How Your Christmas Shopping Can Identify Your Unique Talents and Improve Your Team

It’s Dec 23rd. Are all the boxes on your list checked? Have you even started shopping? Have you been done for 2 weeks? DO YOU EVEN HAVE A LIST??When you go shopping Do you talk to EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. IN. THE. STORE? Do you dread the store because of the people?

What happens when the single item you absolutely needed to get is no longer available? How do you respond to that? Do you THRIVE in the last-minute Christmas Eve shopping thrill? Does the thought of leaving it to Christmas Eve make you break out in hives?

Am I sounding like Dr. Seuss? Well then good, because even the Grinch had strengths – but maybe he was just feeling like he didn’t matter, and it took Cindy-Lou Who to help him find his flow. Did Cindy-Lou Who go on to be a world-renowned Coach?

If you’ve been following me enough, you know that I speak a lot about bringing out who you are as an individual or a team so you can be the best leader, teammate, team, or colleague you can be.?If you haven’t been following, what are you waiting for??

The best leaders start by knowing themselves and then look to a deeper understanding of those whom they lead – period. The best teammates seek to engage the natural talents of the members of their team. When you know what makes the individuals on your team uniquely talented and acknowledge those unique traits purposefully, you create a stronger foundation and foster engagement. Both are recipes for greater longer-term success.

And the best part of all, when all of these come together with clarity, the Christmas Bells start to go off – you’ll be making sweet music in your head as you fire on all cylinders and your team will be firing away.

Let's take a look.

As a coach, I work with people and teams to induce success by helping both identify their strengths. We use the CliftonStrengths as a tool to achieve this and it is always eye-opening! It is very personal to you. Talents are naturally recurring feelings of thought, behaviors, or feelings.?I’ll attribute some of them to this exercise to give you some flavor into the individual talent themes that emerge for you in some way – strong or weak – every day. There are 34.

Take a snapshot of your past month from Thanksgiving until right now. Break it up into three segments. The 10,000 ft view. Your process. Your social approach to it all.

1) The 10,000 Ft View:

Think about the timeline of this past month. Think back to Black Friday. Were you already feeling like if you didn’t start that day you would be behind? Do you make a list and can you possibly not ever function without having a list? You probably have high Achiever or Discipline in your strengths. Those with both Achiever and Discipline high in their talent themes come at life with the mindset that “I accomplish more than others because I plan my work and then I work my plan. My organization enhances my intensity.” They are both important executing themes.

Can you identify with this? If so how do you use it to your advantage? If you don’t identify with it that’s okay too, just think about what behaviors you use to be successful in how you execute.

Now, look at your workplace. When you work with someone who needs to have a checklist and start acting on it right away but you act more from energy than you do from being organized. How do you handle it with them? Do you resent them and complain to your friends? Or do you recognize that you both do things differently and feed off of each other??In so doing, you allow for each of your strengths in executing your goals to be used and become an even better duo!

2) Your Process:

Think about your process. The steps you take to get the gifts under that tree. How do you approach it?

Think about your "list." Everyone has a list but where does your list live? Spreadsheet? One of those handy “to-do” post-it notes that have a checklist on it? (Did you lose that checklist?). Is it sitting in your brain and the thought of writing it down is foreign to you? Does that bother you that you’re the way you are when it comes to lists?

When you actually go and buy that dreaded annual sweater for your dad, do you need to have all of the options in your hand in front of you to weigh the outcomes? Do you grab the first one you see, or do you hold 5 of the same sweater in your hand because you can’t pick the best one? You don’t want to get the wrong one!!! You may draw on what has worked in the past and use your Context talent to make your decision.

How this plays out is an example of certain talent themes: Someone with strong Deliberative talents is careful and vigilant. You bring a thorough and conscientious approach to making decisions. You avoid making mistakes by identifying by considering the pros and cons of your actions.

Someone with high Activator in their themes approaches things through the lens of “doing something is better than doing nothing.” While you may concede that analysis has its uses or that debating a topic can yield results, deep down you need to act, and once your decision is made to buy a sweater you just buy a sweater.

So what do you think about how this may play out in your everyday life in your team? Do you work with a teammate who approaches things in a way that frustrates you by just acting and seemingly not thinking about the consequences? Or flip it around, do you feel as though someone on your team puts way too much thought into each decision??Both have their strengths in executing for your team.

Appreciating your teammate for what they bring and instead leveraging how they approach their decision-making process can be enormously impactful in improving productivity and performance!

3) Your social approach to it all:

Where did you go to buy the gifts? Amazon has made things incredibly easy. But for you is Amazon a way to increase efficiency? Is it a way to avoid people? Does the online aspect of it have its limitations for you because it is missing an important aspect – the people? Or is that the best possible element of it all for you – avoiding the people!!!

When you do have to go to a store. How do you approach that? Are the people around you an obstacle to your goal or do you draw energy from them? Do you seek interaction with the people who are helping you or fellow shoppers? Or is that the most draining thing of it all?

Those with strong WOO talents enjoy the challenge of encountering new people and gaining their esteem. WOO stands for “Winning Others Over.” To someone with high WOO, no one is a stranger, just friends they haven’t met yet. WOO is an important influencing theme.

Can you name the colleague whom you think has particularly high WOO in their talent themes? I bet you can. How do you feel about how they interact with strangers? Does it seem draining to you? If so, ask yourself, do you use their talent to help you meet new people who can help your business? Have you thought about how your approach to people may marry well with your colleague's WOO talent to be a more productive team and get the best results?

Taking time to reflect on how you do what you do is a vital exercise in your own development, the development of your team, and your team's culture.

A concept as seemingly easy as buying gifts can teach you so much about how you and your team operate. There are so many other life examples that we can learn from and I encourage a process of examining your strengths to do so!

By the way. If you haven’t guessed. My #1 ranked talent theme out of all 34 is WOO, and I can’t wait to meet you.

www.unlockperformance.co

*CliftonStrengths and their descriptions are the possession of Gallup

#Strengths #Cliftonstrengths #Teamwork