all my library blogging

Hello again! In this post I’m going to talk about one specific tool that helped me find my thing. Apologies in advance for the length, I did cut a few hundred words but it’s still pretty long.

The StrengthsFinder Inventory and how it changed my life

I hated my first job out of college. It was so bad, I often entertained thoughts of running my car into the median on the highway during my drive home, just to get away from it all. (Thinking about my cats kept me from doing it.)  My self esteem had been so destroyed in this job that I didn’t even feel capable of obtaining a new one.  I was truly, truly stuck.

After I had been there a few years, one of my favorite managers ever, Noel Nyman (who was actually my manager’s manager), gifted a book to his entire team called Now, Discover Your Strengths. Dumb title, but was the first tool that really helped me out of my career rut.

The basic idea is that you have the most room to grow as a person in the areas where you are strongest. Developing natural talents into personal strengths is what makes people happy and productive, and everyone would be better off if we all spent more time working on enhancing our strengths rather than shoring up our weaknesses. Accompanying the book is an online inventory that helps assess what your strengths are, choosing your top five out of a list of 34. The book’s publisher, Gallup, developed the inventory after interviewing tens of thousands of managers in hundreds of companies over a period of several decades, so it’s backed up by considerable research.

Downside note: you have to use a code printed on the inside of the book jacket to access the inventory, which means you need to buy your own copy. But, if you feel like you are at a dead end in your life and are looking to get out of it, I think it is totally worth the price. I received my copy as a gift, but I have gifted copies to several of my friends because of how useful it has been to me.

If you are already well aware of your strengths, this tool will be a waste of time, and I do know people who felt that way about it when they were required to participate in a StrengthsFinder activity at their workplaces. (I disagree with requiring people to take the inventory.) But if you are someone who has placed high priority on being a “well-rounded” individual, the results may be a revelation — they were for me. I tried to guess what the inventory would tell me before I took it and I guessed completely wrong. My top two strengths are something called “Input” and “Intellection”. My reaction was something along the lines of, “What the heck is Input?”

It turns out that people who are strong in Input have a natural talent and tendency for collecting things, especially information, because you never know when you might need it again. The truth of this was immediately apparent to me. I’ve long been someone who processes huge quantities of information on a daily basis, from my childhood as a voracious reader to the internet-addicted adult I am today. But it was never anything I had ever considered among my personal talents! No, these were qualities that made me a lazy daydreamer who surfed the internet all day, keeping me from doing my job. Despite being able to immediately reframe my newly-identified strengths as weaknesses, I was energized. Something told me that the folks at Gallup were right, and I started looking for ways to play to my strengths in my work.

For a while, I tried to use my newfound self-knowledge to make my existing job more tolerable, but I soon concluded that I really was in the wrong role, and that it was time to find a new career, one that suited me better. Prior to finding the StrengthsFinder, coming to this conclusion would have made me feel like a failure, but instead, it gave me the courage and freedom to look for something different.

I didn’t find a new career immediately — I spent a couple years pursuing Technical Writing and Editing before I found my “calling” in Library and Information Science, and it took me a couple years after that to apply to library schools. But today I am a library school graduate with a fledgling information consulting business, a dream whose seed was planted six years ago. I know I would not be here if I hadn’t encountered the StrengthsFinder.

The cool thing about StrengthsFinder is that there are so many strengths, there are millions of combinations of them and you’re unlikely to come up with the same profile as someone else. I also like that it doesn’t try to prescribe you a job. It tells you who you are, but it doesn’t tell you what you should be doing — that part is up to you.

Downsides

I don’t want this to sound like a commercial for the StrengthsFinder so here are some of the things that are not so great about it:

• As mentioned above, you have to buy the book to take the inventory
• They only tell you your top five strengths — it would be nice to see all 34 ranked
• They claim your top five will never change, so they don’t let you take it again

I have actually obtained a second code to take it again and only my top two strengths were unchanged, so I don’t believe the last item.

The StrengthsFinder is based in Strengths Psychology, which is loosely related to the field of Positive Psychology, the brainchild of Martin Seligman. Dr. Seligman discusses similar ideas in his book, Authentic Happiness, but his list of traits are less business-oriented — kindness, humor, gratitude, etc. — and he claims that you can actually develop the traits you’re weaker in, and he has examples from his own life of how he developed his own sense of gratitude. My own experience inclines me to agree and I think the StrengthsFinder would be an even better tool if Gallup acknowledged this.

I should point out that the inventory has been upgraded and the book has been revised since I took it. It’s now called StrengthsFinder 2.0, and it’s possible they’ve addressed some of the issues I raise here.

Other Resources

If you check out the StrengthsFinder and you find it useful, you may also like the book that preceded it, First, Break All the Rules. In it, they discuss how to make workplaces better by helping people play to their strengths. Noel went through this book with his three direct reports before he shared Now, Discover Your Strengths with the rest of his team. I have used the “12 questions” outlined in the first chapter to evaluate every workplace I’ve been in since I read the book.

You can also read the short review I wrote about Now, Discover Your Strengths at LibraryThing.

Have you used the StrengthsFinder?  Did you find it useful, or did it tell you what you already knew?  What strengths did it identify for you? Do they seem accurate or inaccurate? Share your experience in the comments.

Friday, I’ll talk about some more things that helped me figure out who I am.