StandOut (3 page)
• How to take your performance to the next level
—So you’re now an established member of the team. How can you elevate your performance and become a lynchpin, the proverbial franchise player, the one whom they tell stories about at company gatherings, the one whom the biggest and best clients request?
• What to watch out for
—You can never have too much of a strength, but you can misdirect it or channel it poorly. What are the pitfalls to which you are susceptible and which could you, with forethought, avoid?
When you receive your results, read the practices and techniques for each Role and then click on the “Combine My Top 2 Roles” button and you will discover what you can do to maximize your distinct combination. Here you will find:
• Which careers fit your strengths combination
—Although we have seen each strength Role combination in every career we have studied, we have also been able to map particular combinations to particular jobs and responsibilities. Here you will find which responsibilities are the closest fits for your specific strengths combination.
• How you can win as a leader
—All great leaders rally people to a better future, but each does it differently. Since authenticity is the currency of effective leadership, you need to know your natural leadership edge. How can you make your people believe that you believe in a better future for your organization? How can you genuinely convey your optimism without being a Pollyanna? How can you transform your people’s uncertainty into genuine confidence, when, truth be told, you have uncertainties of your own? Which practices will accelerate your growth and effectiveness as a leader?
• How you can win as a manager
—All great managers turn one person’s talent into performance, but your way of doing this will depend on your unique combination of strength Roles. So, what is your best way of setting clear expectations for people, for rewarding people, for engaging them, for challenging them?
• How you can win in sales
—We are all salespeople. We all have someone whom we are trying to persuade, someone whose commitment we seek. How do you convince? When do you come across as persuasive? If you ever needed to make your case compelling, how would you do it? How do you move others to action?
• How you can win in client service
—All of us have clients; some are external, some internal, but all of us are in the service of someone. The chief responsibility of client service is to build a relationship with the client that extends beyond price. What is your way of doing this? How can you give your clients certainty? How can you establish trust with them? How can they learn from you?
What the StandOut Strengths Assessment Measures
Spend twenty years building and analyzing tests that measure people’s themes of talent, and over time it becomes apparent that, no matter how thinly you slice each aspect of each theme, certain themes do wind up clustering into patterns.
For example, it is entirely possible to design an assessment that draws a distinction between themes such as Significance, Self-Assurance, Achievement Drive, and Assertiveness and then measures them separately—Dr. Don Clifton and I did this with StrengthsFinder. What we now know, however, is that these four themes correlate closely with one another. In statistical parlance a set of highly correlated themes is called a “factor,” but in the real world they combine to create a certain “personality,” a certain way of engaging with the world. In the case of these four themes, we know this personality well. It is the person who wants others to come around to his way of thinking, who enjoys persuading, outsmarting, or outwitting people, and who can even, on occasion, come across as aggressive. In the language of StandOut, this person is an Influencer.
Similarly, a combination of the themes Strategic Thinking, Optimism, Impatience, and Ambiguity Tolerance creates another kind of person. This is the person who is at her best charging into the future, believing in every fiber that the world is a friendly place, that setbacks are opportunities in disguise, and that the best way to find out what is around the next corner is to walk around the corner and see for herself. In the language of StandOut, this person is a Pioneer and she’s different from the rest of us: the uncertainty that unnerves us, thrills her.
To create the StandOut strengths assessment, we combed through all the many hundreds of themes that are possible to measure, and identified the most common and powerful theme combinations. Of course, the number of ways to measure the fine shadings of human uniqueness is infinite; however, the number of powerful theme combinations is not. We found nine. We call them “Strength Roles.”
You are a practical, concrete thinker who is at your most powerful when reacting to and solving other people’s problems.
You are a catalyst. Your power lies in your craving to bring two people or ideas together to make something bigger and better than it is now.
You make sense of the world—pulling it apart, seeing a better configuration, and creating it.
You are a levelheaded person whose power comes from keeping the world in balance, ethically and practically.
You engage people directly and convince them to act. Your power is your persuasion.
You see the world as a friendly place where around every corner good things will happen. Your power comes from your optimism in the face of uncertainty.
You sense other people’s feelings, and you feel compelled to recognize these feelings, give them a voice, and act on them.
