Discovering Strengths: A Vital Key to Future Leadership Success
If nothing else, the ever-changing business world reminds us that it is important to know how to use personal strengths. For employees and those emerging into leadership, self-awareness benefits and becomes imperative—determining how we move through roles, build relationships, and accomplish career objectives.
In this article, you will learn why it is so important to discover your strengths, the risks of not knowing them, and why using tools like the Core Strengths SDI 2.0 can help you get the most accurate and meaningful understanding of your personal strengths.
The Importance of Knowing Your Strengths
1. Enhanced Self-Esteem and Confidence
Knowing your strengths leads to greater self-awareness and self-worth. This understanding builds confidence and helps you stand out in a crowd. Knowing what you are best at allows you to make more informed decisions about which roles, goals, and objectives are "yours." Inherited capabilities, skills, and interests shape your talents and make you a competitive and capable candidate in today's and future job markets.
2. Career Satisfaction and Growth
When your role aligns with your strengths, you are more likely to feel satisfied and engaged at work. This alignment makes it easier to excel and opens doors to new, exciting opportunities within your company. Conversely, not knowing your strengths can lead to frustration, as you may find yourself in roles that do not leverage your abilities, delaying your career growth and happiness.
3. Strengths as Values and Assets
A person's strengths are a vital resource they can offer to an employer, not only their skills and abilities. When you recognize and apply them correctly, you can answer the question: What value do you bring to the team, stakeholders, and the organization to make your contribution indispensable?
The risks of overlooking your strengths
1. Unrealized Potential
Ignoring your strengths can lead to underperformance and dissatisfaction. You may struggle with tasks that do not match your interests and motivations, resulting in missed opportunities for recognition and further professional or career growth.
2. Increased Risk of Burnout
Continuously working against your strengths may lead to stress and, in the long run, to burnout. This role, tasks, and strengths mismatch might drain you, robbing you of energy and enthusiasm and negatively impacting your overall well-being.
Understanding and leveraging your strengths becomes critical to staying well and staying productive.
Leveraging Strengths with Core Strengths SDI 2.0
Among the many respected and widely used strengths assessment tools, our choice for more than 10 years and the one we recommend to our clients is the Core Strengths SDI 2.0 - Strengths Deployment Inventory.
More than 1000 clients have used and recommended SDI because it gives you the opportunity to not only see your personal strengths, but also radically change your view of your "weaknesses", giving you practical and easy-to-use tips to become a better leader, build trust and a collaborative environment to achieve better results through relationships.
The Core Strengths SDI 2.0 is invaluable for discovering and applying team members and leaders strengths. This assessment goes beyond identifying your talents and strengths; it explores your core motivations and how you deal with conflict. It also provides practical dos and don'ts for strengthening trustworthy relationships with your stakeholders, leaders, and employees in your daily interactions with others.
The Strength Deployment Inventory 2.0 (SDI 2.0) is an assessment of human motives and strengths. It stands on the foundation of practical application, scholarship, and research that began with Elias Porter's introduction of the SDI in 1971 and publication of Relationship Awareness Theory (Porter, 1976). The theory has roots in psychoanalysis (Fromm, 1947) and client-centered therapy (Porter, 1950; Rogers, 1951, 1961).
Today the SDI 2.0 offers four views of a person: a Motivational Value System, a Conflict Sequence, a Strengths Portrait, and an Overdone Strengths Portrait. These four views form a systems view of personality and productiveness at work.
Knowing your overdone strengths perceived by other as your “weeknesses”, for both leaders and employees, brings more opportunities to modify and choose more productive behaviors to achieve better results through relationships.
Application of Core Strengths SDI 2.0 in Daily Life
For Employees:
Better long-term relationships: Understanding your strengths allows you to tailor your listening and speaking styles to find keys to different stakeholders, which ultimately brings about more effective results through relationships in high-stakes situations.
Less harmful interpersonal conflicts: Being aware of one's own and others’ conflict triggers is good for preventing needless, unproductive conflict and ensuring harmonious work integration.
For Leaders:
Right People for the Right Roles: By knowing your team members' strengths, you can allocate jobs that play to their strengths, thus increasing their productivity and job satisfaction.
Building Trust: Knowing your team's strengths, what gives them self-worth, and how to reward them meaningfully will help you build trust and form sound relationships — a competitive advantage during company transformations.
Great Leadership: Successful leadership extends beyond technical skills; it requires a deep understanding of people. Relationships Intelligence gives you the insights to adjust your communication approach to suit each individual, coach your team effectively, minimizing misunderstandings.
By integrating these insights into your leadership style, you can move away from a rigid “take it or leave it” approach, fostering an environment where strong relationships underpin strong business performance.
Schedule your discovery call today and see the possibilities for leveraging your strengths to accomplish your career goals. Let's begin the journey to Identify your unique strengths and talents and get clarity on your professional and career goals.
