StandOut (22 page)

I was talking to him the other day and for the first time in a long time he brought up that day when everything stopped.

“I just didn’t have it, Marcus. I didn’t have what it took to get the job done. I knew it. My boss knew it. Everyone knew it.”

“Well, what did you used to be good at?” I asked quietly. “When you used to look forward to going to work, which activities did you look forward to?”

At first he said nothing. He just sat back on his sofa staring up at the ceiling, and I thought he’d ignored me or couldn’t be bothered to answer. Then, with a small smile, he looked at me and said: “Tutorials. I was really good at writing tutorials. I loved trying to pretend I was looking at a computer screen for the first time and had no idea what to do, what button to press, what sequence to follow. I loved doing that. I loved writing really helpful tutorials.”

It was such a weirdly precise thing to say, and yet he said it as if he’d never known it before that moment. He certainly hadn’t known it fifteen years ago. Or at least he hadn’t known it clearly enough. When he started to struggle, when “everyone knew” that he didn’t have what it took to succeed in his new position, he had no conscious strengths to fall back on. He came to believe what everyone around him was telling him, that he didn’t have what it took to get the job done, and gradually— then suddenly—his confidence disappeared. And one day he couldn’t put the key in the car door and drive to work.

Obviously I’m not saying what happened to Michael will happen to you. I
am
saying that life will throw obstacles at you. Take responsibility now for remembering what your core strengths are so that you can grab on tightly to them when things go awry. When you take a job you should never have taken, when your boss doesn’t understand you, when your company RIFs you, when you start to question whether you have anything of value to offer, understanding your strengths will hold you in place, reorient you, and show you the way forward.

All that to say one of the most important outcomes from taking the StandOut assessment is simply that you remember your results. This is why we’ve chosen to target only your top two strength Roles. We could keep cutting these Roles into ever-thinner slices, or drill down into your third, fourth, and fifth Roles, but what we would gain in complexity we would lose in practicality—a week after taking the test you wouldn’t be able to recall what your strengths were, and since what you can’t recall you can’t consciously apply, much of StandOut’s power would slip away.

When I took StandOut, my top two were Creator-Stimulator. If you want to know what this says about me, by all means turn to
Principle #3: You Must Reach Beyond Your Roles
, but, frankly, at the most basic level, what matters is that I remember those two words. If I can remember those two words for a week, then I am more likely to think consciously about how I am using those strengths that week. And if I can do this for one week, my brain’s retrieval of those two words will become just that little bit easier, and so I am more likely to be conscious of how I am applying them the next week, and the next, until ten years from now, if you ask me what my StandOut results were, my memory paths would be so well worn—technically, the memory would have migrated from the hippocampus, where all midterm memories are stored, to the cortex, where long-term memories live—that they would be instantly accessible to me.

To beat life’s terrible signal-to-noise ratio, you are going to have to turn up the signal. And the best way to do that is repetition. So keep it simple. Take StandOut, remember your top two Roles, think about how you’re going to channel them today, and then do the same again tomorrow. And tomorrow.

Principle #3: You Must Reach Beyond Your Roles

Conventional wisdom tells you to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Yet when you study the most successful people you discover that they do something quite different: they push themselves
within
their strengths zone. They certainly aren’t complacent. It’s more that they realize they will be at their most productive, their most creative, their most generous, their most collaborative if having found their edge, they spend their life sharpening it.

How do they do this? By using the raw material of their life to add detail to their understanding of their strengths. As I mentioned, my top two strength Roles are Creator-Stimulator. Since there are seventy-two different permutations of top two strengths Roles, it is possible that you have the same combination. And if you do, you and I will have much in common. We will both be enthusiasts, always looking to bring energy and optimism to new ideas. We will both be at our best when we know our subjects deeply, when we have crafted stories about our ideas, and when we have tailored our stories to each of our “audiences.” Yes, we will have to watch out that we don’t throw our full force behind an idea before we have vetted it fully, but, on our best days, both of us will be a compelling and uplifting force to our friends, colleagues, and families.

And yet there the similarities might end. The content of your ideas, the way in which you present them to others, how you dramatize them, and indeed your ultimate reasons for doing so, will almost certainly be different from mine.

To sharpen your edge, use your top two Roles as a starting point for investigating what your strengths look like in the real world. To help you begin, try an exercise that I call (tongue-ever-so-slightly-in-cheek) “Love It/Loathe It.” Simply draw a line down the middle of the pages of a note pad, write Loved It at the top of one column and Loathed It at the top of the other, and then carry the pad around with you for a week. Any time you find yourself looking forward to an activity, or getting so involved in the activity that you lose track of time, or feeling invigorated when you’re done with an activity, in the Loved It column scribble down precisely what you were doing. On the flip side, when you find yourself procrastinating an activity, or struggling to concentrate while you’re doing an activity, or feeling drained and empty after finishing an activity, scribble it down in the Loathed It column. (In both cases, be sure to write down only activities that
you
are doing, not activities that are being done to you.)

This teasing-apart of your reactions to a regular week of your life won’t take up much additional time, but it will force you to pay attention to the specific content of what you’re filling your weeks with and how you’re feeling about it. In short, it is the simplest way to gather the raw material you need to sharpen and refine your understanding of your strengths.

I have used my Creator-Stimulator combination to study human individuality, design strengths assessments, write books, speak on them, and build a company that trains managers to get better at getting the best from their people.

My sister is also a Creator-Stimulator. She used it to express her lyricism in ballet dancing. Then, after she retired and became a kindergarten teacher and hated it, she used it again to redirect her career back to the stage, where she could keep working with creative adults who wanted to learn how to perform as gracefully as she performs. She finished her masters in Fine Arts and now teaches at the London School of Contemporary Dance.

Michael didn’t know his own strength and lost his way. Now, after fifteen years he is back at school, learning how to use his Teacher-Equalizer combination to design online software tutorials.

Lilia? Who knows? My hope, as her dad, is that she will take control of her genius, respect it, understand it, express it, and refine it, so that she can—in her own way and in a career of her own choosing—become one.

And you? Well, only you can decide.

CHAPTER 5
Strengths Assessment
Technical Summary

Development and Validation

By Dr. Courtney R. McCashland

My StandOut Mission

We each have clear, vivid moments in time that shape everything that follows. Mine was at the age of twenty-one; I was a senior in college and filled with exuberance for life. I am the youngest of three, and my brother who was five years my senior was the truly gifted one. Brilliant, spirited, charming—he drew you in with his charisma. Yet sadly, he was always dissatisfied, searching for that euphoric freedom found when you invest your best and make something good happen. From my view, he wasted so much of what he was because he didn’t choose to, or couldn’t, find a way to engage his strengths.

Curt took his own life after only twenty-six turbulent years of living. I will never forget walking into the dimly lit room to find my father holding my brother’s athletic, six-foot-long body in his arms. He rocked him back and forth and whispered, “Please, Lord, let us go back. Let us begin again.” This image is forever with me.

In life we find ourselves cursed and blessed with things we can’t control. Yet we have choices; and we have time. What we choose to do with our time is up to us. A witness to my brother’s struggle and tragic death, I felt then, and feel to this day, tremendous accountability. Curt’s death inspired my life’s mission: to invest my own gifts to help others find theirs. My work with Marcus on StandOut is one expression of this lifelong mission.

Introduction

To fulfill this mission, Marcus and I turned to data and discovery from a decade of research with top performers, those who have consistently engaged their strengths for success. Our team of scientists and psychometricians reviewed patterns from more than a million talent assessments; analyzed hundreds of focus groups, interviews, and coaching sessions; and scrubbed survey results from hundreds of thousands of Strengths Engagement Track (SET) participants. The study of this robust data set over the years produced the content to formulate the nine strength Roles and the findings needed to measure them accurately.

This technical summary provides answers to questions you may have about the stability, reliability, and validity of StandOut.

The Research Approach

Between 2000 and 2010, we developed and administered a talent inventory to 435,564 participants in order to uncover the most reliable talents found to predict multi-industry job performance for six common job families—Leader, Manager, Professional, Sales, Service, and Support. During this period, more than two hundred focus groups and discovery interviews were administered as part of seventy-three validation studies designed to capture the profiles of top performers for each job family.

For the talents to be a valid predictor of success, we first had to ensure they were, statistically speaking, “reliable.” Coefficient alpha is the most common statistical technique applied to assess the reliability of a unified construct measured by multiple items. Each talent was examined for internal consistency and analyzed using Chronbach’s Alpha. Across the samples, alphas for the eighteen talents ranged from .64 to .93, demonstrating acceptably high internal consistency to the industry standard of alpha = .6. While the configuration and weighting of predictive talents varies by job family, Table 1 provides a summary of data from the eighteen talents most commonly found to have both high reliability and predictive validity across studies.

These eighteen talents are fundamental building blocks at the heart of the strength Roles measured by StandOut.

TABLE 1: RELIABILITY OF PREDICTIVE TALENTS BY STRENGTH ROLE

To supplement patterns that emerged from this quantitative data set, we analyzed qualitative data from interviews with top performers and identified powerful talent combinations credited by the best as their secret to success.

The StandOut Instrument and the Sample

StandOut is an online assessment of talent—innate patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior—measuring nine powerful combinations called “Strength Roles.” To measure which strength Roles are most dominant, we selected a test design and an item-type called “situational judgment.” In the typical situational judgment test (SJT), you are provided with a variety of situations gleaned from critical incidents on the job. In recent years SJTs have increased in their popularity because of all item-types—from Lickert, to Binary, to Open-ended—they have shown the most power as a predictor of subsequent job performance. Research by McDaniel, Morgeson, Finnegan, Campion, and Braverman (2001) accumulated 102 validity coefficients and estimated the mean validity of SJTs to be .34, which as Weekley and Ployhart showed (2005), puts SJTs on a par with cognitive ability tests. In other research, Weekley and Jones (1999) found an SJT to provide incremental validity over cognitive ability and experience.