Strengths - The Likes

I sat in on a StrengthsFinder coaching session that my friend Dale Swinburne ran last week. It was a ton of fun and I'm grateful to Dale for giving away such valuable expertise to a ministry leadership team. In light of that, this week I'll be writing a series of posts that deal with some of the things I think are most valuable when it comes to the StrengthsFinder assessment.

If you don't have any exposure to the StrengthsFinder assessment, the best way to read up on it is to get one of the books and take the assessment. Read up on the descriptions of your top 5, underline the sentences that resonate with you and share the results with someone you are close with. Have someone you work with take it as well and then read up on their talents. Then come back and check out some of these posts.

First, here are my top 5. Developer, Futuristic, Arranger, Positivity and Woo. What matters most in terms of mine are the first 2 - Developer and Futuristic. Developer is almost always on. Futuristic gives my Developer talent a little tweak - I'm happy thinking up projects for people but overjoyed when those projects deal with a specific future that we are changing together.

One of the ideas about strengths theory is that we are looking for someone that isn't quite like us to get something accomplished. In the area of student missions, I'm almost always interested in people with these talents:
+ Ideation - I'm convinced that we need different paradigms of ministry in the future so these people are essential to that end. Tell them what you are trying to do or achieve and start taking notes on their ideas. TerahM came up with 10 ideas for leadership mixers after 5 minutes of talking about the Leadership Collective.
+ Includer - By nature, the Gospel is extending, reaching and inviting and Includers do this all the time. By nature, the rest of us want our groups to be static and therefore comfortable, while Includers are the exact opposite.
+ Strategic - When you plan before you execute, have someone with Strategic think it through.
+ Empathy - When it's on, it's red hot on. I need at least one person around with
empathy because I have zero of it.
+ Activator - These people move us from a meeting talking about something to actually getting out there and doing it.
+ Adaptability - One of my favorites - I'll talk about this one more tomorrow.

This post is from a series of posts about what I've learned most recently from the Strengths Finder assessment. Part 1, 2, 3.