Now, Discover Your Strengths

Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons. --Howard Rothman

Product Description
Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.

Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules, and Donald O. Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research & Education Center, have created a revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. At the heart of the book is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant "themes" with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success. In developing this program, Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with more than two million individuals to help readers learn how to focus and perfect these themes.

So how does it work? This book contains a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This Web-based interview analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes -- such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic, or Strategic -- you lead with, the book will show you how to leverage them for powerful results at three levels: for your own development, for your success as a manager, and for the success of your organization.

With accessible and profound insights on how to turn talents into strengths, and with the immediate on-line feedback of StrengthsFinder at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and useful business books ever written.

This book was also the first book that I've read that included an on-line component. The on-line test took me about 30 min to complete and gave me my top 5 strengths. After reading the detailed descriptions in the book, I believe the test correctly hit 4 out of 5 with the 5th one a close runner-up.

STRENGTHS: The book is easy to read and full of examples. I found the concepts and content very well thought out and very effective at changing my thinking.

WEAKNESSES: I note some weaknesses, but they were at most annoying and not significant enough to prevent me from enjoying or highly recommending the book. First, as in the "First" book, no index. Second, while the book has lots of examples, a number seemed to be thrown in to touch popular or emotional topics rather than being solid support for the specific topic being discussed.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK: The book is probably best suited to professionals and knowledge workers with an interest in better understanding themselves and those around them. If you're interested in increasing your own effectiveness and the effectiveness of your relationships with others this book is for you.

ALSO CONSIDER: Of course, "First Break All the Rules" by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman [either before or after this book]. "The Effective Executive" by Peter F. Drucker.


Let Well-Established, Good Habits Take You Forward!   January 1, 2001
Donald Mitchell (Boston)
61 out of 67 found this review helpful

This book represents three very ambitious efforts. One, it argues for a new management paradigm that builds from the psychological make-up of each person in the workplace to create the most effective combination of people and tasks. Two, the book presents a new psychological mapping scheme to capture those areas where a person will display "consistent near perfect performance in an activity." Three, the book connects you to a self-diagnosis tool that you can use on-line to see yourself in the perspective of the new mapping scheme. Most books would settle for pursing just one these goals. My hat is off to the authors for their ambition!

The concept of building companies around "desirable" pyschological profiles has been in application for some time. The Walt Disney organization uses this approach to locate people who will enjoy working in their company, and to match the person to the task they will be most focused on. More and more companies are experimenting with this approach. The evidence is that it works.

So the first argument simply takes that experience one step further by formalizing it a bit. The book has many persuasive examples of how people usually do not have jobs that use their best talents. This provides another perspective on the Peter Principle. So far so good.

Next, 34 patterns of mental habits are described based on millions of interviews over 25 years. These include achiever, activator, adaptability, analytical, arranger, belief, command, communication, competition, connectedness, context, deliberative, developer, discipline, empathy, fairness, focus, futuristic, harmony, ideation, inclusiveness, individualization, input, intellection, learner, maximizer, positivity, relator, responsibility, restorative, self-assurance, significance, strategic, and woo. You need to see the descriptions to understand what these patterns reflect.

The argument is that these labels capture patterns of thinking habits that condition behavior in any situation. I find it difficult to relate to all of the patterns because there are so many. Also, without knowing what patterns work well in a particular job, I wasn't sure how relevant they are. Connection of patterns to success needs to be shown as cause and effect in a given company before this will be totally useful.

Small companies may not be able to use this tool very well because they will never have enough people doing the same task to figure out which profile is best. Everyone working in that role may have a very inappropriate profile. You will just be picking the best of a poorly-fitting lot if you select around one of them.

Then, I took the personality test on-line. There were no surprises there for me in my top 5 patterns. I also suspect that there would be no surprises for you in putting me into these categories. You would probably have pegged me as an achiever, learner, relator, focus, input person from the fact that I read so many nonfiction books, write so many book reviews, and keep books and notes everywhere (just in case I might need them again). On the relator front, if you had noticed who I like to work with and how I work with them, you would have spotted me in a few days.

However, my actual job competence is a lot different from this. Most clients tell me that they find me most helpful to them when exposing them to new perspectives on their work that allow them to make faster progress. So, I was left wondering if the tool is strong enough to do the task of making people most effective in their work without more help. Someone might develop or be born with a great talent that has little to do with the psychological profile of how she or he likes to spend their time.

To state the opposite proposition to the ones in the book, complexity science would suggest that it is a mistake to overly organize the workplace in any way. You should have as much diversity as possible. When we leave lots of room for open space and time, people will self-organize outstanding solutions. Having people focused on tasks they love might make them less aware of what else needs to be done. Behavioral scientists would argue that learning continues throughout life, and that major new habits can be formed at any time. Old dogs can learn new tricks. Why cannot new psychological mindsets be learned as well. I suspect that they can. These kinds of counter-observations were not addressed in the book, and it would have been helpful to me if they had been.

So while I was impressed by the concept that the "great organization must not only accommodate the fact each is different; it must capitalize on these differences," I wasn't sure that the authors have the best method to get there yet.

I do recommend that you read the book and consider its messages. I suspect that its application will work best in focusing people on tasks that require great persistence and consistency in order to be effective. I am less clear on how well it will work to help people accomplish more in creative tasks. Time will tell.

I suggest that you take the test and discuss your results with someone else who has also taken the test. Ask each other what insights you got from your own results and from hearing the other person's results. That discussion should start to help you imagine ways to use these insights more effectively.

May you always "derive intrinsic satisfaction" from the activities you do!


Very refreshing, decent social science   December 1, 2002
econdude (Omaha, NE United States)
20 out of 21 found this review helpful

The book's strength, to turn the tables a bit, is not in its length (less than average amount of words per page, about 250 pages), not in its style (written at a relatively low level), and not in its technical explanations (very little justification and explanation for the theories it proposes). The strength of the book is how it introduces a new vocabulary for identifying an individual's potential strengths and talents.

The reader must go to a web site and take an assessment test rather early in the book. After the reader takes the test, Buckingham and Clifton work at unraveling old ways of looking at performance and standard practices. For example, they dare to suggest that the paradigm of improving a person's weaknesses as a strategy to implement optimum performance on the job or elsewhere is faulty. You may disagree, and you may find the test useless if you take it. In my instance, the test clearly verfied my areas of talent. So I gave the book five stars, because it's an amazing groundbreaking book - we now have a way to identify and talk about 34 different groups of human talents - and I don't care how Gallup, Buckingham, and Clifton arrived at the results they did if the results are clearly true, as in my case.

Now, Discover Your Strengths doesn't tell you how to find a career based on your top five strengths. It's a very personal decision, and also impractical, given that about 33 million combinations of five exist. Buckingham and Clifton give examples of successful people and what they chose as careers, which utilize some combination of their strengths, and other useful suggestions, such as strategies to mitigate weaknesses.

Highly recommended. I never would have known any of this had someone not suggested I read the book, and now a whole new way of looking at myself and the world is open to me. econ


Super   September 3, 2001
Susan G. Dunn (San Antonio, TX United States)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

I'm a coach -- personal, business and EQ -- and I find this book to be an invaluable tool in my practice. The nomenclature for the strengths is wonderful, and makes sense. As a helping professional, I can generally see what's going on with a client, but can't see the forest for the trees, and wasn't that easily able to describe my own strengths. Taking the test myself was most illuminating and I found out, with some feedback, that I wasn't really portraying my stengths in relations with others. I immediately compared it with the profile of someone I was working with, and it made it clear to us both the one area in which we were 'clashing'. Tension eased as we saw each other for what we were, and it's been smooth sailing. It's a shortcut to understand the person you're managing, relating to, living with, or working with. No single assessment is going to explain a complex living being, but this one will put together a lot of pieces for you and for your client, employee or S.O. The book is very easy to read; clear, well written and informative. Yes, we DID need words for strengths. It's time we quit focusing on "weaknesses". Everyone has them, but everyone also has strengths, and, as the authors say, your best chance at attaining excellence is by increasing your strengths, not shoring up your weaknesses, and it's also a much surer path to contentment.


Fascinating Skills Inventory - Management , Self Assessment   February 6, 2002
22 out of 25 found this review helpful

"First, Break All the Rules" left my wife and me asking, "How do you learn your strengths?" While buying a copy of "First..." for my boss, I found "Now, Discover Your Strengths."

The book is fascinating. The concept of locating and concentrating on using strengths (your own and your employees') rather than fixing their weaknesses is well layed out.

Strengths are talents, innate or developed tendencies and abilities which have, through experience, education or training been honed to a level placing the possessor in rarified air in this regard.

The book and tape give you a code which serves as a password to take an online test to discover your top 5 strengths of 34 identified by the Gallup Organization. I would guess three will not really surprise you, two will send you diving back into the book to read more about them.

By the way, my wife called the number on the StrengthFinders Website and explained that I bought the book and she, too, would like to take the test. The phone representative gave her a new code, and she took the test.

...

The Talents and Strengths share similarities to some of the elements of the "Inner Self" of "Follow your Bliss" or the "Authentic Self" of Dr. Phil McGraw's "Self Matters." When you find yourself learning a skill with remarkable ease and speed, or doing all the recommended reading in a course during the first week, these are clues. You likely have an affinity for the subject.

Others might be a burning desire to please, to help, to inform, to relate and more.

The business goal is to put the person with the strength in the position that uses it. Then to use the techniques of Great Managers to guide them to brilliance. I recommend both "First" and "Now."