045: Dean Jones - Develop and Lead with Your Strengths

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective, and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now, and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill g. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business coach, Bill Gallagher. We're talking about strengths today, how to develop your strengths, how to work and lead from strengths. This is such a fabulous, liberating conversation. I'm talking with one of my favorite people in the world, Dean Jones. Dean is the talent development architect for Gallup and he's a longtime personal friend and mentor. So there was a moment in my life where my life started to shift, right. I'd had some business success and I was starting to turn the corner and I had this insight that my life was going to be about making a difference. And then I was in a workshop that Dean was leading. Dean walked to the front of the room and I met him for the first time as he introduced himself. And I was like, okay, that guy's making a difference for a big group of people. And he just pouring his heart and soul into it. And I want to be that sort of guy. And so I just love having you on the show. Thanks for being here.

It's such a treat. Thank you so much for inviting me, Bill.

So a lot of who I am today as a coach and stuff, really, I've learned and developed in myself, but through, through your example and through your leadership. So you're now the talent development of architect at Gallup?

Yeah, yeah.

And we're going to talk about the CliftonStrengths and what it makes available for people and how you use it. And it's just an extraordinary tool. We use it with our clients, especially in the beginning, but then we loop back on it frequently. But as we start onboarding a new leadership team, we deploy the strengths. We'll talk more about that later. But so let's get into it a little bit. Tell Us about the, you know, how do you come to be here? Why does this matter to you?

That's great. You know, it's funny you're asking me this. I have been at Gallup now for 11 years, and so I don't actually think that much about how I got here. I wake up surprised some days, but I don't spend too much time thinking about how I got there. But I had. Immediately prior to Gallup, I had had a job where actually I started a business with two other guys. And we, We. It's an interesting thing mostly in my career, my background, I was a sales and marketing executive. And I spent the bulk of my career doing that. I'd gone to business school and I got real interested in startup companies and like that. And literally, I literally thought most of my career was gonna be about sales and marketing. At the same time, I had this crazy interest since my mid-20s in personal development. I got really interested in human development, how people develop, how their identity forms, how they learn and how they. And had spent as, you know, spent a lot of time as sort of an advocation of mine in adult learning, teaching people. And I had, for many years led a community leadership program and was just passionate about learning. And immediately prior to joining Gallup, I met a guy who had licensed some intellectual property and started to put investors together to put together a training company. And he. He approached me. I actually worked on the business plan a little bit and then came back to me when he had. He'd gotten some funding and was ready to go get his next round of funding and asked me if I'd be interested in joining. And at first I wasn't so sure. And then what happened for me is it really became both of my passions together, learning and business. And we did that for about three and a half years. We grew the company, we sold the company, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I had an agreement that I was going to stay on with the company for nine months. And I was trying to decide was I going to stay on for longer than that or what was I going to do. And my sister is an executive recruiter. And she said. I was talking to her and I said, gosh, what do you think I should do? She said, you should check out this company, Gallup. They're really, really smart people and they're very intense, and I think you would fit in perfectly. So I ended up. I went through their whole. Gallup's whole talent assessment process and ended up joining Gallup in San Francisco. And after kind of a lifetime, really all my adult life of really looking at doing a lot of different kinds of development opportunities, I got exposed to strengths. And I will tell you, it was just life changing for me. For me, it filled in some of the equations around why people do what they do. For many years I had been training people to either lead programs or be leaders in their community or to impact others lives. And some people really got it and some people just didn't. Some people, it was just super intuitive for them and they could walk to the front of a course room and just impact people in a way that you just couldn't believe. And other people, no matter what you did or what you taught them, they just weren't able to do that. And really when I started to really dig into the work behind strengths and really understand kind of the nature of talent, it explained so much for me. And it really. Now what's so exciting in the work that I do with organizations all over the world as I kind of work with our consultants and our clients, is to help them understand really how talent is really the catalyst for moving their business forward in significant ways. That's really how I got into it, as you can tell. Super passionate about it.

You know, here's the thing. I hear you started developing yourself and then developing other people and you have this love for people and for bringing out the very best in people. Right. And I just hear that strengths gave you an access to more easily, rapidly developing the unique strength of each person. Right. And their particular thing. And I think it's really related. You know, when we start coaching a company and we start working with a group of leaders, we do begin with the why. Right. In particular, and very much in the world of Simon Sinek, start with why, where. You know, Simon's been a speaker at our summits and very much around our work. So we're very much interested in the why of the business, the difference it makes as distinct from a vision or a mission statement. Just the pure why, like what lights you up? Where's the emotional center of it? And when that's married to any personal why, which very, very few executives or leaders have a clear expression of the why of their life. You know, like, what's the purpose of my life?

But.

And often in our work, they end up discovering that. But when we find a close connection between a life purpose and a business purpose, in a leadership team, there's real power. That's the emotional center, that's the, you know, where actions derived from that kind of deep brain early primitive brain stuff. But then comes like how so my. So I'll share with you my strengths, right? So ideation, strategic communicator, activator and command, right? Or my, my talent themes. So. And I'm very clear on all aspect, the good and the bad of each of them or the world that is created and how they play. And we were talking earlier about some of that, but that doesn't in itself give me any fulfillment.

Right, right. I want to go back to this why piece because I think it's so important. I think that one of the things that people get when they really understand not just their Strengths, but their CliftonStrengths talent themes, when people really understand their own talent themes, it really gives them a sense of what am I built for? What am I called? What ultimately am I called to do? It's an interesting thing. And for most of us, this notion of calling for some people, people answer that as like a religious question or a spiritual question, but oftentimes when you're engaged in it as a spiritual question, it's not like it's sort of why humanity or why are we put on this earth versus why me? You know, what is it about me that I am called to do? What am I built for? Right? And the more you can unlock your own talent, the more you unlock your own greatness. I mean, it sounds like a motivational speech, but you really know what you're built for and what you're not built for. You really start to understand who you are. You know, when I was growing up, it's so funny, I read, used to read all these books, you know, Horatio Alger books and you know, the Hardy Boys and all this nonsense, right? And it was all about these, you know, you'd grow up and there's this notion that you were going to grow up and be this well rounded person, right? So you're going to be athletic and smart and capable and honest and good, you know, and all that kind of stuff. Here's the thing that you realize as you grow up is that really those. Being a well rounded person is not all it's cracked up to be. What that makes you is average. It doesn't make you great. That really excellence and particularly leadership comes from really unlocking what is it distinctly that makes you great. And it's not going to be everything. It's really understanding that piece.

Our friend and past guest and another speaker in our world is Dave Rendell and his book Freak Factor is very much in the same world. Dave's, you know Freakishly tall guy with unusual talents and wears a lot of pink and he's hella funny, but he's all about, look, stop trying to blend in and just be your. Let your freak flag fly. Figure out what makes you special and unique and like that.

So, yeah, and it's so important that you, I think that you understand that everything around strengths really started with Dr. Don Clifton. Don Clifton was a guy, he's a really interesting guy. He had been In World War II, he'd been a bomber in World War II. And he came back from the war and literally had this kind of burden that. He had this kind of burden that he had done so much damage during the war that he needed to do something to contribute sort of an equivalent amount to humanity. He became an academic and a researcher and ultimately a business person. Right. He had his 50 year career really as a researcher, really researching, as a psychologist, really researching sort of the nature of what is the access to excellence. What was really unique and powerful about him was that at the time that he started working as a psychologist, mostly psychology still as a field was relatively new. And what people were interested in, particularly in the popular culture, but also among psychologists, is what made someone abnormal. So what made somebody a freak or a deviant. The whole field of psychology was sort of oriented around what made someone different, right. Or perverse or abnormal. Right. And his. It was really breakthrough thinking. We look back at it now and it seems very in tune with our times. But at the time it was very, very different.

No, there was like that whole period of Freud and all that, like, let's understand your neuroses, right? Let's dig into your dreams and figure out what's wrong with you.

Right, Right. Exactly. How are you maladjusted? Right. And Don said, let's study what's right with people. And in fact, this is, I think probably the most misunderstood aspect of strengths is I think for many people, they do the assessment and it's almost like they feel like it's a horoscope. Like it's like, you know, like, who am I? I'm a Gemini and I like long walks on the beach. No, it's that. That what strengths, and particularly Clifton's strengths came out of was a study of excellence. It really started with Dr. Clifton saying, like, what are the different talents that lead to greatness, to lead to excellence? His assertion, and it was funny, there are two fundamental assertions that he had. One was that you could actually identify and measure and harness talent, that you were able, you could take something as ephemeral as talent and be able to identify it and measure it and develop it over time. The other was, and it's really interesting, I think we look back on this now, is that he said talent is, and maybe more important than intelligence with regard to success. That at the time, mostly that how people thought about success was if you were smarter, if you had a higher iq, you know, what psychologists now call general mental ability, that if you had a higher iq, you would end up being more successful. And in fact, he said that in fact, it's not just iq, it's not just intelligence that really it's talent and your talent, your aptitude around that.

Well, I think many of us have seen an awful lot of entrepreneurs, highly successful people who aren't always intellectually brilliant, who wouldn't necessarily have a high iq, but who are highly effective at getting things done, at advocating, at pushing, or they may come at it from a variety of different places, either from being very persuasive or dominant or strategic or whatever, but it's not necessarily. And we know lots of really brilliant people sitting around a coffee shop talking about what's wrong with the world.

Right, right.

If only somebody gave them the power that things would be different.

Yeah. It doesn't diminish their intelligence, but in terms of performance and success, that it's really more about talent and the alignment of your talent to performance, that really makes a difference, probably. So the assessment that Dr. Clifton ended up building and that the other thing.

Just to tie into people. So lots of people are going to be very familiar with another name Maslow. And I think that this body or this way of thinking of let's figure out where high performance comes from. Let's look at the most highly functioning people and figure out what's right with people. And Maslow Network is really popular, especially in Western business. And I think that we can see the symmetry. So if that's something that you believe in and ascribe to, you'll hear the relationship in the work of the strengths.

Yeah. And in fact, we know that Strengths is tied to your point. Maslow's work, the Hierarchy of Needs piece, is probably more closely tied to the engagement work that we do. As we think about engagement strengths, definitely a catalyst for that. The piece that I think is important for people to understand is that it really comes from this understanding of what is your unique talent. And the CliftonStrengths assessment is designed to assess talent themes. There's 34 talent themes that when you do the assessment, there are 34 talent themes it gives you a forced ranking of the most by intensity of the most dominant talent theme that you have down to the 34th. What it allows you to be able to do is to really start to understand. We know that something like 60 to 70% of your behavior is explained by your top five themes, and another 90% of your behavior is explained by the top 10 or 12 themes. So we can look at that. The other thing that is unique is when you stack the cliftonstrengths, or sometimes in the past we've called it the cliftonstrengths finder. If we stack that up against other assessments and we've talked about this Myers Briggs disc. One of the things that's unique about CliftonStrengths is that it's a highly validated assessment and there's a lot of transparency around the validation and there's ongoing validation. We just released at Gallup our meta analysis, which is essentially our analysis of all the work that we do around strengths to be able to look at what is the range of benefit, what are the benefits that can be extrapolated from the work that we do so that anybody could say, what are those generalizable benefits that somebody would. Would accrue from doing strengths? So when you do the assessment, there's 34 themes, there's a force ranking, and it's really an opportunity for people to start to understand, gosh, what are those natural patterns of behavior? What are those natural ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that I have that I can capitalize on to really increase the work that I do? My performance might give me access really to excellence. And that's really ultimately the benefit. There's.

Well, so. And then just to reinforce because not everybody's familiar with it. So you, if you're not familiar, the. If you go to Gallup Strength center, we'll remind you of that later. But. And you take the assessment, you, depending on how much you pay, you get either the full results or you get a partial. So you get your top five, or you get your full 34 sequence and you get the related things from it that talk to you about it. But those Instead of getting four letters or 16 pair arrangement types, you get 34 words, highly descriptive words. So I said at the opening, right, I'm ideation strategic communicator activation and command. And that's a really rich picture. It's very different than saying I'm high di. Right. And low sc. I now have a clearer picture. And if I think about my typical day, whatever I'm like in the shower, on my run, on my drive into work, I'm filled with ideas. And then as I get closer to the office, I'm formulating the way to accomplish those ideas. There's the strategic coming in and then communicate errors as soon as I walk in, I talk to people in the office or even I pick up the phone on the way, I'm throwing those ideas out, hey, here's this idea I had and here's how we're going to do it like that. And then activator is all about getting started, right? So I'm like, okay, now we're going to get going. And then command is actually taking charge when either things are broken down or people don't know what to do or like that kind of thing. Now that person, right, me, yes, is highly disruptive to an operating scaling environment. I'm a great innovator, startup, turnaround, fixer, like that. But I'm a bad operations person now. You know, when we interview people, especially people, you know, 40 and below and we interview people for jobs, everybody is a self starting, communicator, team player, entrepreneurial mind. Like you know, it's crap. And they don't walk in like I would at 50 if I was applying for a job and say, listen, if you hire me to run the operation, you will have no company in two years. If you need me to fix something or launch something, I'm your guy.

I'm your guy, right?

And I think about like now not only how I work as a coach, but the way that I work as a coach is really ideally suited to stuff. I can go away, have ideas about how to fix the situation, but if I'm not there doing it day to day, and you are and the leadership team is. And I also know that like most great scaling leaders, we need an innovator and then we need an operator, an executor and a visionary. So we need the counterplay of that. And when we think about the balancing. So you're starting to talk about how do you get this rich picture now. But then not only do we have 34 things, but then there's some groupings, right? There's influencing and there's strategic and there's relationship relating and then, and then there's. I'm blanking.

Execution.

Execution, right? Yeah, the one I'm not.

Right?

So I'm high influence, high strategic, low relationship. And so like I know that my bottom 34, right. Some would call those weaknesses. Those are the things I don't care about. I don't value I don't enjoy. They're like kumbaya relationship. They're like woo. Now my wife has woo winning others over, right? Yeah, she's very much so. When she leaves a party, right, she has to then go back around to everyone and touch them all. And a whole other 5, 10 minute conversation starts as she works her way back out of the party because she can't go and say, well, I left without saying goodbye. I can stand at the door and go, good night everyone.

And be out.

The door in 30 seconds.

I'm done. I think. So I want to go back to this thing about diversity, I think, and particularly how this works on teams because I think that'll be, that's a particular relevance. One of the things about, you know, like if you do Myers Briggs, you're one of 16 types and one of the things you notice when you work with teams is everybody wants to be one type. You know, everybody's like, I'm an entj or you're oh, you're the good type.

That's a good one.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm in charge.

Everybody's like, everybody wants to be one of them, depending on what it is. Right. The thing about CliftonStrengths is it captures the diversity of the population. So the likelihood of you having the same top five in the same order as another human being is one in 33 million. So yeah, I mean, so it captures the diversity of the population, right? Yeah. So I'm not the likelihood that you and I are going to have the top five. One of 33 million. It also, and this is what's so powerful on teams is it gives us a common language to be able to talk about individual differences. So a lot of times when we're going to navigate individual differences, whether it's because we're trying to collaborate or we're trying to work out a conflict, oftentimes the language becomes a value based language. I'm better than you are because I do this, you're better than me because you do that. And as opposed to having a common language that helps us be able to say, hey, I do this, this is the contribution that I am. You do that, that's the contribution that you are. And part of it is we know inside those talent themes there are assets around that and there's things to manage and part of just like anything in life, but it gives us access to those in a way that's really powerful. One of the things I think is so fascinating for people when they do CliftonStrengths is some of the things that they think are really negative qualities are actually. They can see in the light of Crifton. Strengths are really their contribution. I'm activator number one, right? So activator is a talent theme where you're very comfortable, you want to move to action all the time, and you're very comfortable taking ideas and translating them into action. It creates a lot of energy and a lot of sense of urgency. Sometimes people. People that are high in activator oftentimes seem impatient. You think, yeah, exactly. There's a point, by the way, where as you learn. As you sort of learn to traffic in this, that it's almost like you can walk in and look at somebody's themes, and it seems like you're psychic, right? You can just say, I bet you're. You know, that's not great coaching, but it does. There's a lot that you can start to see where it feels like almost like a parlor trick, where you can say, gosh, based on seeing your themes, I could see what it is. But one of the things. My point about activator is one of the things I think is, for me personally, I started. I had always been a person that was like, hey, calm down or be more patient or be, you know, wait on the. And when I did CliftonStrengths, it flipped it for me where I could see. God. That's actually my contribution. That's actually the value that I bring, is my ability to say, okay, we've had this great discussion. Let me help us translate that in action. Let's get us into action. And that was a lot of the value that I provided. And I've seen this over and over again when people do this, where they look at those themes and they see. It's like, oh, God, One, that's who I am, and two is I see what my contribution is. The other thing that you really see as people develop around strengths is they are that thing I said earlier about being well rounded. They're willing to be great, but they're also willing to be able to share their weaknesses. They're willing to be able to say, hey, I'm not good at that. And they get much better. You know how some people can't tell you really what their weaknesses are? You know, it's like the worst is in a job interview, when you interview somebody, and the two things they always say is, I'm a perfectionist, right? Or I care too much. You know, it's like, you know, I.

Just care too damn much. So this Goes to our kind of how we get started with it. Right. So when we first start working with a company, either an existing company, we're going to bring strengths in or with a new client and we're doing it as part of our onboarding. We do the leadership team. So everybody give me all 34 and I'll do a couple, three things with it. Aside from giving a general intro to strengths, I will give them a map. So we throw up the strengths, their talent themes on a map for the leadership team. Now, leadership team is usually somewhere between five and 12 people. So we throw those off and we notice some dominant themes every now and then. Like I had one and we had nine people in the room and eight of them had achiever. Right?

Yeah.

So I'm like, oh, wow. And the CEO founder was the only one who didn't. I'm like, well, so you're really great at listening for listening and pulling achievers out.

Right. You're hungry, which is not uncommon, by the way.

Right. You know, and, but then when we look, we're like, okay, but this team is missing any influence, any of that sort of world that, that world of persuasion and other teams would go in and you're like, okay, you guys are all big on like strategic and influence, but you're missing, you're missing the execution side of things. So we'll look at the balance and the general character and we'll look at, are there some dominant ones like achiever in the case of the one that came to mind? Or we'll look at what are the ones that they all share in common in their bottom five. And we'll start to see a couple like, okay, is there one of the next roles? Because we have fast growing companies so they're going to be filling and upgrading and adding positions. We're like, okay, you know, when you go to hire the cfo, right, Is that CFO going to be deliberative or consistency or things like that? You know, that's going to counterbalance to your activator or whatever the case may be.

And let me talk about this a little bit because I think there's some misconceptions there. Right. So what you said actually is great because honestly, I think part of some people are always, you know, probably the most common request we get is, hey, could you come in and work with our team, our leadership team, help us understand this. The first aspect of really helping leaders to be able to work to use strengths on their team is that they each individually know their own strengths and weaknesses. But that they know, they know sort of their dominant talent themes. They know the lens that they see the world through. A lot of times it's interesting as you go through this a lot of times we'll put a team grid together. We'll have people look at a team grid. And you do notice, I love the example you used because it's really common. You see that a lot with leadership teams. The CEO is pulling people that have a particular profile and whether he or she, you know, we call that glare factors. He or she, you know, I'm competitive, I think everybody should be competitive. Therefore I'm going to hire competitive people because I think that's the access to success.

Right.

And in fact, we know that to your point, well rounded teams typically perform better. Right. It's not just about, hey, I'm going to get a type of, and I'm going to hire all of a type.

So for sure, as our teams grow, there's going to be changes, changes on the team. And so we want to begin to balance.

Yeah. And the piece is not like, hey, we got to find somebody who's got this theme. It's helping people to understand, here are the themes that we've got. How do we use those talents? You can use any talents to do a job. Part of it is knowing what those talents are and how do you apply them in a meaningful way. I worked with a. There was an executive team that I worked with for an architectural firm and I came in and we were looking at the team grid. One of the things to your point is similarly, they were very, very high in execution themes. And particularly they all had really high responsibility, which is one of the themes about follow through and loyalty and diligence like that. They had very, very few influencing themes. So there were very few influencers. And they were like, I think they were a little in despair about it, right? They were like, what's the, should we be hiring people that have influencing themes? What's the deal? But the thing that we got to though was the way that they were very successful. They had lots of great customers. They had really successful relationships with their customers. It wasn't that they needed somebody who had influencing themes. It's that they had to really understand that the way they influenced their customers and their partners was through the way they executed. They were known as super responsive. They were known as reliable, responsible, reliable. Their follow through was incredible. Their diligence around it. They had these great long term, trusted relationships with their customers, with their clients. So what you could see was, is it wasn't you know, sometimes people say, hey, look, I don't have any thinking themes. It's not like, no, you don't think. No, it's just what we see is your configuration themes tells us how do you build relationships or how do you influence others or what are the ways that you think through things. It tells us kind of your composition of how you're going to approach things. And particularly as you look at in a team, it's super valuable in a team because you start to see the biases of the team. It's not, by the way, that those bottom themes are weaknesses per se. They're just themes that just are absent. Right. It's like my number 34 is Harmony, which is that those people that have that talent to be able to generate consensus. I am not a guy that ever needs consensus. You're laughing.

You and I have this. We have this in common, right? Consensus.

I like, there's never going to be a guy that walks into a room and goes, God, they're not consensus here. We should get consensus, right?

That guy over there is not on board.

Let's bring him on board.

Get out of my room.

But what's interesting is some of my closest partners in my career that I rely on the most are people that are really high in harmony because they can. Like, there's a gal I work with who I just adore and she's so smart, she's so bright. Literally, Harmony is number one for her. She can walk into any room and see who's on board and who's not. And for me, it helps me because then inside of our partnership, you know, I'm trying to take us in a particular direction and I'm trying to, you know, I want to take us in a particular direction. My number one is activator. My two is focus. My third is woo, by the way. Fourth is strategic. And fifth is for later. And so, as you know, as I go through kind of, you know, my desire, my goal is, hey, where are we going? How are we going to get there? And how quickly can we start? And she is just great about being able to say, hey, are people on board? And that kind of partnership just helps.

Recognizing those partnerships if we want people to learn their strengths and how to use them and be aware of it. My next step for a leadership team is to have people put their top five on a post it and stick it on their computer or on their laptop or in their mirror, wherever it's going to be regularly in their place. And I ask this first for the self awareness piece is each time you encounter something challenging for the next little bit or you're not sure what to do, just look at your talent themes and then decide which of the ones you're going to employ. So which one gives you access to some new action, new approach or something like that. So that's the simplest thing. And then as you start to coach others on their strengths, do a similar thing, have theirs in front of you and then ask them to look. Rather than telling them, hey, why don't you employ that communication thing now ask them which of them they'd like to see, but with awareness that they have and that they're there and that sort of self awareness followed by the other one. And then of course, I invite them, with example to consider also sort of the flip side. So like command, right, is really great except, you know, if you're dealing with certain people at certain times, it can be pretty soul crushing to always take command, never let other people show up. Right, right, right, right.

Command is one of the rarest themes. I will tell you. I'll just add to that bill, that the other thing that's really useful for people as they start out so they can go take the strengths assessment. As you said earlier, they can get one of two reports. It's $15 to get a report that has your top five themes. I think it's $89 currently to get all 34 themes. And once you get the report, the first thing that we always encourage people and read the report and highlight the words and phrases that most describe you. The other thing that I often do is I tell people, go to somebody that knows you well, right? And go to somebody that knows you well. Read the description of each one of the themes and say, hey, where do you see this in me? Your spouse, your close work partners, your mom, your mom. Usually moms are not a good proxy because they're like, oh, babe, I love every aspect of you, right? But you know, it's like, do you see this in me? And where do you see this in me? At the beginning. You know, it's so funny. I was leading a course, this sounds years ago, I was leading a course at ucla. I used to do this thing where at UCLA I would go periodically and lead a course on consultative selling, right? And we would use strengths. It was sort of a strengths based selling course. We would use strengths as part of it. And I had this woman who was getting her MBA at ucla. She already had a law degree and she was like a, like a prominent lawyer, right? And she's in this course, and it was this funny thing. She raises her hand, says to me, look, I just read this report. I'm like, they're all fine, except this one is definitely not me. And it was like her number one theme or something, right? She's like, I'm really clear. This is not me. There's been a mistake. Maybe it's the way I did the test, maybe I did it wrong, but this is clearly not me. And I said, okay. I said, why don't you do this? I said, why don't you. Why don't you start and just read the description of the theme out loud? So she starts reading it and she just starts laughing, right? And I said, what are you laughing about? She's like, it's so me.

That's funny. It's one of those things.

As we start to really internalize it, we can see God, that's really me, right? And the more you're aware of it, then the more. And the more you realize, you realize it as a contribution, the more you're sort of free to express that, and you don't feel like you have to cover your bases in all the areas that you're not.

So we also use the assessment in hiring. So I'll have people do their top five as part of the hiring process. When we do the deep interview, then we review the resume, and I use a top grading approach with everybody as well. I've got that top five to consider. Now, when you start to talk to me about your lovely resume, that looks very generic and laudable, but I can now probe for how you approach each thing, and I develop a richer insight to what it is, and I start to get something that's a little more descriptive.

Yeah, we. You're going to laugh at this. We tell people not to do that.

Bill, I think it's an excellent thing.

Thank you. And yeah, here's the thing we know, right, is that while it does assess talent, it's really not validated for hiring. The. And it's really designed to be developmental in nature. And let me tell you why, just so that you understand kind of why. Or that where we are with really measures you against you. So it's not measuring you against the demands of a role. It's not measuring you against other people. It's really measuring you against you. So as you look, what are your dominant traits and what are your less dominant traits? It doesn't look at you relative to a pool of other candidates to be able to look at that. Totally agree.

So we're not never comparative or it.

Also doesn't say anything about your ability. Sometimes people want to connect it like, hey, I'm high in competition. That makes me a good salesperson. Well, there's actually a lot of good salespeople that are not very competitive, but they are very achievement oriented.

Right.

Or have a huge ego drive. So it's as we look at it, the thing that relative to hiring that it's good for, we actually tell people it's a great assessment for people in onboarding is that once people have actually gotten the job and you're convinced they're the right person for the job is to help them to be able to help them to be able to understand how they're going to use their talent on the job. The one thing you start to see is you start to see what they're drawn to and the ways that they'll go about applying themselves once they're on the job.

So just to recap for a little bit on some of the key points, the why of this work is really going to what makes people unique and special and extraordinary. The things that the talent themes that they really could develop over time into true strengths. And there's a lot of science behind it. It's a rich assessment tool that gives you a rich picture of that uniqueness and that potential. It's based on the work of Dr. Don Clifton and you can find out more information at the Gallup Strength center. Gallupstrengthcenter.com We've been talking to Dean Jones, talent development architect for Gallup and just an extraordinary tool and so easy to get started if you go to Gallup Strength Center. 15 bucks gets you the base thing, 89 bucks gets you the full 34 as of the recording of this thing. So for our senior leaders, I certainly recommend you spring for the full thing. And as you roll it out, you can play with both of them. There's lots of additional work and books on strengths based leadership and so on that you can begin to look deeper on it. You've got some tips on how to get started, but really you want to begin to understand yourself before you lead others in this world. And it's something that we advocate greatly. Again, I'm Bill Gallagher and for more information on scaling up and stuff, you can check us out@scalingupbusiness.com we've got of course our podcast every week we've got video tutorials@YouTube, YouTube.com Bill Gallagher We've got the, we've got articles as well on the blog@scalingupbusiness.com you'll find the podcast so like it, subscribe it, share it with others. You'll find an iTunes stitcher wherever you get your podcast from and and on our website at scalingupbusiness.com, you'll find a growth kit that gives you an overview of the Scaling up framework from the book Scaling up The Rockefeller Habits 2.0 and tells you how to run your own team strategy meeting so how to get started leading your own leadership team through strategic development and powerful execution with worksheets and agendas and everything like that right there. So free download on the website. Thanks again so much. We'll see you next time. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our Scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.