Beth Wallace, administrative manager
What are your strengths? How can you use them in your daily job tasks or to help you find a good job fit? How can your strengths be best utilized to benefit the company and you? Many people don’t know their strong points or how to put into words what those strengths are, which can leave people feeling unfulfilled and unhappy in their jobs. StrengthsFinder 2.0 is a book by Tom Rath, with a corresponding quiz that includes personality and situational questions. The results of the quiz generate one’s top five strengths out of the 34 defined options. Rath’s method is based on the idea that focusing on and building your strengths benefits you more than trying to become better at your weaknesses. As he says in his book, “You cannot be anything you want to be – but you can be a lot more of who you already are.”
Each of us in IMI Association Executives participated in StrengthsFinder to determine and define our team members’ strengths. As in many industries, there are periods of high and low volume workload – and we like to help each other out around the office. Who do I go to when I have a big project that requires thinking through the possible issues and problems that may arise? Knowing our team members’ strengths helps us identify our best resource for specific tasks. After learning my co-workers’ strengths, I know I could go to someone with Deliberative (a cautious, considerate decision making quality) as a strength to talk through the decisions that are being considered. Also, understanding how to work with and communicate with co-workers based on their strengths creates a more effective and efficient environment.
To make sure we fully utilized this resource, we all completed the quiz and met in groups to discuss the results. We dug deeper into our strengths and how they apply to our current position or in other areas the association needs help. The results were actually quite interesting to analyze and interpret. IMI’s mission is “Building Relationships. Delivering Solutions.” The two common categories that most individuals reported strengths in were Relationship Building and Executing. These categories align with our mission, showing that we have the right people to advance IMI’s mission. Others’ strengths fell into Influencing and Strategic Planning, both of which are very important to the success of IMI and our clients. The Influencers are wonderful people to interact with our members and Board of Directors; and we know we would struggle without our Planners that keep us moving and in the right direction.
Overall we were happy with the results and excited at the potential to utilize our strengths to help our associations grow and succeed. StrengthsFinder is also a great exercise for association boards or other volunteers to complete as a group. Recognizing and utilizing the natural strengths each of us has is a great way to maximize the impact of your team.
Want to know more about association management? Contact us info@imiae.com to find out more about what IMI Association Executives can do for your organization.
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