I wanted to continue our tradition of talking a little bit about the Strategic
strength and doing a bit of a theme overture or strength de jour, as you
would. In our database of over last time I looked just a few days ago we were
just over 12.5 million people in our database.
The strength of Strategic comes in at number five so it is in the top five of
our database of over 12.5 million people.
Strategic loves to answer the question of "What if?" It really excels at pattern
recognition, taking complexity and bringing order out of complexity. And then
on top of that, being able to figure out a way to work through that complexity and
find the best route forward. Strategic along with other strengths such as
Adaptability and also Arranger has a nice spontaneity to it. Ideation also has that
same type of spontaneity to it. It's
able to change the route that it needs to go. As you may have heard in
military lore, "a plan usually survives until it begins to be executed." And
so Strategic has that innate flexibility to
be able to determine a new way of moving forward.
Strategic might resist the status quo, they typically are not happy with the
status quo because they're always driving to improve things, to make it as
best as it can possibly be. A metaphor that we often use for Strategic, not
shockingly, is chess. Thinking several moves ahead not just thinking about the
next move that we have. The overuse of Strategic can drop you into the basement
as with many of, as with all of the themes actually. And Strategic might
sometimes spend a little bit of extra time in planning when they should be
activating. Though the themes that Strategic are most commonly correlated
with within our database would tend to drive it towards action. So you'll see
that and I'll talk about a couple of those in a moment.
Also Strategic when it is not happy with the status quo, that can sometimes
even make one miserable with the status quo! And a way that you can frustrate
Strategic is to not let it be proactive in changing the current status quo.
So that can be a phenomenon associated with Strategic, that as you're
working with your clients and as you're
coaching you want to be you want to be
looking at. Within our database it is most statistically commonly correlated
with Achiever. Most of you know that (Achiever has)
for a long time been the number one
strength within our database and
Strategic is fifth, so it makes sense that they
would very commonly come together. And then also the least likely strength that
you'll see with Strategic is Harmony. And
perhaps I'll ask Seth about that. See if he
he has any speculations about that when
we get into that part of it. Strategic overlaps if you filmed a Strategic and
looked at its behaviours you will see behaviors that are also associated with
some of the other themes. I often call Strategic and Restorative two sides of
the same planning coin. Restorative is trying to bring something that's broken
back to the status quo; Strategic is trying to take the status quo and to
make it even better, to actually maximize that
outcome. Strategic also sometimes is well
partnered with the Arranger. Arranger having to do with the most optimal
configuration of available resources and Strategic looking at those resources and
thinking " If this is what I've got, what do I
need to do with these resources to be
able to move forward."
I've already mentioned the spontaneity that we see implicit
in Strategic. We see a similar
spontaneity within Adaptability and also that would be a feature of Arranger
that we see manifested in a lot of folks who take our particular assessment.
Analytical well-served Strategic. Strategic in some ways you can say that
it combines Ideation and Analytical and being able to quickly sort through
alternative ways of moving forward and figuring out
the best way to do that. Someone
with Deliberative also works well with Strategic or someone who has both
Strategic and Deliberative would work very well because Deliberative is
looking for those land mines which is going to cause the plan to go south. So
that's another conceptually a theme that goes along quite well with
Strategic. And then finally I'll just mention Futuristic gives you an idea of
where you'd like to go and Strategic actually helps you to get there. So
that's a powerful combination that you'll find. And then of course you can
understand it would often also combine
with Maximizer in terms of making something
the best it can possibly be. What gives
Strategic joy is when they are able to tactically change the future. That's what
gives Strategic a joy. And what depresses Strategic is when you can't do that. One
of the nice things about Strategic is that it is a very high energy strength.
There's a lot of energy associated with that as people are constantly evaluating
what they can do and how they can make things better.
So in some of these calls you've seen that we come up with a theme
gesture. I liked that so I thought I would, actually
Seth and I work together
and he helped me to come up with this on a
good theme gesture for Strategic. And
actually Seth why don't you demonstrate the theme gesture. Show them the theme
gesture for Strategic if you would.
(Seth): Sure!
(Steven) Yeah... first, second, third. So that's our
theme gesture for Strategic. And if
that doesn't rock your world please tell us and we'll never do that again. I
thought you might be interested. (Jim): Stephen,
what is the one we say first
second third it's what's the significance of that?"
There's no significance! I just made it up, no just kidding!
No, first were gonna do this, then we're gonna do
this, then we're going to do this. So that's the meaning of the theme gesture.
Thanks for getting us to parse that out a little bit Jim. So anyway that's enough
with Strategic from our data base and from our research and from our experience.
The beautiful thing about the variability of strengths
is that a strength shows up differently in every person. You'll find
some commonalities between individuals but the beauty and the power of
Strengthsfinder is that a strength will manifest in highly idiosyncratic ways
with different individuals