Lead Like You or Lose: Strengths Success Story
(Name and personally identifiable details changed have been changed.)
Emma was exhausted. A seasoned leader with more than 30 years of experience in the corporate world, this was day 5 of her new job. Like so many highly talented professionals over the past 2 years, Emma made a brave career decision, and found herself in a brand new place, trading in her dry-clean only board room blouse for a trendy white hoodie, where she showed up to a new job virtually, where her two pandemic puppies played at her feet while she plugged in a new laptop from her kitchen bar.
Starting a new job is a swirling emotional experience for most, and while Emma put on a calm face for our session, I felt something was brewing below the surface. “Honestly?,” she leaned in, “I keep wondering if I made a horrible mistake.”
By the end of our session, Emma realized she had, in fact, made a horrible mistake. But it wasn’t the one she forecasted. Her mistake wasn’t joining a new bustling tech company. It wasn’t saying yes to the career-defining leadership position. It wasn’t leaving behind the promise of eventual promotion at her former Fortune 100 company. Her mistake was thinking she could go about her onboarding process like a textbook checklist.
Emma is a people person. Her CliftonStrengths pack a heavy dose of Relationship Building talent. Strengths like Empathy, Relator, Individualization and Developer blend fluidly with the Strategic Thinking strengths of Futuristic and Input. She is deeply loyal, preferring longevity of relationships over quick connection. She thinks in terms of what can be, and constantly soaks in information to feed that future utility. She dismisses sweeping generalities, quickly noticing what is unique and promising about a team, a person, or a problem. She does not see the world through bullet points. She makes lists only to get her ideas out, but tends to lose them once the writing is done. In her previous role, her favorite thought partners were those who inspired her through big brainstorms, held her secrets, and fed her imagination with additional perspectives. She knew part of her job as a leader was to summarize the action that had been taken, so she toughed it out and created the reports and project management analysis that she had to do, but hoped this new world would have less of what she groaned and called, “admin stuff.”
After she disclosed the fear that she had mis-stepped into this new position, I asked her to tell me about her process for onboarding. First, she described her company’s official onboarding plans, so I pushed a bit harder. “I get that. But what are you doing to feel settled?” She looked at her calendar. She looked at her list. In a stale voice, she read off five tasks.
I stayed quiet, listening for the unsaid.
“What’s wrong?,” she asked?
“Nothing is wrong,” I suggested, “but everything could be better.”
Emma had been going about her first days in precisely the opposite way that her strengths suggested she would succeed. Like many of us, she assumed there was a right way to go about a challenge, in this case—onboarding to a new job. You get the list, you do the list. But Emma isn’t inspired by lists. If given no playbook, no judgement, and every possible pathway to solve a problem, lists wouldn’t even be on her radar of ways to proceed.
Together we used the clues we could take from her CliftonStrengths profile to inform the fastest, easiest, and most enjoyable way for her to meet her goal of feeling settled into the new job. We looked for what her Strengths hungered for. We studied times in her past that she never thought would be connected to this solution, and we defined the themes. Then we designed a custom way for her readjust her approach, one that was real and important enough to put into action within hours.
Emma showed up on day 6 as a different leader. We helped her change how she introduced herself to her team. She asked what her Strengths were truly curious about—personal questions, goals for the future, specialties they dream of accomplishing. She stayed quiet in meetings, listening for cues to how people build trust and connection, rather than who does what and by when. She took notes on the subtle differences between her team members, ways they’d each like to be recognized, and what was meaningful about their home lives.
Today Emma has been with her organization just over six months, and tells me this is the fastest a place has ever felt like home.
When you think you’re doing it wrong, you probably are. Your Strengths are a research-based way to reduce the guess work on ways to proceed. They’ll inform what you’re hungry for so you can make sure to feed yourself the fuel you most need.
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In this example, you probably noticed I used two of Gallup’s Leadership Domains titles, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking. The others are Influencing and Executing. No one needs to be well-rounded. Strengths are not about diluting your brilliance, but investing further into it.
