Are You Living On the Balcony or In the Basement
One of my coaching clients, an executive whom I will call Anne, has been working for 2 years as a manager in a prestigious consulting firm and has had a problem typical of many professionals. Lauded and respected for her professional expertise she is nonetheless seen as rough, unpolished, and inconsistent in how she interacts with employees and customers. At first, she was defensive about this feedback, then embarrassed. But primarily she was feeling at a loss as to how to move her career forward.
Two months after we’d started working together, she was still getting similar feedback from her supervisor. Since she sees herself as a fundamentally competent person, she found this quite disheartening. At this point I thought, “We really need to get a deeper understanding of her core talents and help her maximize those.”
Pitfall alert for smart people!
One challenge for smart folks, like so many in health care, is that they can and do get good (or good enough) at quite a few things, which actually obscures and confuses them in knowing what their core talents are. Mid-career professionals feeling dissatisfied with their jobs are often in this dilemma, using well-developed skills that aren’t necessarily aligned with their core talents.
Enter the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment. A new (for me) tool that I’ve recently started using more widely, I suspected this would yield some new insight for Anne about her blind spots and I hoped it would give her more leverage and clarity about what she needed to change.
This unique assessment grew out of interview data done by the Gallup Organization, in which they interviewed 10 million individuals in 48 countries across all occupations. They identified more than 400 different themes of talent and then focused on the 34 themes found to be most prevalent in individuals considered the “best of the best.”
What is a strength?
The assessment does not actually measure strengths but rather the presence of talent in 34 themes. While talents (recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied) naturally exist, a strength (the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a specific task) must be developed. A strength is the product of refining one’s talents with skills and knowledge. An individual’s Signature Themes are unique to that person. When ranking within the set of five themes is considered, 33, 390, 720 sets of Signature Themes are possible.
However, this assessment not only gives unique insight into your core talents. Even better, it helps you understand whether you are using those talents in a positive way or a self-defeating and limiting way. It allows you to answer the question :”Are you living life from the balcony or in the basement?? Only with that understanding can you then identify strategies for when you find yourself in the basement that will take you back up to the balcony.
When Talents Aren’t Strengths
When Anne looked at her talents, and saw her balcony and basement manifestations, it was as if the light suddenly went on in the basement! Rather than feeling either hopeless or discouraged as she had been, she quickly saw how she could become much more proactive in taking ownership of her talents and consistently manifesting them as strengths.
Anne’s top 3 talents are Activator, Command, and Responsibility. From the balcony, her Activator talent is a strength when she is making things happen, turning ideas into plans and moving things forward. However, in the basement, she too frequently demonstrated the talent as “fire, then aim”, impatience, taking action too quickly and reacting too quickly.
The Command talent as strength is all about being in control, being the leader, being the driver and very decisive. In the basement, however, Anne came off as being too bossy, controlling, and critical.
The Responsibility talent is all about being utterly dependable, seeing things through to completion, and taking complete psychological responsibility. A major basement trap for Anne, as for others who have this talent, is taking on too many responsibilities, particularly in things that she’s learned to be decent at but that aren’t her true strengths. Thus, she is quite susceptible to taking on too much, and then getting quite stressed which contributes to her reactivity and impatience (Activator and Command liabilities).
As she began to examine how these three talents interact, it became clear that much of her behavior that is un-productive, was actually the dynamic of these three talents colluding in the basement. The real pay-off Anne gained from this new-found insight provided by the StrengthsFinder framework is that she’s taken ownership of her talents, and has a much greater sense of direction, empowerment, and choice in the specific actions that will demonstrate her strengths, and assure her greater career success.
Making the most of YOUR talents
Since one of my signature talents is that of “Maximizer” (a talent for moving people to their greatest potential and sorting through the “clutter” to determine the greatest ROI), here’s what I want you take away from this story.
- First, take ownership of your talents and consciously develop them into strengths; otherwise, they can manifest as limitations in thought and deed.
- Second, write down your goals and the associated ideal outcomes. Then, think and write about how you can leverage your specific talents to achieve your goals.
- Third, look for opportunities where you can utilize your talents
- Fourth, remember that your greatest success truly depends on how well you identify and leverage your Signature Talents and Strengths, for in the same way that companies rise and fall depending on whether they stay true to their core competencies, so do we as individuals.