Throughout my time in The Presidential Leadership Academy we have taken many assessments that are meant to measure our personality as well as our leadership tendencies. I have found these helpful to my leadership, especially given my naturally introspective nature. Typically when I receive the results of these assessments I find that they are accurate and consistent with my nature (and given that I am a low self-monitor, meaning I like being consistent, I was happy with this).
I recently had another opportunity to take a similar assessment for my internship this summer called StrengthFinders. The goal of StrengthFinders is to determine what your strengths are as a leader and using these to improve and lead to the best of your ability. When I got my results, the following were my top five strengths:
- Learner
- Achiever
- Discipline
- Intellection
- Responsibility
Upon seeing these results I was not surprised that these were my strengths as they are all very true of me as a leader and a person as a whole. However, this time I found that I was slightly upset that these were my strengths. I ran into that awkward moment when I didn’t like my strengths.
StrengthFinders categorizes the 34 different strengths into four categories: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. Looking at these four categories at face value, those that are most important to me and most align with my “personal mission statement” are Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking. This has always been the case and has been even more emphasized after being in a classroom with 100+ students each day, where I want to influence their lives and let them know that they are cared for by building relationships with them.
So why did I not like my strengths? They did not seem to align with my mission statement at all as each of my strengths feel into the two other categories: Executing and Strategic Thinking. Upon reflection this is not a surprise as I have always been a naturally task-oriented person more so than a people-oriented person, but I still don’t like that.
To be honest, I planned to write this blog and leave it on the note of being confused as to how it could be that my strengths are not aligned with my heart and my goal for my future working with students. I looked at the list and said, well I guess I can’t use these to build relationships and encourage my students so I might as well practice the other areas. Thankfully though, my #1 strength stepped in, and as a Learner I decided to learn a bit more about these strengths before giving up on them.
In the book Strengths Based Leadership which accompanies the StrengthFinders assessment, each strength has its own section which discusses how it can be used in several areas: Building Trust, Showing Compassion, Providing Stability, and Creating Hope. While I won’t go into the specifics of how my strengths can be used in each of these areas, it was encouraging to realize that even though on surface value my strengths seem to only help get things done or done well, if used strategically they can all be used to put the focus on those that I lead and building relationships with them!
However, through the process of recognizing that my strengths are not 100% aligned with my mission, I also realized that this is a good thing, because I can use my strengths of learning and discipline to work at growing my weaknesses so that I can focus on this mission of encouraging and building relationships with others.
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