StrengthsFinder is a well-designed diagnostic (and coaching / talent management approach) that can be used to help individuals and teams become more successful, by focusing on people’s strengths, as opposed to their weaknesses. 
Created by the Gallup organization and based on the research of Dr. Donald Clifton, StrengthsFinder 2.0 is a book by Tom Rath that serves as a “wrapper” for an online personal assessment that you can take through StrengthsFinder.com. The original version of the book, Now, Discover Your Strengths was co-authored by Clifton and Marcus Buckingham, who has since left the Gallup organization to start his own gig. Overall, thumbs up. Very insightful and practical stuff.
Now, I won’t be discussing what’s great about StrengthsFinder, other than the words “well-designed,” “thumbs up,” “very insightful and practical” (above), and “brilliantly lucrative and well-executed book and consulting services marketing strategy.”
Rather, just as the StrengthsFinder test will give anyone their Top Five Themes of Strength, I will now proceed to pick out what I think are the Top Five Themes of Weakness of StrengthsFinder. ‘Cause I’m contrarian like that.
**LONG RANT WARNING***
**LONG RANT WARNING***
**LONG RANT WARNING***
THEME #1) ARBITRARY: The premise of StrengthsFinder is to use an inventory of 34 “themes” to help people discover their talents, which are defined as “naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior” that are “enduring and unique.” By understanding and harnessing one’s talents, a person can cultivate their strengths, which are defined as “consistent near perfect performance in an activity.”
In order to perform and activity, the authors say we must have knowledge (defined as “the facts and lessons learned”) and skills (“the steps of an activity”). However, when you get right down to it, what the authors relegate as “skills” that can be learned versus “talents” that are innate can, at times, seem a bit arbitrary. Furthermore, when describing a situation where a person achieved greatness in an activity outside their core themes of talent, the authors explain it away by describing how that person could have drawn on a different strength to get the job done. Finally, the test is opaque: You don’t get to see your numerical scores on individual themes, and in the standard version, you only get a list of the top five, or what they call your ”Signature Themes.”
(“Signature Themes” ..makes me feel like a new line of fragrance from Sean John… )
In the end, these 34 themes have an almost horoscope-like quality to them, especially since we the readers are advised to not look at just our top theme but rather to ”weave” or “braid” together our Signature Themes. With its black box survey algorithm, blurry definitions and distinctions, and its total lack of falsifiability, it’s impossible to prove or disprove anything about StrengthFinders. I’m actually tempted to do a comparison of the 34 StrengthsFinders themes and the 12 signs of the traditional horoscope. No, I didn’t even test high for ANALYTICAL on StrengthsFinder, but perhaps this is just a combination my IDEATION and INTELLECTION themes, and my being a GEMINI and having a moon sign of…wait… I forget…
StrengthsFinder exhibits many characteristics of the Forer Effect, namely, that people lend credibility to descriptions of their personality that are vague and generally applicable, especially when those descriptions appear to be tailored to them, authoritative (backed by science, ancient wisdom, surveys of 2 million people, etc.), and generally positive. Well, the idea of “strength” is positive from the get-go, and some of the 34 theme definitions are downright ebullient: “You know you will be judged not by what you say, not by what you think, but by what you get done. This does not frighten you. It pleases you.” Or how about this: ”Others may label you creative or original or conceptual or even smart. Perhaps you are all of these. Who can be sure?”
THEME #2) PERFECTIONIST: By defining a strength as “consistent near perfect performance in an activity,” and by laying down the opening premise that “Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength,” the authors push an agenda which is fraught with difficulties in a world which is less than ideal. As Voltaire famously wrote, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” The perfect is the enemy of the good. No, depending on our circumstances, sometimes our greatest opportunity and room for growth is in an area that we’re not naturally gifted in. In fact, one of the things I like about the 34 themes in StrengthsFinder is that it provides some helpful descriptions of personality traits that one can and should learn from, even if it’s not a core competence. “Who is wise? One who learns from every person,” said Ben Zoma (one of my all time favorites). If, according to your StrengthsFinder profile, you score low on Empathy, Command, Self-Assurance, etc, etc. perhaps it would be a good idea to cultivate those abilities, especially in volatile market conditions that could see you needing them.
Buried in a few places in the books, the authors concede that one shouldn’t “forgo… weakness fixing” in the areas that they have marked-off as the exclusive domain of innate talent. Using the example of Empathy, they describe the effects of an empathy skills class as giving a “karaoke version of empathy” to someone who is not naturally strong in the Empathy talent theme. “Of course, a karaoke version of empathy can sometimes better than no version at all… Damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.” However one defines the term ”success,” the definition may include the idea of ”excellence” in it, but it definitely does not include its own reverse definition, i.e., “failure.” Those of us who “view failure as a kind of success” have in fact redefined true ”failure” as something else… perhaps, ”failure” for us means the inability to learn from imperfect outcomes. Or maybe we just ignore “failure” altogether. Regardless of the semantics, weakness-fixing does deserve a high priority of personal development plans and corporate training budgets. Strength building does too. Which brings us to the next weakness of StrengthsFinder…
THEME #3) UNBALANCED: The authors of StrengthsFinders, like many authors, wish to make a point. In the process, they make their point bigger than it needs to be. This is slightly annoying. Or maybe that’s just my BALANCED theme at play (just kidding, there is no such theme in StrengthsFinders, nor is there a SNARKY theme or an ORNERY BLOGGER theme ).
One way in which the authors overstate their case is by resorting to a straw man argument that most companies and talent management professionals (especially recruiters) seek well-rounded candidates for hire and promotion, and that these misguided professionals should be looking for exceptional candidates who have the unique strengths needed to excel in the particular companies and roles being filled.
The fact is, if you ever listen to the conversations of recruiters and hiring managers, you will hear talk about “perfect fits,” “square pegs” and “purple squirrels.” In the spectrum of “everyone should anything they set their minds to” versus “everyone should only do what they are really good at,” the world of corporate human resources is definitely skewed to the latter view.
StrengthsFinder is actually a pretty decent coaching tool (oops, I said I wasn’t going to give any more praise, there’s me with my FOX NEWS FAIR AND BALANCED theme swooshing around) and I include it in my consulting toolkit. But strengths-based management is also abused as a form of psychological pigeonholing — assign this type of person to this type of role because they have the innate talent for it. When combined with criteria such as prior experience and technical skills, the talents & strengths-based approach of selection and professional growth creates a hyper-specialization of the deepest kind.
The authors make numerous, valiant attempts to discourage pigeonholing and insist that, used properly, a strengths-based approach to talent development should have the opposite effect. Their arguments in the short section titled “Will I become Too Narrow if I Focus on My Signature Themes?” are only somewhat convincing and are overshadowed by the larger theme of “stop trying to make a fit that’s not there” and “do what your nature has made you good at…. and keep focusing on that.” Unfortunately, many managers who read the book will likewise use the 34 themes as just another way to categorize and commoditize their human “resources.” In fact, the authors (in Now, Discover Your Strengths) suggest creating a “theme inventory” of entire organizations and to map people and roles against that inventory. While well-meaning in their intent, the authors give less the less-nuanced reader a powerful tool for stereotyping themselves and others… it’s like handing out scalpels to non-surgeons.
I think this last point #3, UNBALANCED is actually two points: UNBALANCED and EASILY MISINTERPRETED. Or perhaps simply TOUCHING ON AN AREA THAT DAN IS OVERLY SENSITIVE ABOUT. No matter. On with the rant…
THEME #4) WRONG: Going back to the authors’ assertion that Empathy is an innate talent for which a true strength cannot be obtained through training, I must disagree. Empathy can be taught, provided the learner is willing, motivated and the instruction is done effectively and reinforced properly at a deep level. Life experience (post age 16) can help too. The StrengthsFinders thesis, with its definitions of STRENGTHS, TALENTS, SKILL and KNOWLEDGE, could be rendered as the following formula:
STRENGTH = TALENT (SKILL + KNOWLEDGE)
..where TALENT is a fixed variable, which has an overwhelming, multiplying effect on whatever learnable SKILLS and KNOWLEDGE are needed.
The firm I work for often uses a formula that has a similar structure:
EXCEPTIONAL PERFORMANCE = (KNOWLEDGE+SKILLS+PROCESS) MINDSET
…where all four variables K,S,P,M are learnable. The MINDSET variable includes things like attitudes, values and beliefs. Granted, this formula does not take innate TALENT into account, as the StrengthsFinder “equation” does, and both formulas don’t take things like LUCK and CIRCUMSTANCE into account. Add in all the disclaimers you want about life not being reducible to inane, contrived formulas, but there is a practical difference to all this formula nonsense: If my company gives a course designed to help people develop their empathy skills (and it does), the course does not just provide a bunch of techniques to emulate and create a “karaoke version of empathy.” Rather, the course helps participants develop an attitude and belief about empathy that will underpin the tactical things they need to do and say, in order to cultivate it. A person’s ability to be effective (or even “consistently near perfect”) in empathy is not dependent on a static variable of their brain circuitry, frozen at age 16. I have seen mature adults fundamentally change their ability in this and other areas of talent, areas that StrengthsFinders reserves for its 34 themes.
THEME #5) INCOMPLETE: StrengthsFinder, according to its technical appendix, captures personal motivation, interpersonal skills, self-presentation and learning style. It does not attempt to capture stuff outside of those areas — and in many cases, there can be important stuff. Also, it seems to miss some things that fall within the areas of cognition that it purports to cover.
The inventory of 34 talent themes is based on “over 2 million interviews,” with lots of granularity and distinction around talents that would come into play in the typical modern workplace. One gets the sense that if those 2 million interviews took place mainly in non-corporate settings (e.g. artistic settings, or even workplaces with a strong element of creative design), you’d get all kinds of other talent themes not covered by StrengthsFinder. What about an innate sense of Rhythm, Melody, Direction, or Spatial Organization? Within the area of visual design and rendering, there are any number of talents that come into play, some of which are included in StrengthFinders’ 34 themes (certainly ARRANGER, possibly CONNECTEDNESS) but if you’ve ever met someone with a talent at drawing or watercolor, you’d know there is more to doing it than just “the steps of an activity.”
But then, it’s too easy to nitpick (ANALYTICAL, DELIBERATIVE, COMPETITION, FOCUS), isn’t it? Wait, none of those were my Signature Themes, either…
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i get it. hook me on “attack!”.. then post big rants making sure ill have no time to comment.
once again.. im speechless. im yet again in a position where i spend a lot of thought and introspection on an issue come up with conclusions then find out there’s a book written on it with similar conclusions.
those strengthfinder ppl seem to be talking about the same thing ive been commenting about on this blog for weeks. except, they’ve got it down to a pseudoscience with formulas and top skills etc.. something i strongly disagree with.
one thing i do want to comment about tho: there are certain things you cannot learn effectively. You cannot learn to be charming. you cannot learn to be social. you cannot learn to be charismatic. and to some extent, you cannot learn to be empathic.
you can take courses and emulate, but in my experience, emulation is easily sniffed out, and “fake” is a difficult stigma to get rid of.
actually, what i said above is not 100% true. you can “acquire” those traits.. but not thru “courses” or “exercises”.. but it takes things like deeply painful experiences or major selfconfidence boost.. or any drastic personality changing experiences.
the bottom line is still simple.. someone who is antisocial, hates talking to people.. has no business being in sales or customer support etc…
someone who is self-absorbed, lacking self confidence, constantly self doubting, has no business being in caregiving situations… etc..
you cannot teach people to not be selfabsorbed. it takes some serious challenges in life.. and overcoming them.. to be able to start gaining those “strengths”.
from what u explain.. those strengthsfinder people are stuck in a static system. and people, fortunately are not static. “potential” is a word i didnt see used in ur entire post…
Yes, “potential” is what this stuff is all about — helping people achieve their desired potential. Thanks for bringing that up. Your comment has actually sparked some ideas for additional posts. But before I go and do that, let’s chat some more about StrengthsFinders :
One of the hidden strengths of StrengthsFinder is in the scores for all the areas of talent that fall between a person’s “top five” and “bottom five” themes, which Gallup doesn’t show you… at least not for the $20 fee. Of course, the survey authors would insist that a strengths-only philosophy demands this opacity. I say screw that, let’s pull back the curtain and see The Wizard… open source, baby!
While it may not have the scientific rigor of a particle accelerator, the StrengthsFinder tool does have some practical value in terms of talent management and professional development. Focus on what you do well… do more of it… do it even better… keep polishing. The authors strongly maintain, as you do, that some things such as true empathy cannot be learned. Other similar personality indexes/assessment tools say the same thing, although some of them allow for life-threatening-illness-new-religion-drastic-perspective-changing-quarter-life-crisis-event-type-things , just as you mentioned. But overall, these models maintain a similarly strong line about a person’s core personality being locked in their mid-to-late-teens. In my opinion, once you allow for the exception of profound existential experiences / desire to change as a way to reshape core personality traits , it all becomes semantics anyway. To quote a lawyer I once hired, “you can drive a truck through that loophole.”
I also think it’s important when thinking about this stuff to get past the theoretical extremes and deep personality disorders — people who are 100% antisocial or profoundly narcissistic or whatnot — and deal with the more usual case of the people who have some non-absolute, highly situational, and moldable tendencies. I’m talking about ordinary people – the people we meet every day in business – people who have variegated, diffuse strengths and weaknesses, but more importantly, who also have values and opportunities that they may choose to follow, according to their own free will.
Here is a fantastic recent article from the New York Times Magazine, by fellow Montrealer Steven Pinker. This guy gets it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html
There’s more to all this stuff than just genes or other innate tendencies. The new book by Malcolm Gladwell is an important read too. One of its messages is that excellence also comes through lots of practice, luck and help from friends. On the surface that sounds trite, and it might be, but… well… just read the damn book.
I get worried when people start dictating that certain people “should,” “shouldn’t,” or “cannot” do something truly successfully, based on their innate tendencies. This is not because I believe that anyone can or should do anything, but because there are so many amazing examples that contradict any conventional wisdom about fitting square pegs in square holes. But rather than getting caught in the trap of describing famous people, let’s keep it a little more ordinary: you mention sales, specifically,
Leaving aside the straw man argument of the extremes (I’m going to unilaterally replace your word “hate” with “very very uncomfortable” ..and if you don’t like it, take it out on me in our next game of Attack), sales development is actually an area that I can comment on from direct experience – both as a manager and now as a salesperson and as an instructor at a consulting firm for some of the world’s top performing companies, dealing with all kinds of personality types. I’ll try to write a future post on some of the interesting things that happen in the world of sales, including sales performance, sales leadership, sales management, sales coaching, and sales training. For the time being, let me just note that I disagree with your business prescription. The real bottom line about salespeople is this: There is more than one way to sell, and more than one kind of salesperson. For many companies, the most effective and professional salespeople, who are most liked by their clients (who can sniff out “fakes” as you say) and who generate the greatest successes, are not the most naturally gregarious people… not by a long shot. Also, the “natural” personalities who succeed “effortlessly” in sales in one environment will completely fail in another environment. Finally, there are also many reasons why a person could be intensely uncomfortable talking to other people, and they themselves don’t always know what the reason for that is and how that might be best mitigated in their role as a salesperson.
As for your caregiving situation example, well, that’s a touchy subject… definitely an area with diverse opinions about what constitutes a “good fit” or even just plain old competency.
My challenge to you is this: When you factor all the other things that might influence a person’s success in an endeavor – their talents, their drive, their situation, their support, their timing, their commitment, their practice, their beliefs and guiding principles – might you consider that the thing we call “innate talent” is a very small piece of the outcome? In hindsight, it’s easy to look back at a person who is doing something very successfully and come up with all kinds of reasons why it’s “in their nature” or was “inevitable.” I suspect often times it’s just the bundling together of a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t necessarily a “top five signature theme.” In many cases, it’s the person’s sixth, seventh or tenth ranking “themes,” bundled together with some happy accidents (e.g., they were the best candidate available at the time and place of the opportunity) and 10,000 hours of practice, Karate Kid style, and all we observers can see at the end of this messy process is the resulting fluid, flawless execution.
So here’s my stance on this StrengthsFinders stuff… at least for today: Use a strengths-based approach to professional development as just one of many tools, and try not to dictate functional roles based on personality profiling. I think the authors of StrengthsFinders would mostly agree with this message, except for the “as just one of many tools” part.
before i make a lengthier post (with more thought into it), i’ll even add this to your point: a lot of times we might discover a strength we have by trying things we wouldn’t normally have thought of being good at it.
so unless one does the horizontal exploration, one cannot find his full potential.
on another note, talking about extremes is the only way to be able to connect social sciences to arithmetic (which i have to mention again, i strongly disagree with, even if i sing a similar tune as the strengthdfinders ppl).
in extreme cases, with extreme personalities, the variables drop. at least to an acceptable enough level where we can make postulates (“a clinically depressive should not work at a palliative care unit”). the “normal” people, the middle 80%, can not be categorized, patterned, branded, cuz their personality is way too fluid. way too balanced.
That’s an interesting point you make about using extremes to isolate variables. Historically, much of research on the mechanics of the mind has utilized situations such as twins separated from birth, lobotomies, etc. to limit the number of factors at play and uncover the underlying patterns and “rules” of human behavior. And yet, returning to the example at hand, what’s confounding is how, for example, you might say a person with no legs should logically not pursue a goal of running a marathon. We all know how that story ends, of course. We don’t know which people will achieve greatness by playing to their strengths, and which will achieve greatness by overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, or even those middling bunch that try to overcome those odds, “fail” at the initial goal, but discover something else in the process.
I’ve been reading some Richard Feynman lately, and your issue with the “social sciences” is one he shared. Here’s a segment from a BBC interview hid did:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EZcpTTjjXY
On the flipside, Feynman had a respect for the non-scientific world, and is quoted as saying: “I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” I think that quote might be a bit out of context here — he was probably referring to problems of philosophy, faith, morality and other spheres. The dissection of human behavior, human drive and motivation, the discussion of where talent comes from and how it can be most effectively harnessed, is well within the sphere of the natural world that science tries to explain.
The first people to use bows and arrows didn’t wait until Newton worked out all the equations for understanding projectile motion. So tools like StrengthsFinder, with their lack of truly scientific rigor, can be effective nonetheless. Yet the audience craves an aura of statistics and science.
[...] Pecha-kutcha and other X-TREME POWERPOINTING is a topic I’ll save for a separate post. As for “Emotionally Intelligent Signage,” while that term may sound cool in a WIRED-techno-chic sort of way, a more accurate term for what Pink is describing would be “Empathetic Signage.” Of course, that sounds… emm… pathetic… so we’ll keep the meme as Pink has rendered it for marketing purposes, and quietly remind ourselves that Emotional Intelligence is a vast, evolving topic, of which this idea of “empathy” is just a part. (All pseudo-science rants are hereby directed to the StrengthsFinder comments thread.) [...]
you are right re: “innate talent”. it is definitely far from being the pivotal piece to success.
i wonder how much context has an influence on what the strengthsfinder style analysis can be useful for.
from a managerial point of view, when faced with the decision of who to assign to what position, i think it is reasonable to assume “playing for strengths” is the recommended course of action. assign the correct personality to the correct job. (as opposed to, assign them to the opposite jobs and expect them to change.)
In contrast, from a personal development point of view, working on the weaknesses would definitely be a much more productive exercise.
i agree things like should/shouldnt for career picking is definitely not recommended. in fact, i was advised at cegep career counseling that the career i picked today was a very bad idea for me. they based it on report cards, and choice of courses. i’m sure the logic was solid, but their data was not reliable. and it’s situations like this that worry me when it comes to “arithmetizing” social sciences.
Nicely put, well stated! Your distinction about context, management vs personal development, is quite sharp.
The manager looking for talent is like a prospector looking for gold. They can chisel away at any wall and hope gold will appear, or they can choose which wall to chisel against, based on what hints they can see, using their own experience, tools and talent as prospectors.
From a personal development point of view, my bias these days, when asked by people for career advice, is not to just have them figure out “what they’re good at that they also enjoy and can make money doing,” aka their “marketable strengths.” What I like to do is ask them what kind of environment they would most likely want to work in, be surrounded by, and then, based on the opportunities in the near vicinity, to test those waters. But that is just my bias at this particular time, and I am not a professional career advisor.
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Yep it’s just a tool.
I’m for listing all the 34 themes in order 1-34 as the report with the top 5 reported fully (maybe extra $5).
FYI mine are Activator,Woo,Strategic,Futuristic,Command
My feeling is that otherwise the suggestion that it is just an intro for the $750 gig is always there.
Now Marcus Buckingham has started his own gig too.
Was he pushed or did he leave over creative differences??
my two cents worth.