Using Gallup Strengths to Lead During a Crisis
Loriana Sekarski
Loriana Sekarski is the founder and president of BONSAI, a consulting company that transforms leaders (and businesses) into the best version of themselves. Outside of BONSAI, Loriana serves as an adjunct professor at Washington University's graduate student program. Additionally, she's fine-tuning her passion project, TakeFlight, a program that addresses domestic abuse within the Christian community.
Leading and managing a crisis is never easy, and the current pandemic of COVID-19 is a level of crisis that most of us have never seen before. We’re all adjusting to rapid changes to our daily routines, and it certainly has an impact on ministry.
The Gallup strengths are a powerful tool in any leader’s toolbox for leading and managing during a crisis. No matter what your role is, people are looking to you for leadership and stability during a challenging time. Knowing and using your strengths can help.
By focusing on our strengths as individuals and as teams, we can improve our outcomes. When we assign duties that come naturally to people, it increases their engagement and enjoyment, which is immensely helpful during a stressful time.
If you already know about Gallup’s strengths, go here to get a tool to help you lead your team through this crisis. It will give you insights on how to aim the different strengths of your team members at your challenges and the work ahead of you.
If you don’t know or haven’t heard about Gallup’s strengths, let me introduce this tool to you. One executive I work with says it’s “incredibly powerful because knowledge is power.” Using it well will change how you live, lead, and work in a way that is more effective, enjoyable, and fruitful. It can even impact how you do Organic Outreach (a future article). Like any tool, not using it or not knowing how to do so renders it useless.
Gallup, the research organization that also does public opinion polling, has conducted extensive research on what makes people successful. Several decades ago, they discovered that when people work in the way they were designed and focus on what comes naturally to them (their strengths), their performance is exceptional.
If you invest in developing your strengths, your performance will improve dramatically. This approach is the opposite of what we typically focus on during performance evaluations, which is investing time in fixing weaknesses and trying to get better at something often hard to budge. In focusing on developing our strengths, we don’t ignore weaknesses but rather address them through the lens of our strengths.
Gallup has identified 34 talent themes, which are clusters of behaviors, thoughts, or actions to describe how we think and act. When we get to use our top 10 talent themes, called strengths, we get near-perfect performance every time—if those strengths are fully developed. It’s like hitting your sweet spot every time playing tennis, or getting that beautiful long, straight drive when you golf. In contrast, trying to use your lowest six talent themes feels like driving from the tee with a putter—it’s painful, and the results aren’t very good.
Let’s look at an example to drive this home. My top strengths are Activator, Futuristic, Relator, Woo, and Belief. What does this mean? It means I am always looking forward to where things are headed (Futuristic), identifying our next steps to get moving (Activator), wanting to bring people with me (Woo), and wanting to establish meaningful relationships with those people (Relator). And, I only do this if it all aligns with my unchanging core values (Belief).
If I only had Futuristic in my top 10 and let’s say Activator was 30, I might just sit and enjoy visioning without the need to take any steps to get there. If Context were higher in my strengths, I would want time to look back at where I’ve been and get all the pieces in place before moving forward. But because Activator is a top strength for me and Context is 30, I have the momentum to move forward without looking back. It’s about action with others to get us where we need to go!
Why is this information useful? Because it tells me:
- How I am at my best in a situation, so I intentionally aim my strengths at solving issues, which means higher performance.
- What problems and situations I thrive in, so that I step into those situations.
- What situations I am at my worst in, so I can step aside and let others lead.
- Who else I need on my team to make up for strengths I don’t even think about.
- How I might be assuming the wrong thing because of my strength lens. (For example, with Woo, reaching out to neighbors for outreach sounds fun to me, but without Woo, others might experience anxiety in doing so.)
- How I can better manage myself and increase self-awareness, which increases emotional intelligence.
As a leader, knowing the strengths of my team can tell me:
- Who will be better than me at doing certain work and will even enjoy that work?
- Who to delegate specific tasks to and who shouldn’t be assigned certain tasks. (Remember the painful example of trying to drive with a putter!)
- Who to pair together on projects so their combined strengths become superpowers.
- Where we might be deficient as a team so we can plan accordingly.
This tool is so helpful because it is incredibly accurate and also complex. There are 33 million combinations of the top five strengths alone. And strengths have dynamics between them, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes countering each other. And yet, with the Gallup tools on their website, you will have enough information to start shifting your performance and that of your team (and using the crisis tool that we developed).
If you want to know your strengths and start on a path to using them better, go to Gallup and purchase the CliftonStrengths 34 assessment. (While the Top 5 assessment is a lower cost, you will only get partial information, so you are wasting $19 versus investing $49. The full 34 assessment is worth the investment!)
Once you get your results, utilize the plethora of information available on your Gallup dashboard to guide your strengths journey. This will help you not only weather the current crisis but also better lead your Organic Outreach effort.
