Business Tips
What are your unique leadership strengths?
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- Parent Category: Business Tips
- Category: Leadership
How to discover your strengths is to take some leadership self-assessments, such as DISCus or, the PX-12 Profiler and to ask others with whom you have worked closely for regular feedback. Today, there are a number of books available online or at your local bookstore that help you discover the foundation of your signature strengths.
Seeing ourselves clearly does many things:
• It allows us to control impulses and select the most appropriate behaviours,
• It shows us how to avoid reacting in negative and potentially self-limiting ways,
• Knowing our strengths and limitations makes us more understanding of others,
• Gaining an understanding of issues reduces conflict in ourselves and in others.
Being aware of the effect of your personality and default behaviour on the people in your life helps you to engineer a better communication and leadership style.
There is one last point to make regarding discovering and leveraging your life signature talents, that is a strength, taken too far, can be a weakness. For example, "competitiveness" when taken to the extreme; means winning at all costs. Or when someone who is extremely "analytical" overuses this strength, it can lead to needing more information constantly before making a decision (analysis paralysis).
Here are some business bestseller books that you can read to learn how to be an effective leader.
"Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. in 2001 helped you to identify your innate signature talents so that you can build them into leadership strengths. Now there is newer (2007) business bestseller book called "Strengthsfinder 2.0" that utilizes the same self assessment.
You can find these books at your local bookshop or purchase them online. On the inside of the book jacket cover there is a unique code number to take the online www.Strengthsfinder.com self-assessment.
When you receive your top five "signature talents" report, you need to keep them in front of you so when a situation arises, you may refer to your top five signature talents and decide which to put into action when facing the new leadership situation.
Reference: Vickie Bevenour: ‘Unleashing Your Inner Leader: An Executive Coach Tells All’ (Wiley and SAS Business Series)