Team Is Under 10% On Influencing Strengths — Is This A Weak CliftonStrengths Lineup?

Influencing Strengths Not Part Of Your Top 5? Chill, You're Not Alone   

It’s totally normal for you or your team to hope for a balanced distribution of themes across all four domains of strengths: strategic thinking, relationships, executing, and influencing. You may think that you are not as productive and effective if you lack the talent themes from one or more categories. For example, being low or bare on influencing strengths could make you feel you are disconnected, unconvincing, or misunderstood.

The thing is, CliftonStrengths assessment might surprise you. Ideal does not mean evenly spread. In fact, when you look at the database of all people who have taken the StrengthsFinder assessment, you'll see influencing strengths in 15% of the top 5. 

If you're doing the math with us, you've already picked up on the fact that each domain does not get a tidy 25% count. So no worries. If you have 5% influencing strengths or 20% on your team, the secret is to work with what you have.

Here's Lisa Cummings to show you how (full transcript of the episode):

You're listening to Lead Through Strengths, where you'll learn to apply your greatest strengths at work. I'm your host, Lisa Cummings, and I gotta tell you, it's tough to find something at work that is more energizing than using your strengths at work every day. 

Today we are in a season of the show where we are moving into question and answers from you, the listeners. Today's question: 

“We're just starting CliftonStrengths with the team, and we noticed a lack of influencing strengths."

So she goes on to ask about how to address this as a team. They have already talked about how to address when you have a "deficiency." 

I'm putting that word in quotes, about when you're missing a talent as an individual person, but how do you address these ideas as a team?

Now first, if you're new to CliftonStrengths or the book StrengthsFinder 2.0, when she's mentioning influencing themes, that is one of the four main domains of talent. Some people call these the four leadership domains. Sometimes I call them the four demands on our personal leadership. Beyond Influencing strengths, the other categories are:

• Relationships
• Strategic thinking
• Executing

So the first thing to know is — hey, good news, this means you’re normal!

When you look at the whole database of people who have taken CliftonStrengths — more than 24 million people — that instances of influencing strengths (talent themes) in the top 5 is 15%. So it's not an evenly spread dynamic.

So