Serving Bread

A few years ago, I went through the StrengthsFinder material as part of my continued leadership development. Though I was cognitively aware of the value to develop strengths, the material that we studied as a staff team during that season propelled me to evaluate and recognize gifts and strengths in a new light.

The basic premise of strengths based theory is that rather than work on our weaknesses, we should be developing our strengths. Rather than always focus on how to fix the problems, we should put our energy in making the things that make us thrive be more central to our lives.

What has been helpful in this material is that this leadership tool validates our strengths and urges us to focus more energy in developing them. I think it was back in high school when a teacher mentioned to me that we should not just learn from the sub-par papers that we write, but also from the papers that score us an A. In fact, she said, there is a lot we can learn from our successes. The strengths theory material focuses our energy to learn on our leadership successes and to put them to practice.

Last year, I read Marcus Buckingham’s Go Put Your Strengths to Work. You can get the thesis of this book from just the title. It was helpful to go through his exercises and assess where my passions and joys lie.

This particular theory does have it’s flaws. Though it can be formative, it cannot be the only leadership development principle at work in our lives. Leadership and jobs often require us to put much energy into things that we do not particularly like. They often will force us to develop skills in areas that are not our strengths or even our passions. And sometimes, we need feedback on our weaknesses and we need to face the failures of our live.

But our strengths do count. For too many leaders, their passions, gifts and strengths are glossed over and feedback is often unfairly focused on weaknesses and failures. Leadership is to develop our strengths so that we can multiply them to make an even greater impact.

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