First-Time Managers Leading Themselves with Strengths

Part 2 of First-Time Managers Leading Themselves with Strengths. You can recite your top five. Now say what your number one is going to make you do at 4pm on a Thursday when the project is behind.

In the first article I said you cannot lead other people on purpose until you can lead yourself on purpose. That is the bottom rung. This article is what standing on it actually looks like.

Most first-time managers have already done the part everybody assumes is the work. They took the assessment. They have the report. What almost nobody does is the twenty minutes that come after it.

Ask the second question

Ask a first-time manager for their top five and most of them will rattle it off without blinking. Some of them keep my custom reports with them in those clear plastic protectors in a binder.

Then ask them what Achiever® is going to make them do at 4pm on a Thursday when the project is behind.

Silence.

That gap is the whole thing, and it is not a knowledge problem. They know the words. A talent theme NAME is a label. It is a theory about what you might do. Knowing it means you can see it coming.

The name is free. It comes in the report. Knowing what it makes you DO costs you a few bad meetings, unless somebody shows you how to look.

The report is written in the past tense

Your CliftonStrengths® report tells you what has been consistently true about you across your whole life. That accuracy is the point of it, and it is also the limitation nobody mentions.

Management happens in the future tense.

The report has never met your team, your deadline, or the project that is three weeks behind. It gives you the ingredient. You have to supply the situation.

A theme plus a situation is a prediction. Neither half does anything on its own.

Which is why so many people can name their top five and still get blindsided by themselves. They are holding half of it. The most accurate half. And accuracy about your past is not the same as a warning about your Tuesday.

What this looked like for me

Futuristic® is in my top five. The report says I am inspired by what could be. True, and completely useless as a warning.

Early in my first management role I ran our team meeting the week of our biggest conference of the year. Everybody was working long hours. Everybody had a list. And I spent that meeting painting a picture of the vacation we would all take to rest and recover once the conference was over.

I thought I was leading.

I was daydreaming out loud.

My team walked out of that room with no idea what to do on Tuesday. They needed to know what to do TODAY, or this week. Not after we came back from vacation all rested up.

Nobody in that meeting could have told you my Futuristic® did that. Neither could I. And I had known the WORD for years.

The quiet one

Futuristic® at least handed me a bad meeting I could point at. Learner® was harder, because nothing dramatic ever happened.

I love the PROCESS of learning something new. A new thing is genuinely more interesting to me than a thing I have already figured out. Accurate, and it told me nothing. (Thanks, report.)

What I actually needed was that same sentence with the situation attached: when something new shows up, I will go get excited about it, and the boring consistent thing my team is counting on will quietly stop getting my attention.

That sentence is not in any report. Nobody could have written it for me. It took somebody sitting me down and asking what my themes were going to DO, not what they meant.

Both of those themes made me good at my old job. That is not the point. The point is that until I could say them out loud as sentences about what I would DO, they were just words I could recite.

Five questions to find out whether you know your themes or just their names

1. Can you list your top five without looking them up? Most people can. That is the floor, not the achievement.

2. For each one, can you name a decision you made in the last month because of it? Not what the theme means. A decision. With a date on it.

3. Which of your five did the most work in your last meeting? If you cannot tell, you were in the room but you were not watching.

4. Has one of your themes ever surprised you? A theme you know does not surprise you. It shows up exactly on schedule, doing exactly the thing it always does, and you see it coming from across the room.

5. If somebody asked you what your number one makes you DO, rather than what it means, how long would the pause be?

That pause is the whole thing. It is the distance between a label and an instrument.

None of this means you took the wrong assessment or got the wrong five. The report did its job. It gave you an accurate description of what has been true about you. Converting that into something you can see coming is a separate piece of work, and almost nobody schedules it.

Twenty minutes, and nobody else sees it

Here is the work.

Pull up your top five. For each one, write one sentence in this shape:

"Under pressure, this will make me ______."

Not what it means. What it makes you DO. Then go read them again on your worst day this month and see how many you got right.

This one is just for you. Nobody else needs to see it yet.

It is the difference between having a language and speaking it. And it is not long. It is just never on the calendar.

You cannot manage a reaction you never saw coming. So go and look.

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More in this series

Part 1: What Nobody Tells You When You Become a Manager for the First Time

Part 2: Why Naming Your CliftonStrengths® Themes Is Not the Same as Knowing Them (this article)

Part 3: When Your Strongest CliftonStrengths® Theme Starts Costing You

Part 4: How to Build a Management Rhythm Around Your Own CliftonStrengths® Themes

Part 5: How to Tell Your Team the Way You Work, Before They Have to Guess

If you are planning a workshop

I facilitate CliftonStrengths®, team development, and first-time manager workshops. Getting a new manager fluent in their own themes before they are responsible for anyone else's is one of the cheapest hours you will spend on them. If your company is moving people into their first management role this year, connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me about it.

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