WALKSCAPE
Crosswave EditionThe Strengths Test I Was Asked to Take for a Job
2024-02-08
Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton’s Now, Discover Your Strengths asks what would happen if people spent more time developing abilities they already use well.
I found it in an unexpected place. In the winter of 2012, I went to the CCMM Building in Yeouido for an E-Land internship aptitude test. The company gave me a copy.
I thought it was a gift for applicants. It turned out to be part of the process. We were asked to take the strengths assessment and submit the result on E-Land’s site.
Two assumptions the authors question
The authors argue that companies often begin with two assumptions about the people they hire.
- Training can make anyone competent in almost any field.
- A person has the greatest room to improve where they are weakest.
What the authors would start from instead
The book proposes two different starting points.
- Each person has recurring patterns of thought, feeling and behavior that the authors treat as relatively enduring talents.
- A person can make especially large gains by developing what they already do well.
That leads to the book’s practical questions. How can you recognize those patterns, and how can you make them useful?
What counts as a strength?
Buckingham and Clifton use “strength” for a particular kind of performance.
- The ability to perform an activity consistently at a high level.
Three implications follow from that definition.
- A strength is something you can put to work repeatedly.
- You can do a job well without showing a strength in every part of it.
- Developing a strength can make a larger difference than trying to improve every weakness.
How to develop something you already do well
The book offers three tools for making the argument practical.
First, distinguish recurring talents from learned knowledge and skills. The authors describe a strength as something you build by putting those together.
Second, watch your own behavior closely enough to see what repeats.
Third, find words for the patterns. The assessment Gallup developed is one way to give people a shared vocabulary.
What the book calls talent
“Talent” has a narrower meaning here than it does in some conversations about success.
- A recurring pattern in the way a person thinks, feels or acts that can be used productively.
Patience and a tendency to take responsibility are examples. The book also considers how someone who experiences difficulty with reading might develop ways to ask precise questions or explain a difficult idea.
Those responses depend on the person and their circumstances. I found the example most useful as a reason to notice a skill that might otherwise go unnamed.
The account of brain development
The authors use synapses, the points at which brain cells communicate, to discuss how habits might become established.
The developing brain forms and reorganizes connections, including through pruning. That process continues across different periods in different parts of the brain.
I read the neuroscience as part of the authors’ explanation of how patterns can develop. The assessment itself measures responses to its questions. It does not trace them to particular connections in a person’s brain.
Four questions to ask about your work
The book suggests several things to pay attention to before taking a test.
- What do you do first when you face a new situation?
- What kind of work do you find yourself drawn to?
- What have you learned unusually quickly?
- What kind of activity leaves you satisfied?
I could answer some of those questions more easily by thinking of a particular day at work than by trying to describe myself in general.
The online assessment
The edition I read introduced the online StrengthsFinder assessment. Gallup now calls it CliftonStrengths. Check Gallup’s current options for access and reports.
The assessment uses 34 talent themes. The version I took highlighted five, and I could use those names to find the relevant parts of the book.
Here are the themes, in the order used in the Korean review and with Gallup’s current English labels.
- Developer
- Individualization
- Competition
- Empathy
- Consistency
- Relator
- Positivity
- Woo
- Context
- Command
- Futuristic
- Restorative
- Analytical
- Intellection
- Achiever
- Belief
- Deliberative
- Connectedness
- Communication
- Self-Assurance
- Adaptability
- Strategic
- Arranger
- Harmony
- Significance
- Discipline
- Ideation
- Responsibility
- Focus
- Maximizer
- Input
- Includer
- Learner
- Activator
The assessment put these five at the top for me.
- Learner
- Input
- Maximizer
- Achiever
- Empathy
Putting the results to work
The later chapters explain how to read the assessment, how a manager might work with an individual and how a team might be organized around different abilities.
The idea I kept coming back to was to put people in a position to use what they already do well while giving them a chance to practice it further.
The authors still consider weaknesses. They look for anything that gets in the way of good performance and ask whether it needs to be managed.
What I thought of when I read it
I thought of the Korean baseball player Lee Dae-ho. He makes the difference between a strength and a weakness easy to picture.
Lee brought power, patience at the plate and the ability to make contact. His running speed was a different matter. A team can give those attributes different weight when deciding what to ask him to do.
The person you want up with runners on base may be somebody you rarely ask to steal one.
The example took me back to my own five words. Where could I learn, collect and connect material, and pay enough attention to a person to make the result useful to them? That was a more concrete question than what job a test thought I should have.
Book details
Now, Discover Your Strengths
- Authors
- Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
- Korean edition published
- September 15, 2005
- ISBN-13
- 9788935206278
- Gallup assessment
- CliftonStrengths
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