Strengthsfinder Reflection

STRENGTHSFINDER REFLECTION PAPER

1. Please record your top five strengths determined from the assessment

•  Competition
• Achiever
• Focus
• Significance
• Achiever

1. How does this information about your strengths help you better understand your unique talents?

This information about my strengths helps me to better understand my unique talents because it provides a detailed breakdown of each strength along with an action plan on how to utilize each of them. Although I have done this a few different times, 3 out of my top 5 strengths are always the same. Competition has always been number one and each time I read about it, I’m able to apply it in a different way.  

1. How can you use these strengths to add value to your role as a member of a team, or workgroup?

These strengths can be used to add value to my role as a member of my team through positioning each team member and team, partnering with members that have complementary strengths. To begin with, I would leverage my competition strength to position our team in a way that I could compare our results to other teams in similar situations. In addition, I would also keep the team on track through utilizing my achiever strength by setting small goals and deadlines in order to keep the team on track.

Furthermore, I would partner with team members with complementary strengths. For example, since I have an analytical trait, I would partner with an activator so that we can apply my ideas and processes right away. In applying this concept, we would be complementing what may be a weakness for me in getting things started. Thus, someone coming in and taking the bull by the horns to get things going may help the team to catch steam quickly.

1. How can you use this understanding of your strengths to enhance your capacity to lead and manage teams? Share an example/story of a team initiative you have lead or experienced that demonstrates the use of your strengths.

I can use my understanding of my strengths to enhance my capacity to lead and manage teams through the process of putting together a team that leverages each other’s strengths and then managing the through their strengths. I know specifically that I’m good at challenging people to do better which is reflected in my strengths. In combining my strengths together, I would utilize a process of encouragement and planning to help my team get to the next level. An example of this is when I first came to the office that I currently work in as a Financial Advisor. Many of the teammates were lacking any insight on where they were headed in the future within the company and knowing this, I leveraged my experience and connections that stem from my tenure in order to coach them. I then put together a plan for them with deadlines in order to keep them accountable. From then, I was able to gain their trust and re-engage them to send referrals to me.

1. Articulate you own point of view about the leader’s responsibility to effectively manage and lead teams.

It is leader’s responsibility to effectively manage and lead teams by doing whatever it takes to get their team to work together. Many times, teams are put together without any rhyme or reason and thus, don’t work well together. However, if the leader can be involved in this process in choosing a team, this can be impacted from the beginning. From then on, it is the leader’s responsibility to learn about the team and put together a plan to get the team to be successful.

6.)  What will you do differently tomorrow as a result of this report, in other words what actions might you take (see Ideas for Action for each strength in your report)?

I have broken down my actions by strength.

Competition

• Put myself in a position where I can measure myself and compete against others. This will put me in a position to push myself to win in no matter the situation.
• Learn from my wins as much as my losses. Many times, I don’t think about how I won even though it can give many clues as to how to win more consistently in the future. Thus, trying to explore this would help to maximize my learnings from each experience.
• Utilize the balanced metric that my work place offers and make a balanced metric for any team that I’m a part of. This ensures that my team and I don’t skip over certain aspects that may be important just to win.

Achiever

• Build a process of celebration and reflection after each achievement. Many times I’m focused on the next challenge and thus, I’ll be creating a plan to reflect on each achievement.
•  Set challenging goals in order to leverage my self-motivation.  

Focus

• Set SMART goals and stick to them with check points. This will help to ensure I’m making progress toward achieving them.
• Since I have self-motivation, I’ll continue to stick to roles I can function independently since I will need little supervision.

Significance

• Surround myself with my goals and achievements so that I’m constantly reminded of them.
• Accept that it is okay to seek admiration from important people in my life but do not let it evolve into an over reliance.

Analytical

• Partner with an activator so they can put my thoughts and plans in motion quickly.
• Have a process of research in order to support my logic. Narrow them down to the most meaningful ones and bookmark them for easy access.

The StrengthsFinder assessment has also opened up my eyes to another aspect of the way I operate in life even though it is about the third time I’ve learned about it. Fortunately, this time was in a classroom setting so I was able to get much more from going over it this time than before. My top strength is competition and just knowing it and reflecting on it reminds me to be wary of being insensitive to others just to be number one. On the other hand, in order to ensure that I improve, I know that I’ll need to put myself in situations where there can be a winner because it will push me to improve myself in a way to win. Another one of my strengths that stood out to me is significance because it matches up with my Myers Briggs assessment. This significance strengths says that I want to appear to my peers as confident, trustworthy and accomplish in many areas which is almost exactly how an ESFJ-A is driven by.