In our fast-paced, success-driven society, individuals and organizations are constantly being forced to find creative ways of doing more with less. Downsizing, outsourcing and off-shoring have become synonymous with the new business world, breeding a culture of fear and confusion. Getting the right people in the right jobs has become a crucial element of survival for individuals as well as organizations.
Knowing who we are, what we enjoy and do well, and which roles honor our uniqueness is the cornerstone to personal and professional effectiveness. In the popular best seller, Now Discover Your Strengths, Gallup reported that less than half of our eligible workers believe they will be given the opportunity to utilize their talents consistently.
Careers for Dummies revealed that even fewer adults feel they have clear career direction. Individual responsibility for finding the right fit has become paramount, and instruments abound for measuring our strengths, abilities, preferences and talents.
The Highlands Ability Battery is a gold standard assessment tool designed to identify and unify individual and collective strengths, abilities and preferences. It measures natural abilities, providing significant understanding of the environments and arenas most conducive to our productivity, along with specific language for articulating those parameters. Another more recent instrument, The Strengths Finder, from the popular best seller, Now Discover Your Strengths, has captured the attention of many individuals and organizations in their quest to maximize individual and collective performance.
For more than a decade, individuals and teams within GlaxoSmithKline have embraced The Highlands Ability Battery as a powerful tool for maximizing individual and collective human resource potential. More recently, many other groups have also discovered the Strengths Finder, and they find the results from both instruments very complimentary.
While both instruments have value, the Strengths Finder is a forced-choice preference indicator, capable of revealing the perception by individuals of their personal preferences. It is a pragmatic approach to increasing awareness, productivity and fulfillment in our careers. The Highlands Ability battery, based on nearly a century of research, employs timed worksamples consistently validated to reveal natural abilities – the hardwiring of the brain, which does not change over time the way preferences can.
Used in combination, The Strengths Finder and The Highlands Ability Battery identify signature themes along with specific behaviors and strategies for maximizing productivity and performance. While the Strengths Finder reveals preferred themes and tendencies of the participant, THAB identifies more specific abilities characteristic of unique individual hardwiring. Congruence between the two suggests accurate awareness of what abilities come naturally and easily, increasing an individual’s capacity to understand, articulate and utilize the most prominent talents consistently.
Self-awareness is the key to congruence in our careers and in our lives. Understanding our natural abilities, along with our preferences among other significant personal vision factors, provides a permanent structure for making practical, personalized proactive choices in our constantly changing lives and careers. Exploring our own strengths, within the context of our work environment, and learning the language for communicating and navigating these strengths with our colleagues is the foundation of individual and organizational success.
