Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Strengthsfinder

Working Genius vs. StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths)

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cliftonstrengths vs working genius

In the leadership world, there’s been a huge uptake of the Working Genius. Bravo to Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group for putting out an extraordinary assessment and tool to help leaders and organizations discover the six phases of work, and how to work better with each other!

Even though I’ve been a certified Gallup Strengths Performance Coach (Strengths Advisor) since 2008, that’s not the only assessment that I use in my leadership and coaching. In fact, when I find one that fills a unique role, I become as much of an advocate for that one as I am with the StrengthsFinder assessment (now known as CliftonStrengths).

Enter: The Working Genius.

I recently had my entire staff team at Beulah complete the Working Genius assessment. Since we also use the StrengthsFinder assessment in performance management, I wanted to outline how the two of them compare and contrast with each other. And since I couldn’t find a comparative chart online, I went ahead and drew one up.

I hope you find this helpful.

StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths) vs. Working Genius

STRENGTHSFINDER (CLIFTONSTRENGTHS)WORKING GENIUS
PURPOSE:To discover how you approach your work.To discover how you work.
WHAT:The assessment helps you identify your Top 5 themes out of 34.The assessment helps you identify your two Working Geniuses, two Working Competencies, and two Working Frustrations.
PHILOSOPHY:The best of the best focus on their strengths, while managing their weaknesses.You are at your best when you focus on your Working Genius, and manage your working frustrations.
CHARACTER/MORALS:There are no bad StrengthsFinder themes.There are no bad Working Geniuses.
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR WEAKNESSES:Use complimentary themes, or partner with others who are strong at what you’re weak in.Partner with others who have a Genius where your Frustration is, and vice versa.
CATEGORIES:There are four domains of strengths: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking.There are three phases of work: Ideation, Activation, and Implementation.
CREATOR:GallupThe Table Group

How to Get People to Serve in Your Church

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William Wallace, Melinda Gates, Hitler, Elvis Presley, Billy Graham, Nelson Mandela, Bono, and Jeff Bezos.

What’s your off-the-cuff reaction when you hear those names? Do you think of similarities or differences? If you could group them together with one word, which one would you use?

Would the word “leader” come to mind?

Now you may or may not agree on how effective each one of those individuals were (or are) as leaders, but it’s clear that when they acted, people followed. They led and history is different because of it.

When leaders act, people follow. And history is different because of it.

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While William Wallace led with passion to secure Scottish freedom from the English, Melinda Gates has led with compassion to give away more money than most people can even begin to fathom. While Hitler led the Germans with an authoritarian grip, Elvis Presley led with his charisma and rolling tunes.

Haven’t you ever noticed that as quickly as you can name leaders, you are able to name different attributes that make each of them uniquely effective? This is because there is no silver bullet to leadership. There is no common set of characteristics that—when put together—produce the end result of a leader.

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I LOVE Learning

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learning books

There’s a funny commercial that I recently saw on Hulu. It was a video of Oprah essentially repeating the same thing over and over again. Here’s her script,

This is the joy for me. I LOVE bread. I LOVE bread. I now just manage it. So I don’t deny myself bread. I have bread everyday. I have bread everyday. That’s the genius of this program. I have lost 26 pounds and I have eaten bread every single day!

No, Oprah didn’t pay half a million dollars for these commercial spots just so that she could rant about her love for bread. This was a commercial for…you guessed it, Weight Watchers.

As cheesy as that commercial might be, I get it. When you love something, you just want to tell others about it. You want to proclaim it on the rooftops. And yes, while I do love bread, this post isn’t about ciabatta, focaccia, baguettes, or pretzel buns. This post is about learning.

I LOVE learning.

In the midst of loving and serving my wife and three children, a full-time job leading and running NewChurches.com, preaching at least twice a month at my church, hosting a twice-a-week podcast, writing my new book with B&H (No Silver Bullets), speaking about the book I just co-wrote with Ed Stetzer (Planting Missional Churches) and writing curriculum for Bible Studies for Life and The Gospel Project, I still carve time away to learn.

This is because I know that…

The moment you stop learning is the moment you’ll stop growing

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I love and hate this quote from Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton,

We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!

I hate that! I don’t want to be a beginner, I want to be an expert. But when I chew on the truth of those words, I realize the genius of it.

The moment we see ourselves as experts is the moment we allow pride to subtly seep into our lives.

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Two Ways to Overcome Your Weaknesses

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mountain
Doug88888 – Flickr

There was a time in my life where I dreaded the thought of meeting new people. It’s not that I was a germaphobe or had anthropophobia (the fear of people), it was just that I preferred to spend time with people I knew, rather than do the small talk mingling thing.

This first came to light when I started pastoring. I remember, it was a weekday morning and I needed coffee (and no, I don’t have an addiction). I was at the office and could’ve easily walked a few steps into the kitchen and made my own pot, but I soon realized that it was the day that all the mom’s met in the basement of the church for fellowship. That only meant one thing: free coffee + cream puffs + ton of desserts.

Knowing that there would be a lot of mom’s and young children, I plotted my strategy as I made my way to the basement:

  • Rule #1: Keep moving
  • Rule #2: Smile and say hi, but focus on walking into the kitchen
  • Rule #3: Never stop moving

When I opened the basement doors, there were over 50+ women and young children mingling, in what looked like, absolute chaos (at the time I was newly married without kids). In a cold sweat, I immediately made my way towards the kitchen remembering to never stop moving. As I turned the corner to walk into the kitchen, I soon discovered that there were another 40+ women and children hiding around the bend. So staying true to my rules, I never stopped moving. I just shifted directions and went straight back upstairs into the office kitchen, where I forewent the cream puffs, and made my own coffee.

As I was making my own coffee, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “What’s wrong with me? Why did I act that way? Why was I in such a nervous cold sweat when I saw all those moms and kids?” As a new pastor, I knew this was a glaring weakness. I knew how important it was to be able to meet new people, remember their names, and minister to them.

Was it that I didn’t like moms and children? Well, considering the fact that I didn’t have children at that time, perhaps I just didn’t know what to do with them, and let’s face it, mothers can be intimidating at times. But I didn’t think that was quite it. So what was it?

As I continued to reflect on my behavior and this apparent weakness of mine, I began reflecting on other situations that mimicked this one – situations where I was in a sea of new and unfamiliar faces. The only other parallel that came to mind was when I was attending a conference, teaching a class, or preaching a sermon. Oddly enough, in each of those situations, I was a completely different person – I loved meeting new people and I would even remember their names, most of the time!

So what was wrong with me? Why was I acting like Jekyll and Hyde?

Through the journey of discovering my strengths (click here for a post where I explain this), the one thing that I knew about myself was that I was a Developer. I loved helping people grow and I loved helping things develop. In other words, I loved everything about development. So when I compared both situations in light of my strengths, a lightbulb came on! In conferences and when I’m teaching or preaching, my posture is towards development – so I don’t mind meeting new people – in fact, I welcome and pursue it! However, to that group of moms and kids, my purpose was not to develop any of them – it was merely to get coffee and cream puffs.

So if I wanted to overcome my glaring weakness of meeting new people, all I had to do was shift my perspective and reframe the situation. Instead of viewing others as strangers, I needed to view them through my developer lens. So that means every stranger is an individual that I can either develop, or an individual who can develop me.

To overcome your weaknesses, shift your perspective and reframe the situation.

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Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling for Pastors

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shattered glass
GabPRR – Flickr

What do you do when your church is growing and your responsibilities are increasing?

There are only two options: You either hire another staff member, or get better at distributing your work. If you don’t do either, then there will be a glass ceiling that will forever haunt you. I answered the former solution in an earlier post, so today we’ll look at the importance of distributing your work.

I love this quote by Sun Tzu from The Art of War:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

To paraphrase, if you know your enemy, you’ll win 50% of the time, but if you know yourself, you’ll win the other half.

How often do we spend all our time reading the latest strategies and methods for leadership and ministry, while neglecting the important task of learning what kind of leader God has made us to be? This reminds me of that old Hebraic tale of Rabbi Zusya and Moses: When he was an old man, Zusya said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

The reason we would rather live someone else’s story, than discover our own, is because introspection is hard work.

However, unless you discover how God has uniquely wired you, then you’ll never know your unique kingdom contribution, and that glass ceiling will follow you everywhere.

To break through your glass ceiling, you need to discover how God has uniquely wired you.

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So let’s get back to that original question, what do you do when your church is growing and your responsibilities are increasing?

Well, first of all, you better not take it all on yourself! That only leads to burnout. So you need to get better at delegation.

There’s a fork in the road at this point. There are some who believe that you need to surround yourself with a team and let them choose what they want to do, while you get the scraps. While this may sound servant-like and altruistic, it’s actually foolish. Play this out for a bit. If you keep on giving away the things that you do best and the things that give you life, where do you think you’ll end up? That’s right. Burnout. Again.

Instead, you actually need to ask yourself two questions: What are the leadership responsibilities unique to my role? And how do my strengths line up with those tasks? Answering both questions will take a lot of time, but the first question is pretty straightforward since you just need to write out all of your responsibilities and tasks, and then systematically cross out the ones that others can do. You will then be left with a list of responsibilities and tasks that you and only you can uniquely do. Answering the second question is much harder work though, since it requires introspection. However, once you discover your strengths and how they line up with your responsibilities and tasks, you will have essentially carved out a role for yourself that plays to your strengths, while managing your weaknesses. The beauty of this rationale is that your weaknesses are actually going to be someone else’s strengths.

So how do you discover your strengths? How do you discover the way that God has uniquely wired you? How do you determine the unique kingdom contribution that you have been designed to make?

First of all, take a moment and do some introspection by answering these questions:

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