You’ve taken the Clifton Strengths Assessment and you are back at work and wondering how to put into practice all the details of valuing others instead of judging them – not always as easy as it sounds, huh?
Breadth is considered ‘strength spotting’ by understanding the how often your strengths are put into use across all that you do.
Depth is studying each of your top strengths and identifying how they show up in what you do.
Calibration is similar to making sure the volume of each is in balance with the others. Having one strength dominate over the others can cause friction. It helps to understand when to pull back and recognize how others are responding.
Please keep in mind that unless your top strength is utilized, your following strengths will struggle to be helpful. Thus, knowing your natural strengths (and why they matter) as well as what you need to do so you get to use them, ensures you will be productive and less frustrated in all that you do.
WHAT GETS IN THE WAY OF USING YOUR STRENGTHS?
Understanding how broad your strengths are applied (breadth), how many characteristics you identify with and link to your individual top strengths (depth), and which ones need to be calibrated differently to step into more consistent success, will all lead to increased self-awareness. However, implementing your strengths successfully can still get stunted without the following tenants of true awareness:
Knowledge Transfer
Skills Practice
Behavior Change
Knowledge transfer occurs when you realize you are learning something new. You need to pay attention and build in intervals of revisiting your strengths; learning needs to be on a continuum – not with an expiration date. To do this, set aside time each week to review what went right and how your strengths were at play. Evaluate which strengths were helpful and which ones may have gotten in the way due to a mis-calibration.
Skills Practice stems from how you include your new knowledge into your day: creating new patterns from the old, and really celebrating when you recognize your strengths in use. Your skills increase when you can recognize strengths in others, you understand how to value someone that you used to get aggravated with, and you reassess how to engage in your performance expectations to maximize your skills. You may find that, more than before, you collaborate easily with others who have differing strengths to create successful outcomes.
Behavior Change results when you integrate thoughts and actions continuously so that a new behavior becomes more organic. It’s no different than developing a different habit around a familiar task. This will often happen once you realize which elements of your strengths work better than others and you make a conscious choice to implement them. For example, you may find that asking questions instead of demanding answers achieves the same results yet elevates the engagement of your team voluntarily and allows them to become more excited to be a part of the solution.
Regardless of which of the elements between breadth, depth, or calibration you choose to use first – your awareness of your own strengths will be an exciting journey. If you’d like more information on how to deep dive into your strengths, take a look at Carole’s Strength Strategy Bootcamp!
Learn more about these two tactics on this video.
Discover Your Talents with Strength Strategy!
The best managers get to know themselves and their team. You lead a team to success by understanding your team’s capabilities, and by people in positions that play to their strengths while partnering them with people who will overcome their weaknesses. Discover your strengths, and the strengths or your team, with our Strength Strategy course!
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