A month or so ago, it was announced that we’d be going on an off-site for work. This wasn’t inspiring. I’m an introvert, so dealing with many people in one place, especially under a regime of enforced interactions or ‘fun’, significantly drains my energy. I don’t do city breaks either, so jaunting over to Paris or Brussels for endless ‘sessions’ in an office didn’t excite me.
It turned out it was in Chamonix, France, which changed things significantly. All the business and team-building stuff was also insightful and interesting, particularly the CliftonStrengths team-building we undertook.
What we’re doing here
Don’t panic. This isn’t some deep business post. If you’re remotely interested in my more professional life, you can check it out at elucidate.net. This article is in my personal blog section of this site, so it’s me reflecting on what the process revealed and how this relates to myself and the topics I post here.
You’ll get one of those introspect posts where I talk about something that has resulted in an exciting way of understanding myself, which I breezily assume is also interesting or helpful to others while hopefully making it mildly interesting.
What are CliftonStrengths?
Okay, I lied a bit. Before we continue, we’ll have to do a small amount of business to have context on what CliftonStrengths are.
CliftonStrengths is about identifying your talents. You might develop different skills, areas of expertise and knowledge, but CliftonStrength talents will remain quite sticky, influencing the skills, expertise and knowledge areas you drift to and how you apply them.
To obtain your CliftonStrengths, you take a 30-minute assessment. It involves a series of questions on the ‘degree of identification’ model, and you have around 20 seconds to answer each question. It’s the usual drill, with repeated questions asked in different ways to find consistency and iron out outliers. The result is you get identified against your CliftonStrength themes, of which there are 34 in four domains. You can investigate further or move on. My results or all you need to know for this post.
Let’s play a game before we move on. If you’re so inclined and you know me a bit in real life or social media, what domains do you think I fell in? My top 5 themes follow a 3-1-1 pattern, which means I didn’t have a single theme in one domain. If that’s too much, maybe guess which domain I didn’t have a single theme in or which domain I had three in?
A process for the self-aware
People came out of the process feeling their themes (you get ten identified with a focus on the top five) represented themselves, while others didn’t think the process did a good job. I believe this identifies something about the person as well.
It strikes me that the less you understand yourself and the degree to which you are self-aware might influence the test. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’m at a place where I understand who I am pretty well, which was reflected in the assessment’s almost telepathic accuracy. I wasn’t sure about it as I paced through the questions, but the result was almost prescient.
I’m not sure the process would have been as accurate back when I was in the first decade of my career, or it might have reflected my confusion and, as a result, not appeared as a solid reflection. It’s also possible it would have still been as accurate; it’s just I wasn’t mature enough to gain the benefits of my themes and instead was experiencing the negatives of some of them (something I realised writing this, which we’ll come back to).
What I learned
As indicated earlier my breakdown was 3-1-1, specifically Strategic Thinking (3), Executing (1) and Relationship Building (1). I was surprised I got so many in strategic thinking, especially since it accounts for five of the larger ten!
The degree to which these themes could be said to exist in a virtuous circle that defines how I breathe is shocking.
1. Intellection
Theme number one. If one of the (what was) regular gaming groups is reading this now, he’ll be laughing, along with half my relatives. Hell, I was laughing while realising how damned accurate it was.
The inellection theme tends to bring the following: –
- The ability to explain complicated subjects in simple terms
- An appetite for thinking and reflection (so funny)
- A depth of understanding and wisdom
- Energy and desire to think about areas of interest
- Valuable insights that might otherwise be overlooked
I like to think. I adore mental activity. I exist in my frackin’ head. I’m introspective and am my own best companion. I’m constantly absorbing information, reflecting on it and picking things out later to apply to problems in ways people often don’t even recognise they connect (albeit that may be a bit of the intellection, strategic and connectedness themes coming together virtuously).
I don’t just do something; almost anything I enjoy has at least a light intellectual component. If it doesn’t, I’ve probably already stopped doing it in the time it takes to write this sentence. Reading. When watching TV shows, the ones I value shoot off thoughts in my head. Travel is an intellectual exercise of self-discovery. I don’t just play role-playing games or run my rare campaigns; I am getting something out of them beyond just playing. There is always a theme, an idea or something I want to prove I can do.
Anything that doesn’t contain this intellectual element doesn’t last the distance or get regulated to the brain food version of McDonald’s. Similarly, it lacks investment and doesn’t resonate as an experience.
The fact this post exists is a testament to this theme!
2. Strategic
I was surprised this appeared because I didn’t see what I did as strategic, but on reflection, I always do it.
The strategic theme tends to bring the following: –
- An ability to recognise patterns of data and determine the best way to proceed
- Flexibility to find an alternative way forward
- A creative anticipation of what may happen
- A willingness to consider all of the possibilities
I brand myself under the tagline ‘making complexity actionable’ as I realized that was the common thing I was doing professionally. I tend to orient things to putting things in a position to succeed. I focus on what could be. I find my way through complexity by combining and seeing things others miss to forge a path forward.
This filters into my hobbies. There is a reason I don’t just run loads of role-playing games serially. While some of it is related to never doing anything consistently for too long, the other part is that I approach the campaigns I run strategically. I enjoy the process of understanding how they can be successful. In this case, it could be categorised as over-thinking, but as long as it’s not getting in the way of what I’m enjoying, who cares? There is a reason I’ve written posts on what might be my next role-playing campaign endeavour as it’s my intellection, strategic and learning themes kicking in.
I was too focused on ‘strategy’ being related to people with specific job titles or running whole companies or large departments. The fascinating thing is strategy can be about dealing with complexity.
3. Learner
The correlation between lack of learning and when I start finding things bland and a bit soulless is very high.
The earner theme tends to bring the following: –
- A more complete picture
- A curious mind with a desire to learn and find out more
- A curiosity to discover new things
- A desire for continuous improvement
- Courage when venturing into the unknown
It’s also about the process as much as the subjects. I realised this the most during my MBA. I don’t think I’ve used any specific subject directly from that existentially challenging academic period of my life, but the challenging learning process transformed me.
I came out of my MBA expressing complexity in diagrams and three columns (you laugh; it’s a superpower, honest).
I love the journey from ignorance to competence, and as I’ve grown, it has made me substantially less stressed (the problem in my younger years was that it used to stress me out). I love the journey of getting there and recognising when I know just enough.
I’ve mentioned the MBA—a 10K investment just because I wanted to learn. Many people called this nuts, but it was brilliant. You can even put YouTube in this category. In addition to wanting to help people, one of the reasons I stuck with it was the challenge of attempting the myriad of skills it takes. It just challenged me continuously, and I would not let go. What I learned is also why I don’t consider it a failure.
Even the period immediately after recovering from my divorce was driven by learning as I pushed travel boundaries I’d never pushed before as part of learning about myself rather than someone who was more a combined person with someone else.
4. Responsibility
There is a reason I am wary of commitments. One is I know if it’s not continuously feeding my intellection, I’ll drop that shit. The second reason is it pains me to let things go. This is a minefield of things that can be used to answer those ‘what are your negatives’ questions in interviews while avoiding the question and sneaking in a positive.
The responsibility theme tends to bring the following: –
- Drive to do things right
- Relationships built on trust
- Stable values such as honesty, dependability and loyalty
- Ownership to deliver on promises
- Conscientiousness and impeccable ethics
I take psychological ownership of anything I commit to, which is excellent, especially since I’ve learned to recognise when things are best not with me anymore. I emotionally bond to completing these things and being able to say I’ve done them, and my intellection and strategic themes mean the more complicated it is, the better. It also has to be done right. I like to think my mature self recognises “right enough”, while when I was younger, it may have been a damaging obsession.
I can see how combinations of my themes, combined with this one, leave lasting impressions on people that amount to my version of influencing—especially from the perspective of those who have worked with me in the past.
It manifests in my hobbies as I don’t like to fail. I used to have zero perspective on it. This meant that the period when I tended to take role-playing games to character creation or a few sessions before bombing out as a GM was immensely painful.
It was a cycle of brutal assaults on my sense of responsibility.
I’ve become very good at setting myself up for success and putting things into perspective. Sometimes, people are taken aback by how direct I can be about not undertaking things I see as inevitably failing. I’m not super negative; it’s just that sometimes I can see the weight of the odds. At work, there are a small number of times I wish I’d put my prediction in a brown envelope and opened it later.
5. Connection
I was surprised by this one as it initially read as deep hippy stuff, and I always feel like if I have a problem, it’s a sense of brutal practicality. Then I reflected on it.
Connection tends to bring the following: –
- A big-picture perspective
- An integration of parts into wholes
- A considerate, caring and accepting approach
- A desire to be part of something bigger than myself
- An appreciation of the mystery and wonder of life and all creation
In my experience, there is no such thing as luck.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars
I have a high locus of control. Why is that? It’s because, while I don’t think everything happens for a reason, you can certainly put things in place to ensure that’s more the case than not! I’m happy to revel in the humdrum of life; I certainly don’t believe I will change the world.
I believe in purpose with a small ‘p’.
I like to think I am considerate, caring and accepting, albeit my introverted, intellection-focused self may not actively discuss it much. I assume it comes across, which I must admit, I sometimes wonder if it does. That intellection can mean you engage with topics and assume people realise you’re coming at it from the right place.
I’m not religious, but I was part of an organised religion until I was 18 (it’s close enough). I continuously look for purpose with a small ‘p’. It’s undoubtedly true that some things I do in life have a purpose, often the bigger things. Not every moment I spend at home, but travelling or in educational endeavours.
It’s this one that causes me to do crazy shit like an attempt to migrate to Australia, study for an MBA or purchase a camper van. Some might say that ‘p’ is occasionally not that small. Okay, now I think about it, this theme has driven me to some crazy and glorious shit not everyone steps into.
Well, damned.
Some years of pain
This process keeps giving, as I realised something while writing this post. If we ignore social anxiety factors like being very shy when I was younger, these themes explain a lot about the parts of my life when I’ve been less happy or content with myself.
Here are some things that have been periodically true in the past when I’ve understood myself less: –
- An ability to over-analyse to the point it holds me back (Intellection)
- Seeing all the bad things that could happen (Strategic)
- The stress of what I realise I don’t know (Learner)
- Taking on things I could never personally resolve (Responsibility)
- The Australia migration debacle (Connectedness)
These things often haven’t been the fault but have made things worse. Let’s say every theme has a dark side, and a thread through my life has been learning to avoid the dark sides of these themes and mine the positives.
I spent too long with one of my hobbies in a weird place due to (1). I was depressed while being unemployed or under-employed for 2 years post-2008 because of (2). I’d have periods of deep stress in my career when the truth is the only person who expected it of me was myself (3 and 4). Sometimes, those big, bold choices to reach out to the wonder of the wider world aren’t the best (5), and I’m not ready for them as a person.
Well, mic drop.
And, Finally…
Well, if you got this far, respect. This process has kept on giving for me, even to the point of writing this post. I wouldn’t say being presented with these themes told me things I didn’t know, but having things reflected back at you that you sort of understand, in a structured framework, is often beneficial.
I’m not the biggest fan of these sorts of corporate tools and organised team-building activities, but based on my experience of the whole CliftonStrengths thing, should you get a chance to go through it (and the experience is probably facilitator-dependent), I’d recommend engaging with it 110%. The focus at the off-site wasn’t really on microscope levels of self-analysis; it was more about how we interacted as individuals and teams, and it was beneficial, fun and informative.