Strengths Finder Exercise

I recently completed Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment for my leadership team. Before completing the assessment, I thought that leaders should foster strengths in all areas of leadership. Any weakness should be sought after and made into a strength. However, after the assessment, I understand that people have inherent strengths that they should use to offset their weakness. Further, school leaders should create teams of people who have strengths different from their own. I see myself differently after the assessment. Before, I often got trapped in framing myself with my weaknesses or faults. By viewing myself through my strengths I feel empowered and better-equipped to take on specific tasks that cater to those strengths. My strengths were futuristic, strategic, individualizer, learner, and responsibility. I am both creative, but efficient in completing tasks. I am constantly seeking new, better practices and feel a responsibility to do the work that I’ve made a career. Learning these strengths helped me see what I bring to the table and easily identify what aspects I should look for when hiring teammates. The exercise taught me that to become a better leader I must complete two tasks. First, I must study and recognize the skills I possess. I must understand how those strengths affect my views on problems and others. I must try to accept these as my strengths and recognize them in my work. Second, I must try to foster a team with unique, varied strengths. Other strengths will not offset mine or fully account for my “deficits”, but they will help me build a diverse team that enjoys different tasks and seeks different things from the outcome of our school. For example, if I want to overhaul school curriculum I would love to visualize the end game. Hopefully, there would be a detail-oriented person on my team who prefers creating the new models and a teammate that prefers rallying the team behind these changes. All of those are separate, but positive contributions to an end goal that my school could benefit from. Rath, T. (2007). StrengthsFinder 2.0. New York: Gallup Press.