by Tom Rath
success of your efforts.
Help others understand that your strategic thinking is not an attempt to belittle their ideas, but is instead a natural propensity to consider all the facets of a plan objectively. Rather than being a naysayer, you are actually trying to examine ways to ensure that the goal is accomplished, come what may. Your talents will allow you to consider others’ perspectives while keeping your end goal in sight.
Trust your intuitive insights as often as possible. Even though you might not be able to explain them rationally, your intuitions are created by a brain that instinctively anticipates and projects. Have confidence in these perceptions.
Partner with someone with strong Activator talents. With this person’s need for action and your need for anticipation, you can forge a powerful partnership.
Make sure that you are involved in the front end of new initiatives or enterprises. Your innovative yet procedural approach will be critical to the genesis of a new venture because it will keep its creators from developing deadly tunnel vision.
Working With Others Who Have Strategic
Involve this person in planning sessions. Ask him, “If this happened, what should we expect? If that happened, what should we expect?”
Always give this person ample time to think through a situation before asking for his input. He isn’t likely to voice his opinion until he has played out a couple of scenarios in his mind.
When you hear or read of strategies that worked in your field, share them with this person. It will stimulate his thinking.
WOO
Woo stands for winning others over. You enjoy the challenge of meeting new people and getting them to like you. Strangers are rarely intimidating to you. On the contrary, strangers can be energizing. You are drawn to them. You want to learn their names, ask them questions, and find some area of common interest so that you can strike up a conversation and build rapport. Some people shy away from starting up conversations because they worry about running out of things to say. You don’t. Not only are you rarely at a loss for words; you actually enjoy initiating with strangers because you derive satisfaction from breaking the ice and making a connection. Once that connection is made, you are quite happy to wrap it up and move on. There are new people to meet, new rooms to work, new crowds to mingle in. In your world there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet—lots of them.
Woo Sounds Like This:
Deborah C., publishing executive: “I have made best friends out of people that I have met passing in the doorway. I mean, it’s awful, but wooing is part of who I am. All my taxi drivers propose to me.”
Marilyn K., college president: “I don’t believe I’m looking for friends, but people call me a friend. I call people and say, ‘I love you,’ and I mean it because I love people easily. But friends? I don’t have many friends. I don’t think I am looking for friends. I am looking for connections. And I am really good at that because I know how to achieve common ground with people.” Anna G., nurse: “I think I am a little shy sometimes. Usually I won’t make the first step out. But I do know how to put people at ease. A lot of my job is just humor. If the patient is not very receptive, my role becomes that of a stand-up comedian. I’ll say to an eighty-year-old patient, ‘Hi, you handsome guy. Sit up. Let me get your shirt off. That’s good. Take your shirt off. Whoa, what a chest on this man!’ With kids, you have to start very slowly and say something like, ‘How old are you?’ If they say, ‘Ten,’ then I say, ‘Really? When I was your age, I was eleven’—silly stuff like that to break the ice.”
Ideas for Action
Choose a job in which you can interact with many people over the course of a day.
Deliberately build the network of people who know you. Tend to it by checking in with each person at least once a month.
Join local organizations, volunteer for committees, and find out how to get on the social lists of the influential people where you live.
Learn the names of as many people as you can. Create a file of the people you know, and add names as you become acquainted. Include a snippet of personal information—such as their birthday, favorite color, hobby, or favorite sports team.
In social situations, take responsibility for helping put reserved people at ease.
Find the right words to explain that networking is part of your style. If you don’t claim this theme, others might mistake it for insincerity and wonder why you are being so friendly.
Partner with someone with dominant Relator or Empathy talents. This person can solidify the relationships that you begin.
Your Woo talents give you the ability to quicken the pulse of your surroundings. Recognize the power of your presence and how you open doors for an exchange of ideas. By simply starting conversations that engage others and bring talented people together, you will take performance up a notch—or several.
The first moments of any social occasion are crucial to how comfortable people will be and how they will remember the event. Whenever possible, be one of the first people others meet. Your capacity for meeting and greeting new people will help to quickly put them at ease.
Practice ways to charm and engage others. For example, research people before you meet them so you can talk about your common interests.
Working With Others Who Have Woo
Help this person meet new people every day. She can put strangers at ease and help them feel comfortable with your organization.
If you need to extend your own network, reach out to someone with strong Woo talents. She will help you broaden your own connections and get what you want.
Understand that this person values having a wide network of friends. If she is quick to meet and greet and then move on, do not take it personally.
VFAQ (Very Frequently Asked Question)
If I have already taken Clifton StrengthsFinder 1.0, should I take Version 2.0 of the assessment?
It’s up to you. While we have fine-tuned the new assessment to be slightly faster and more precise, the language of 34 themes remains the same. So if you have taken StrengthsFinder 1.0, your results remain as valid as they were when you originally completed the assessment.
The primary difference between version 1.0 and version 2.0 is not in the assessment itself, but in the results and resources available. Because the Strengths Discovery and Action-Planning Guide includes the new Strengths Insights, which are based on more than 5,000 unique combinations of responses within the new assessment, we are only able to produce this comprehensive guide if you take StrengthsFinder 2.0. In addition, version 2.0 includes all of the online resources described on Chapter 3 of this book.
If you have taken StrengthsFinder 1.0, and you decide to take the new version, you may find that a few of your top five themes are different than they were the first time. Given the basic odds and statistics of calculating a ranking of 34 dimensions, even if you take the same version of StrengthsFinder again a few months later, it is not unusual for a couple of your top five themes to change. With more than 33 million unique combinations of top five themes, StrengthsFinder is very different from basic personality tests that classify you, for example, as either an extrovert or an introvert.
Based on our calculations, if you compare your version 1.0 results to your version 2.0 results, there’s a strong chance that at least three of your top five themes will remain the same. And in most cases, at least four themes will appear in your top five both times. Perhaps the most important thing to understand for your development is that if you do see a new theme in your top five, it was likely in your top 10 before. So you have not “lost” a theme, but instead now have the opportunity to see a theme or two that had been hiding just below the radar.
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