Using your top strengths to lead through challenges

Executive overview

Most leaders instinctively try to fix their weaknesses when things get hard. The problem: spending energy on low-ranked talents rarely improves results and drains energy. The better move is to identify your natural "easy buttons" and aim them directly at the obstacle.

Stop chasing your weakness floor — your strengths ceiling is higher, and it's already yours.

What CliftonStrengths is (and isn't)

• Not a personality assessment — designed as a performance tool
• 34 themes ranked by instinct and natural preference, not skill level
• Top talents = easy buttons: the approaches that cost you the least energy and produce the most output
• You will always have a bottom five; raising them just creates a new bottom five
• The bottom is worth examining only to understand what drains you — not to fix it

Why the weakness trap persists

• Strengths feel easy, so people discount them as "not special"
• Hard-won skills feel more valuable — even when they produce worse results
• Organisational cultures often reward a particular style; people try to mimic it
• The fish-climbing-a-tree problem: obvious in metaphor, invisible in daily work
• Pain is often the first signal — feeling drained, under-performing, wanting to quit

Applying strengths to a live challenge

• When a problem arises, ask: "If there were an easy button for this, what would it look like?"
• Keep a personalised list of your top strengths visible at your desk as a prompt
• Example: a team facing irate customer escalations — one member with Intellectual, Restorative, and Competition themes volunteered to own escalation calls he found energising; other team members were freed up to fix root causes
• One person's strength realignment changed the whole team's capacity and morale
• The question to ask the team: "What talents do we have in the room that could support this issue?"

The relator vs. woo distinction in practice

• Relator: deep one-on-one connections, quality over quantity, more introverted orientation
• Woo (Winning Others Over): broad social energy, thrives meeting new people, quantity of relationships
• Misreading this distinction is costly — working in the wrong mode depletes energy regardless of effort
• Host Dave Stachowiak nearly quit his Dale Carnegie role after a year of trying to lead through woo (ranked 33rd) instead of relator (ranked 4th)
• Switching to relator-aligned activities — writing, online work, small group coaching — changed his trajectory
• Cultures reward one style; checking your own report tells you whether you're the fish or the swimmer

Making strengths a lasting practice

• One-time assessments don't work; the teams that benefit are the ones who talk about strengths regularly
• Strengths apply to every domain: feedback, conflict resolution, goal-setting, delegation, situational decisions
• Post-event activation matters: 12-week question prompts keep the lens active after retreats
• Over time, team members start coaching each other — the leader doesn't carry it alone
• Revisit your top 5–10 when a new challenge arrives; something almost always surfaces that you hadn't considered

Delegation through a strengths lens

• Default delegation logic: math equation — is the ramp-up time worth the frequency of the task?
• Better delegation logic: whose strengths align with this task? Withholding it may block their development
• Holding on to tasks that fit someone else's strengths better is a selfish act — even if efficient for you
• Connects to Individualization talent: making the connection between a person's strengths and the work assigned to them
• Delegation viewed this way opens development pathways that a frequency calculation never surfaces