What Makes You Distinctive?
This is a critical question that every person in your organisation should be able to answer for themselves. The clarity and conviction of the answers to this question are especially important if you want to:
- Optimise your contribution within the organisation.
- Accelerate your career advancement.
- Love what you do everyday.
Not a shabby return on investment from gaining clarity to just one critical question.
What we are talking about here are signature strengths as opposed to generic strengths. The difference between the two is the distinctive piece. And we are defining a strength as an activity that strengthens and energises you, even if you are not yet excellent at it. It’s an activity you love to do, are naturally good at, and look forward to doing. While a weakness, on the other hand, is an activity that weakens you. You may be good at it, but it depletes you, and if you never had to do it again you would be very ok with that.
Signature Strengths vs Generic Strengths
Signature strengths are the activities that you innately do differently and better than anybody else. They are incredibly difficult for others to replicate and do as naturally as you do. They point to the role-critical activities in which you can achieve excellence and deliver greater organisational success far quicker than your peers. Used intelligently, your signature strengths are how you standout from the competition and how you discern if a future role is actually a good fit for you.
Generic strengths, on the other hand, are very easy to list off and, while they have some value in certain situations, they are not very helpful in terms of enabling you to: standout from your peers, accelerate your organisational impact, or decipher whether or not a new role really is a good fit for you. They can, in some instances, actually do a lot of damage, partly because people often settle for choosing these generic strengths to describe their future potential. I cannot tell you the number of times I have witnessed this while working with people on our coaching programmes. It shocks me every time. But really it shouldn’t, as “knowing our unique strengths” has never been of the standard educational curriculum.
Signature strengths trump generic strengths every time. They enable you to articulate with clarity, conviction and specificity how your distinct way of negotiating, or managing client relationships, or innovating, adds unique value and sets you apart from your peers. Your signature strengths will become the reputational tagline that differentiates your value-add.
Three Ways To Identify Your Signature Strengths
Below, in order of preference, are three of the ways I work with people in helping them identify their signature strengths;
- Spend a week in love with your job – This is a very practical and powerful exercise originally designed by strengths guru Marcus Buckingham. It enables you to use the raw material of your working week to uncover your specific strengths. Simply take a piece of paper and make a list of the activities that make up your job. Then draw a line down the middle of the page to create two columns. Label them “Loved It, Energises Me” and “Loathed It, Drains Me”. Observe yourself for a week and rate each activity in one of the two columns. By the end of Day 5, you’ll have a clear list of the activities that strengthen you. Then rank the activities in your “Loved It, Energises Me” column into your top three strengths activities. Finally, take a moment to get very clear on what you specifically love about each activity and how it adds value to the organisation. Write this in a sentence for yourself for each of your top three strengths.
- Get feedback from others – Based on the increased self-knowledge you have gained from the exercise above, you can now widen your net and invite others who know your work to give you feedback on your strengths. If you are aspiring to a future promotion, it will be particularly helpful to target feedback from your manager, your manager’s manager, and other key influencers in the decision-making process. Listen to what they observe you doing well and be open to what they encourage you to do more of to further grow your strengths. Pay attention to the compliments and positive feedback you receive, and become inquisitive and curious about the specifics of what the person is admiring and why they found it particularly valuable. These are all valuable data points for you to capture and integrate into your signature strengths.
- Take a Strengths Test – There are many to choose from, and if you are working in an organisation, you have more than likely undertaken many already, whether it was a DiSC, Enneagram, StrengthsFinder or the StandOut assessment, to name a few. The key to extracting the most value from any one of these tests is to map it’s feedback to your role-critical activities and transform them from being generic strengths into signature strength; otherwise their value-add can be pretty low.
Investing just a little bit of time in getting to know your signature strengths will enable you to build both a successful and fulfilling career strategy. Equipped with this knowledge, you will be able to successfully articulate your personal value proposition with clarity and conviction, and immediately decipher whether or not a future role is a good for you.
This is the power of knowing your signature strengths, and it’s the reason I designed our Promotion Ready Programme built around this foundational knowledge.
If you would like to know more about the programme, please get in touch.
Wishing you well,
Carolanne
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