage do you think strongly agrees that they have an opportunity to do what
they do best every day? What percentage truly feels that their strengths are in
play?
Twenty percent. Globally, only 20 percent of employees working in the large
organizations we surveyed feel that their strengths are in play every day. Most
bizarre of all, the longer an employee stays with an organization and the higher
he climbs the traditional career ladder, the less likely he is to strongly agree that
he is playing to his strengths.
Alarming though it is to learn that most organizations operate at 20 percent
capacity, this discovery actually represents a tremendous opportunity for great
organizations. To spur high-margin growth and thereby increase their value,
great organizations need only focus inward to find the wealth of unrealized
capacity that resides in every single employee. Imagine the increase in
productivity and profitability if they doubled this number and so had 40 percent
of their employees strongly agreeing that they had a chance to use their strengths
every day. Or how about tripling the number? Sixty percent of employees saying
“strongly agree” isn’t too aggressive a goal for the greatest organizations.
How can they achieve this? Well, to begin with they need to understand why
eight out of ten employees feel somewhat miscast in their role. What can explain
this widespread inability to position people — in particular senior people who
have had the chance to search around for interesting roles — to play to their
strengths?
The simplest explanation is that most organizations’ basic assumptions about
people are wrong. We know this because for the last thirty years Gallup has been
conducting research into the best way to maximize a person’s potential. At the
heart of this research are our interviews with eighty thousand managers — most
excellent, some average — in hundreds of organizations around the world. Here
the focus was to discover what the world’s best managers (whether in Bangalore
or Bangor) had in common. We described our discoveries in detail in the book
First, Break All the Rules, but the most significant finding was this: Most
organizations are built on two flawed assumptions about people:
1. Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything.
2. Each person’s greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest
weakness.
Presented so baldly, these two assumptions seem too simplistic to be
commonly held, so let’s play them out and see where they lead. If you want to
test whether or not your organization is based on these assumptions, look for
these characteristics:
Your organization spends more money on training people once they are
hired than on selecting them properly in the first place.
Your organization focuses the performance of its employees by legislating
work style. This means a heavy emphasis on work rules, policies,
procedures, and “behavioral competencies.”
Your organization spends most of its training time and money on trying to
plug the gaps in employees’ skills or competencies. It calls these gaps
“areas of opportunity.” Your individual development plan, if you have one,
is built around your “areas of opportunity,” your weaknesses.
Your organization promotes people based on the skills or experiences they
have acquired. After all, if everyone can learn to be competent in almost
anything, those who have learned the most must be the most valuable.
Thus, by design, your organization gives the most prestige, the most
respect, and the highest salaries to the most experienced well-rounded
people.
Finding an organization that doesn’t have these characteristics is more difficult
than finding one that does. Most organizations take their employees’ strengths
for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses. They become expert in
those areas where their employees struggle, delicately rename these “skill gaps”
or “areas of opportunity,” and then pack them off to training classes so that the
weaknesses can be fixed. This approach is occasionally necessary: If an
employee always alienates those around him, some sensitivity training can help;
likewise, a remedial communication class can benefit an employee who happens
to be smart but inarticulate. But this isn’t development, it is damage control. And
by itself damage control is a poor strategy for elevating either the employee or
the organization to world-class performance.
As long as an organization operates under these assumptions, it will never
capitalize on the strengths of each employee.
To break out of this weakness spiral and to launch the strengths revolution in
your own organization, you must change your assumptions about people. Start
with the right assumptions, and everything else that follows from them — how
you select, measure, train, and develop your people — will be right. These are
the two assumptions that guide the world’s best managers:
1. Each person’s talents are enduring and unique.
2. Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest
strength.
These two assumptions are the foundation for everything they do with and for
their people. These two assumptions explain why great managers are careful to
look for talent in every role, why they focus people’s performances on outcomes
rather than forcing them into a stylistic mold, why they disobey the Golden Rule
and treat each employee differently, and why they spend the most time with their
best people. In short, these two assumptions explain why the world’s best
managers break all the rules of conventional management wisdom.
Now, following the great managers’ lead, it is time to change the rules. These
two revolutionary assumptions must serve as the central tenets for a new way of
working. They are the tenets for a new organization, a stronger organization, an
organization designed to reveal and stretch the strengths of each employee.
Most organizations have a process for ensuring the efficient use of their
practical resources. Six Sigma or ISO 9000 processes are commonplace.
Likewise, most organizations have increasingly efficient processes for exploiting
their financial resources. The recent fascination with metrics such as economic
value added and return on capital bear testament to this. Few organizations,
however, have developed a systematic process for the efficient use of their
human resources. (They may experiment with individual development plans,
360-degree surveys, and competencies, but these experiments are mostly focused
on fixing each employee’s weaknesses rather than building his strengths.)
In this book we want to show you how to design a systematic strength-
building process. Specifically, Chapter 7, “Building a Strengths-Based
Organization,” can help. Here we describe what the optimum selection system
looks like, which three outcomes all employees should have on their scorecard,
how to reallocate those misguided training budgets, and, last, how to change the
way you channel each employee’s career.
If you are a manager and want to know how best to capitalize on the strengths
of your individual direct reports, then Chapter 6, “Managing Strengths,” will
help. Here we identify virtually every ability or style you might find in your
people and explain what you can do to maximize the strengths of each employee.
However, we don’t start there. We start with you. What are your strengths?
How can you capitalize on them? What are your most powerful combinations?
Where do they take you? What one, two, or three things can you do better than
ten thousand other people? These are the kinds of questions we will deal with in
the first five chapters. After all, you can’t lead a strengths revolution if you don’t
know how to find, name, and develop your own.
Two Million Interviews
“Whom did Gallup interview to learn about human strengths?”
Imagine what you might learn if you could interview two million people about
their strengths. Imagine interviewing the world’s best teachers and asking them
how they keep children so interested in what might otherwise be dry subject
matter. Imagine asking them how they build such trusting relationships with so
many different children. Imagine asking them how they balance fun and
discipline in the classroom. Imagine asking them about all the things they do that
make them so very good at what they do.
And then imagine what you could learn if you did the same with the world’s
best doctors and salespeople and lawyers (yes, they can be found) and
professional basketball players and stockbrokers and accountants and hotel
housekeepers and leaders and soldiers and nurses and pastors and systems
engineers and chief executives. Imagine all those questions and, more important,
all those vivid answers.
Over the last thirty years The Gallup Organization has conducted a systematic
study of excellence wherever we could find it. This wasn’t some mammoth poll.
Each of those interviews (a little over two million at the last count, of which the
eighty thousand managers from First, Break All the Rules were a small part)
consisted of open-ended questions like the ones mentioned above. We wanted to
hear these excellent performers describe in their own words exactly what they
were doing.
In all these different professions we found a tremendous diversity of
knowledge, skill, and talent. But as you might suspect, we soon began to detect
patterns. We kept looking and listening, and gradually we extracted from this
wealth of testimony thirty-four patterns, or “themes,” as we have called them.
These thirty-four are the most prevalent themes of human talent. Our research
