A while back, I was listening to Craig Whitney speak at the Exponential Conference about how his organization, Emerging Leadership Initiative, evaluates potential church planters. He said that, among other things, they evaluate personality based on a Myers-Briggs, DiSC, and StrengthsFinder evaluation.
I tend to really enjoy personality tests because they help me distinguish between what all of us share in common and what makes us unique from one another. That’s a question I’ve been asking for some time because it informs almost everything I do in leadership. It tells me what I can assume someone likes, wants, or needs, and what I can’t. Even more so, it helps me understand specific differences among people, which makes my mind go to how they could most strategically use their unique traits to further God’s kingdom on earth. And that’s a very fun place to go for me.
And of course, the person whose uniqueness I should be most looking to maximize most is my own, because I’m the only person I have control over. I have taken Myers-Briggs (ENTJ) and DiSC (D = 7, I = 5, S = 1, C = 3) before, but never StrengthsFinder. I tend to be fairly skeptical of new or additional personality tests, because so many terrible ones get sent to me in the form of facebook apps. The worst part is that they’re the same as Myers-Briggs or DiSC, just not put together as well. But StrengthsFinder was well-written (developed by Gallup) and really distinguished itself from both Myers-Briggs and DiSC.
It seems that the Myers-Briggs attempts to indicate how you are wired, or how you tend to perceive and organize the world, and DiSC attempts to describe your behavioral style or preferences, and the roles you tend assume. In contrast, the StrengthsFinder evaluation seeks to identify your innate talents; the things that you tend to do naturally that aren’t so natural for most people. So, of course, I had to try it out for myself.
Something I really like about StrenghtsFinder is that it doesn’t let you over-analyze the questions; you’re allowed only 20 seconds per question. You are then evaluated in 34 strength areas, and you are told your top 5. But the thing I like most about the evaluation is that when you’re given your top 5 (at least for the 2.0 version of the test), you are not given some cookie-cutter evaluation about how people with these strengths tend to act. You are given a personalized evaluation (based on the 180 or so questions you answered) on how you uniquely embody or exercise this strength, different from how other people might. As a result, my evaluation page was scary accurate.
It should be noted that Gallup itself admits that the name StrengthsFinder is a bit of a misnomer, because the nature of the evaluation is in areas of talent rather than strength. It’s possible to be fairly strong in something we are not talented in (like the guy who forces himself med school because his parents insist on his being a doctor). It’s also possible to be quite talented in something, but not be strong in it (my mind goes to the book The Blind Side about a massive kid from Memphis who had never touched a football until high school, but was recently selected in the first round of the NFL draft). Perhaps TalentFinder is a better name, especially since the goal of StrengthsFinder is to help eople identify their talents so they might turn them into strengths by developing them intentionally.
That leaves me with two questions for you:
1) How are you spending time developing an area of little talent in your life?
2) How could you re-focus those efforts on developing something you’re quite talented in but haven’t given much attention?
If you identify something and follow through on it, you might be surprised at how much more you enjoy your life.
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I did the StrengthsFinder thing too – a previous employer got a book for each of us in his office. I discovered I’m a pretty boring individual.
I like that emphasis, though, that they put on developing our strengths instead of our weaknesses. So many people tell you to be “well rounded” and try to get better at what you have no gift for. What a waste of time! (In most cases.) I stopped doing a lot of things.
One thing I recently STARTED doing (now that I’ve stopped trying to be what I’m just not) is adding another instrument. I’m musical, so I’m going with it. And for all the struggling that I used to do with other things, this comes pretty naturally and it’s taking off!
What were your top 5, by the way? Just ’cause I’m curious.
Read the next post, and I tell you!