Gallup-certified coach Reena Vokoun walks through the CliftonStrengths assessment and four ways to use it: know your own strengths, talk to your manager about roles that fit them, learn what your teammates are good at and pair them deliberately, and hire to fill team gaps. She also offers corporate wellness coaching that combines strengths work with sleep, nutrition, and burnout prevention.
Reena, it is always so nice to have you in studio, and today you are going to be sharing 4 tips on leveraging our strengths to improve our careers. So let's just dive right into it because you are a Gallup-certified strength-based coach. What does that mean?
Yeah, so it is through Gallup. So Gallup has CliftonStrengths, which basically are an assessment that employees can take to really understand their professional strengths. Are they more strategic? Are they more analytical? Are they a developer of other people? Are they How to Stay a Leader. And basically it has 5 to 10 to 34 top themes just to help people to understand what their natural talents and skills are. And the chance of 2 people having the same top strengths is 1 in 33 million.
Oh my goodness.
So it shows how unique each and every one of us are.
I love it. Now you're gonna help all of us leverage this today. You have 4 great tips for us, the first one being to take stock of your strengths.
Yes, it is really important to understand your strengths. There are over 27 million people that have done the CliftonStrengths assessment, and 90% of Fortune 500 companies use them. So basically, when you understand what your own talents and strengths and skills are, you're just more likely to be healthier on the job, more confident, more competent, and just able to produce better outcomes. So it's important to either take the assessment, you could journal about it, you could ask, you know, anybody that you work with or people in your personal life to help assess you so you understand your own personal strengths.
Amazing. And, you know, I think so often we all feel like really alone when we're trying to climb the ladder at the workplace, but you said it's important to have career development conversations.
Yeah, I think it's important once you really understand your own strengths and skills, you should talk to your manager and have an honest discussion about, you know, are you leveraging your strengths currently in your role? When you look ahead to future roles or your long-term career trajectory, how can you best leverage your strengths so that you can be at your best and really perform at a high level?
Wonderful. Your third tip for all of us is to ask teammates about their strengths.
Right. Once you understand your own strengths, it is important to understand your teammates and, you know, what really drives them to work the way that they do. How do they communicate the way that they do? Because when they can understand you when you share yours and you understand them when they share theirs, you're just gonna work together more effectively. You could also apply this to your personal life, right? If you understand what drives your spouse or significant other or your kids or siblings or parents or even your friends, the relationships are gonna be stronger because you just know how to collaborate better together.
I love that you just said the word collaborate because we're going to say just having these conversations is not enough. You need to determine how to collaborate.
Exactly. So then you wanna kind of take the broader approach and not only talk to your teammates and talk to your manager, but then collectively as a team, how can you pair people together to collaborate and work on a project if they have complementary skills? Maybe some skill sets are lacking on the overall team, so you might need to go out and hire some new talent. So when you really have all the right people optimizing their performance, that's just gonna help with productivity, employee engagement, again, overall health and well-being and confidence and happiness for the team as a whole.
I know, and you've been so kind to give us these 4 tips today, but there's so much more. And one of the services you offer, you actually work with a lot of local workplaces to go into their offices and, you know, help improve employee wellness. So what are some of those services you offer employers?
Yeah, so we have a corporate wellness program where I go in and work with companies and really help them with not only productivity and professional strengths and engagement, but how do they incorporate proper sleep and proper nutrition and a lot of movement in their day to really balance out their lives and manage their stress. Um, so we've got the corporate wellness program. I also speak, um, for companies. I speak at corporate wellness conferences, and it's really just to help energize and make our workforce healthier. Um, I've seen burnout myself. I've experienced it working in tech for so many years at Google and other companies, and so I really want to help solve that problem in the workplace.
Well, we really appreciate you, and you can catch up with Reena anytime on her website, passionfit.com, and of course follow her on social media, listen to her podcast. I mean, so many things that you're offering our community.
Thank you so much, and happy New Year, Ashley.
Thank you, you as well. You should stay for the next segment. We have a fun segment coming up because the rodeo is riding into San Diego, and we're going to help you look the part. We'll be right back.
