How to Us StrengthFinders to Grow Your Business

You may be familiar with Gallup’s international bestseller, “Strengthfinder 2.0,” which has been helping professionals not only identify their strengths in the workplace but also how to further develop them. Not surprising, Gallup scientists have also been studying leadership and how a strengths approach to management can fuel the success of businesses.

The data shows that organizations that work from the strength of their people are more profitable, productive, and have a higher level of employee engagement.  A company is a living, breathing organism - it has a personality all its own which is made up of the people inside the company.  This gives you your competitive advantage - or holds you back and gets in the way of growth.

How might you approach growing your small business with a strengths-based approach?

Here are five simple, practical tips from Gallup to get you started:

• Take the assessment to learn your own strengths,  (i.e., the themes that are your natural strengths). *It is like a poker hand - Five Card Stud - develop your best cards and know when to use the ones that will win this hand!
• When you take the assessment, you will receive action points of how to leverage your strengths - more is not better.  Start with the top five and practice!
• When you see your strengths listed, sometimes we don't believe them.  We cause conflict for ourselves and others when we try to do something that is not our natural strength.  Consequently, we cause problems for ourselves and out team.  If we practice using our strengths we will actually increase our chances of success.
• Put your strengths on a matrix with other team members to see how your company is stacked for winning contracts and recruiting additional team members.
• Encourage everyone in your company to identify their strengths, and create jobs/task and teams that lean into the strengths of everyone or give them an opportunity to develop the strengths they don't use so often. 

One of the exercises Gallup uses to help you see how much easier it is to lean into your strengths is to write a sentence three times with your dominant hand. How does it look, and now write the same sentence with your left hand, how easy was it to do? This is to show how much easier it is and how much less time it takes when we use our natural selves than trying to do something that might be different thinking we are developing a weakness.  It really doesn't work that way.  Focus and grow your strengths. 

We use StrengthFinders with other assessment tools to help us really hone in on how do we lean into our natural abilities, capabilities, and personal interest to grow, develop, and foster a positive culture for our company. 

We grow people from their strengths, not from their weaknesses.  We build strategies based on the strengths of the company, which makes the strategy easier to implement and execute.  We are going with the grain, not against it or trying to be something we are not.