Do you know your strengths? Know yourself, ‘find your fit’ and super-charge your career.
Examine your many skills and strengths that you bring to the table. Every member of your project team has their unique strengths and skills palette.
“An unexamined life is not worth living” was a powerful statement published in Plato’s “Apology”.
We all have considerable talents and strengths that we bring to projects. Do we stop and ponder this topic? Is this introspection a luxury, or something uncomfortable that you postpone?
Examine your strengths, accomplishments and background. It is a powerful way to be clear on the energy and problem-solving approach you bring to your project team.
1. Know your many skills — could clever skill combinations help your career?
You might find learning about people’s professional backgrounds fascinating. Do we assume that Change Managers only have Human Resources or Communications backgrounds? Or that Business Analysts always transition from technical roles? Is it better to ask yourself: is this always the case?
Accomplished Change Managers may have been former nurses or teachers. A capable Program Manager may have started her career in Orthoptics. Another in environmental science consulting. A User Experience (UX) professional may have started as an Architect or a terrific Project Director may have moved on from Archaeology. Some of us have several responsibilities. We may juggle a ‘day job’, volunteer work, a side hustle, working on a Board, study, or carer responsibility.
Why mention these varied backgrounds? Because these diverse backgrounds foster unique strengths. You become anti-fragile, a polymath, and somewhat more interesting conversation at dinner parties.
You may have changed careers. Has your previous experience been a waste of time? It is unlikely. You may have picked up many above-average skills on the way. Now, what if you combine your skills in unique ways?
A former lawyer can use their sharp eye for contracts and social intelligence to stand out in a Communications career. Neither her legal nor social acumen may be world-class. Yet in certain industries and job roles, these skill combinations become formidable.
Today’s Data Analyst might have latent skills that are not used to the full. For example, ease in moving between big picture and detail. What if this was coupled with the creativity to imagine a future in three years’ time? Today’s Data Analyst is tomorrow’s Enterprise Architect. The question is: has this person taken stock of their unique abilities?
There is one stand-out example of combining many skills, at the right time, in the right way. Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, has above-average cartooning skills. He also has an MBA with corporate experience and an acerbic wit. Above all, Scott had the willingness to try his hand at filling a niche by developing a cartoon about Corporate life.
By now we may have identified above-average skills that we can combine. So, let’s move from introspection to helpful questions and tools.
2. What qualities do you bring to a project?
We may rely on feedback from others around us. This feedback has value — but also may be laden with bias or agenda.
One of the challenges of examining your life is not having ready access to helpful tools. Tools like the ones suggested in this article help you see your personality. Research suggests that your personality is quite fixed over the course of your life.
These tests help you focus on “what’s right with you”. This focus on your positives is an emerging field of psychology. Research suggests that our brains are hard-wired towards negativity. Yet, isn’t it more enjoyable to focus on your strengths? How draining would this exercise be if you thought only of your deficits, or how to reduce your distress?
The Values in Action Character survey (VIA) is a free, confidential survey. Your results show your unique constellation among twenty-four character strengths. You can see your top five strengths and interpret these considering your career. VIA also helps define the leading character strengths you can bring to your project team.
Psychologists are selective about personality tests they use on their clients and are well-versed in statistics. They are also ethically bound to select the most appropriate tests for their clients.
Thus, Psychologists scrutinise a personality test’s psychometric properties. These psychometric properties include reliability (will the results stay mostly the same over time?), and validity (does the test examine what it says it should?).
The Big Five test is one of the major personality tests used by Psychologists due to its viable psychometric properties. The Big Five gets its name as it measures five significant personality factors. A useful acronym to help you remember what the Big Five measures is OCEAN: O = Openness to Experience; C=Conscientiousness; E=Extroversion; A=Agreeableness; and N=Neuroticism. The Big Five Aspects Scale is a 100-item, inexpensive survey which may help you understand the five major facets of your personality.
Similarly, the Clifton Strengths assessment looks at thirty-four strengths across four themes. This assessment ranks your preferred strengths. Each strength links to one of four themes. The four themes include executing, influencing, relationship-building and strategic thinking. Your top five strengths are likely those which you use most days at work. Seeing how your strengths intersect with each of the four themes can be a startling insight. For example, three of your top five strengths may relate to influencing. The remaining two may relate to executing. This pattern of results may suggest you are a “take charge and get it done” person.
Like the previous tests, there are no “wrong answers”.
Your personality reflects in how you prefer to engage in a team. You may be action-oriented or an innovator, or be the “peacemaker”. In most cases, you may fulfil two or three team “roles”. You can find out your contribution to your team using the Belbin team roles inventory. You can learn more about the nine different team roles portrayed in this test to see which roles resonate with you.
There are other tests (such as Holland’s RIASEC test) which look at the types of work you prefer to do (i.e. Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional). Your top two or three preferences form a code, and this code can help you look up job roles.
So far, we have looked at your self-reported strengths. Now let us look at the darker side of your personality. This dark side does not look at clinical issues. Instead, we ask: what aspects of your personality might make your working life a little complicated?
Everyone has a dark side, and most of us have made career-limiting moves. Your dark side may emerge when you are under pressure, or when you are sleep-deprived or have a high degree of stress in your life. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) may help you delve into this dark side. Even reading through some of the common “career derailers” on the HDS website alone may resonate with you.
By this point, you may have considerable data about your personality and skills. Take time to collate and reflect on this information. In doing so, consider your experience on a project or operational teams. Nice work in making it this far! Your introspective effort can help you see where your strengths and abilities have been well-utilised.
A significant question to ask: what activities and undertakings energise or drain you? Are there activities, types of interactions and circumstances that come to mind? Time spent reflecting on your career highs and lows (and challenges between!) may yield useful insights about how you prefer to give your best to your team.
3. Bringing your strengths to work
Your role on a project team may have implicit expectations. For example, aren’t Change Managers meant to be always outgoing? Aren’t Project Managers always meant to “take charge”? Aren’t Business Analysts across the minute aspects of every system requirement? We could trot out more stereotypes and assumptions. But what if your strengths and skills do not align with these implicit role expectations?
Firstly, you now have the tools to ‘know yourself’ — this is your catalyst for change.
Secondly, can you take proactive steps to craft your job role? These steps may consider how you select and approach tasks, relationships and your perceptions about your job. This way, your experience at work becomes more aligned with your strengths and skills, and also with the activities that energise you. We cannot avoid every draining activity, but playing the long game on shaping our work environment to suit us can help maximise our contribution to our project teams.
So, what is the answer to our original question — how can you unlock extra energy and drive to solve project problems? By taking steps towards better alignment between who you are and the demands of your job.
To recap:
1. How can you identify all the skills you are above average in… then cleverly combine them?2. What strengths do you bring to work, both individually and as a team member?3. How can you craft your job so that your work aligns with your skills, strengths and energising activities?
Let’s respectfully flip Plato’s statement on its head. The examined life and some minor tweaks to the way you engage your job role can make your life on projects far more enriching and energising.
My book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out my online course on Change Management.