Do You Know Your Innate Talents?

Does the world really need another gifts test? This I thought as I picked up Now, Discover Your Strengths (Free Press, 2001), the new business book and strengths inventory from Gallup Organization execs Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton. We already have the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the DISC System, the Wagner-Modified Houts Spiritual Gifts Inventory, and forty or fifty competitors, cousins, and wannabes. If these haven’t improved personal and team performance, what will?

Still, I mused, the dust jacket said this new inventory—dubbed StrengthsFinder.com—was developed by the Gallup Organization, based on 25 years of research and more than 2,000,000 interviews. The test could be taken online. And, hey, I’m a sucker for diagnostic tools. So I bought the book.

To take the inventory, you go to www.StrengthsFinder.com (http://www.strengthsfinder.com/) and enter a personal code that comes with the book (thus, the free test costs the $26 price of the hardcover book). There you are given 180 “paired choices” such as “I read all of the instructions before beginning” and “I prefer to jump right into things.” For each pair, you choose which statement most strongly describes you, using a five-point scale. Each choice takes less than 20 seconds of thought, but even so, wading through 180 paired choices gets laborious.

The result: You are told your five “signature themes”—five innate talents you demonstrate spontaneously and find satisfaction in. For example, my five signature themes were:

Relator: You enjoy close relationships and build intimacy with others

Learner: You have a great desire to learn

Futuristic: You are inspired by the future

Focus: You take a direction and follow through

Responsibility: You take psychological ownership of what you say you’ll do.

Since there are 34 possible signature themes, each person’s set of 5 will differ. (There are 33,000,000 combinations of the top 5.) That’s the point, says the book: productivity comes from building on people’s unique and enduring talents.

Signature themes include Achiever, Activator, and Adaptability and continue through the alphabet to Significance, Strategic, and Woo (the ability to win others over). The theme names may be inconsistent—some are persons, some categories, some qualities—but they’re generally clear and surely more understandable than initials and quadrants.

The book takes the first 75 pages to make the case that each person holds unique strengths that should be identified and built upon, a thesis the apostle Paul makes more concisely and poetically in 1 Corinthians 12-14. Start reading Now, Discover Your Strengths on page 121, where Buckingham and Clifton challenge the common notion that to improve, you should buttress your weaknesses. Instead, they say, you should “focus on your strengths and find ways to manage your weaknesses.” Further chapters show how to manage an employee of each signature theme and, in perhaps the most helpful chapter, how to build a strengths-based organization. Still, the book struck me as basic, one better to skim than read page by page.

The genius is in the StrengthsFinder inventory. I rate an assessment tool highly if it (a) gives insight you might miss otherwise, (b) empowers you, and (c) makes you want to discuss your findings as a team.

StrengthsFinder.com succeeds at all three, and I predict it will elbow its way onto the sagging shelf of assessment tools. Now, the Gallup Organization needs to make the test available for team use—without requiring each person to buy the book.

Kevin A. Miller is executive editor of www.PreachingToday.com. To reply, write Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net.