By Kimberly Hellekson, Dale Haupt, and Tom Ennis
While everyone is good at something, no one is good at everything (with the possible exception of George Clooney!). Understanding your behavioral strengths is crucial for personal and professional development—and hopefully ensuring that your skills are put to their best possible use. By identifying strengths, you can tailor your training and coaching efforts to enhance your individual skills effectively. This allows us to focus on areas where we naturally excel, making learning more engaging and productive. Leveraging our strengths fosters confidence.
Leverage what you do best
An essential part of growth—as a person and a professional—is to first identify your strengths and skillsets. By first understanding where you excel, you can nurture your strengths to be even more successful. Secondly, knowing where your strengths are and being able to talk about them honestly, is a skill in any situation that encompasses an interview. This may entail such situations as seeking entrance to a college or other formal organization, applying for a job at a company, or even being vetted by a client or stakeholder in the professional realm. The more you understand your strengths, and continue to develop them, the more successful you will ultimately be. (There’s even an art form to being honest about your weaknesses, but that’s another story.)
At some point in your education or professional development, you likely endured a class or training for something you knew you positively were unsuited for. Some people are naturally gifted at math, while others are more adept at analyzing classic books. While the goal of education is ultimately to make you a more well-rounded individual and a functioning “global citizen” of our increasingly interconnected world, in the professional realm, you will almost certainly be using only a few areas of knowledge taught in school. It’s sometimes said that expertise comes from natural ability combined with significant practice (the so-called 10,000 hours). Still, no matter how much training there is, you cannot force someone who is analytical to be a networker or someone who is introverted to be a dealmaker.
Get your people in the ‘right’ role
According to HR.com, nearly 3 out of 4 people in the United States are in the wrong job. That’s not only an astonishing number, it’s a gross misallocation of human resources (not to mention a recipe for unhappiness, individually and company-wide). Find A Rainmaker (FAR) aims to change all of that. FAR is a rapid behavioral assessment tool that, by asking the test-taker to select words that describe how they behave, identifies people who are born teammates (Creative Collaborator), natural inquisitors (Amazing Analyst), the dealmaker (Constant Closer), the social butterfly (Notable Networker), and the front-line face of an organization (Media Mogul). Once identified, these people can be placed in the proper role that naturally plays to their strengths.
Everyone has 10 minutes to spare
Ensuring that your team members are appropriately situated to make the best use of their skills is important. Knowing where your team members’ strengths lie, you can continue to nurture them individually and collectively. Not only will this help the organization, but it will also lead to significant new potential for revenue generation by getting your people into the right roles.
The behavioral survey takes only 10 minutes—that’s not enough time to invest in a tool that can successfully “make it rain” for your organization. The long-term benefits for your organization—individually and collectively—will be worth so many times that initial investment.