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Today, I am working with a group of ministry interns with the Central Florida Wesley Foundation. This group serves the main campus of the University of Central Florida just east of Orlando. Each team member has taken the Clifton-Gallup StrengthsFinder Assessment.

We will be doing some team building exercises and provide a general introduction to Strengths theory.

Here are some links that may be helpful for persons desiring more information:

Articles by Brian
Annotated Bibliography for StrengthsFinder Resources

Thinking about Strengths and Talents

Unleashed for God: Reflections on Strengths, Gifts, Talents, and Passions

The Power of Focus

Other links:
Advising Strategies for Course Selection Based on StrengthsFinders

Chip Anderson’s Description of the 34 Talents (Anderson was one of the early maestros of StrengthsFinder

Tim McGinnis’s site

I was rereading Erwin McManus’sAn Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God Had in Mind. On pages 144-45, he writes about the need to raise up leaders from within a community of faith instead of hiring from the outside:

The development of indigenous leadership is critical to creating and shaping ethos. It is also essential in generating first-century church momentum. One reason for this is that when you identify leaders from within, everyone realizes that he or she could be the next leader identified. It gives everyone a sense of inspiration and hope that he or she might be selected and invested in. If you’re always hiring from the outside, it becomes a mystery how one ever grows to that level of leadership. The obvious conclusion for someone interested in leadership would be that he or she has to leave the church to find a place where that level of leadership could be obtained.
In an organization, leaders must be brought from the outside. in a movement, leaders emerge from within. A genuine movement is a leadership culture. It values the identification, development, and empowering of new leaders. A central component of a movement’s success is not the selection of accredited leaders but of proven leadership. Leadership is not about how much education a person has attained but how much they have actually accomplished in a ministry context. In many congregations the only role that members can aspire to is to be a good follower. in the first-century church, there were no other churches to take leaders from. Everybody had to be homegrown.

Bold face has been added.

How well do communities of faith empower and unleash new leaders?

What are best practices in accomplishing this?

What does it mean for missional leaders to focus on leadership development of others?

Key Transitions for Missional Leaders

I often have this conversation with students: I am not planting a new church. God has called me to serve in an established congregation. How can I lead my church to transition from a maintenance mindset to a missional culture? This may be the key question for the West. The West needs to be re-won for Jesus Christ, but the good news is that there are footholds and resources already in place from which to begin. But transitioning established congregations is not an easy task-but it is an essential one as we seek to be faithful stewards of all that God has given.

Here are some thoughts:

The key is to create a new culture. I have written elsewhere about envisioning leadership in the 21st century in terms of shaping ethos. The following a key transitional points that push this along:

1) Reintroduce the Apostolic story of Acts.
At the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2), the world began to be turned upside down and shaped by a small group of persons whom God filled with the Holy Spirit. The Church launched that day in fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy as a movement of “dreamers and visionaries” empowered by the promised Holy Spirit from God.

Don’t pass over the phrase “dreamers and visionaries” too quickly. In many struggling churches, the people of God have lost the capacity to dream of what God might do in and through the community. One of the first steps in transitioning to a missional model is to help followers of Jesus Christ to begin to dream again dreams shaped by the Scriptures.

2) Move from Surviving to Living.
Struggling churches are merely seeking to survive. When followers of Jesus Christ under the guidance of the Spirit begin to dream again, they slowly begin to realize that survival isn’t a goal. Survival is a prison that keeps a group from living. The goal of the Church of Jesus Christ is life in relationship to God. Living may sometimes means dying. Following Jesus Christ involves living as though you have already died (Matt 16:24). A vital relationship with Jesus moves us beyond fear of failure to following Jesus into the world on mission. This is the source of life. Apostolic dreams lead to apostolic action.

3) Move God’s people from consuming to becoming collaborative influencers for the Kingdom of God.
Missional churches are not about providing programs/resources to meet “felt needs” as ends in themselves. Missional churches call people to convert to the Gospel. This involves a reorientation from a life focused on self to a life centered on following Jesus Christ. The people of God shift from consuming to becoming Kingdom-rooted entrepreneurs who seek to extend the influence and reign of God to the ends of the earth. Congregations shift from inviting people to have their needs met to unleashing people to change the world.

4) Shift from Attractional Methods to Interactive Engagement.
Too many churches wait for people to show up at the door. Missional churches are not opposed to advertising or raising awareness of the community of faith, but they do not sit round waiting for the World to show up. Instead, missional churches collaborate and envision ways to engage new Social networks. This is a key shift. The World no longer serves as a threat from which followers of Christ flee. Instead, the World becomes the venue for life and service in God’s mission.

What are your thoughts?

© 2007 Brian D. Russell

An Annotated Bibliography for StrengthsFinder

Readers of the Real Meal blog know that I am a strong advocate for the Clifton StrengthsFinder instrument. StrengthsFinder is a powerful tool that empowers individuals to understand their own unique and innate talents. StrengthsFinder is available through the Gallup organization. It is an online assessment that takes between 45 and 60 minutes to complete. As we seek to become the people whom God created us to be it is invaluable to gain insight into our own strengths. The StrengthsFinder is rooted in the school of psychology known as positive psychology. Donald Clifton and others began to study what’s right with people rather than using the problems of humanity for establishing a baseline for studying people. In other words, Clifton and others studied successful people in order to understand success rather than studying weakness and failure and trying to extrapolate principles for achieving success. Clifton and others isolated 34 talents at the core of successful people. Although all people have varying levels of all 34, StrengthsFinder focuses on a person’s top 5 talents. Research has found that most people operate primarily through their top strengths.

If you are interested in a basic popular level introduction to positive psychology I recommend Soar with Your Strengths by Donald Clifton and Paula Nelson. This book contains practical advice for achieving a strength based life. The secret is the necessity of focusing one’s energy on deploying one’s strengths rather than focusing one’s energy on trying to perfect one’s weaknesses. Although it is the only book in this list that does not contain a code granting access to the StrengthsFinder online survey, it is an excellent and informative read. Check it out:

Gallup’s newest product comes from the pen of Tom Rath—StrengthsFinder 2.0. This brief book offers an introduction to the latest edition of StrengthsFinder and provides an access code. There is very little difference between 2.0 and its previous edition. For those who have taken the earlier version, you will gain a more comprehensive results report and there are some slight tweaks in the descriptions for the 34 strengths. Check it out:

Now Discover Your Strengths marked the start of the strengths revolution through the research at Gallup. This book is written for those working in corporate America. The description of the 34 talents is geared toward a person’s efforts at work. There is also a helpful section for person’s in management with tips on how best to unleash individuals to maximize their productivity according to their StrengthsFinder profile. Check it out:

Teach With Your Strengths offers reflections on the art and craft of teaching based on StrengthsFinder research. Excellent teachers were one of the earliest study groups used by Clifton in his research. What makes a teacher great? Are their common talents? This book contains some surprising answers. If you teach professionally at any level, this is a must read book for you. Its description of the 34 Strengths are geared toward their deployment in the service of education. Check it out:

Living Your Strengths is Gallup’s effort to promote StrengthsFinder in faith based communities. Its author’s attempt to ground positive psychology and strengths theory in Scripture. Communities of faith will find this a helpful resource because it offers practical and specific advice to individuals on how to deploy their gifts, talents, and passions for the mission of the Church. This resource would be perfect for a small group study or for a weekend seminar.

Discover Your Sales Strengths is the only book on this list that I have not yet read. It includes a Code. Its description indicates that it is for those in sales and offers advice on how to leverage one’s strength profile to maximize one’s success in sales. Check it out:
Discover Your Sales Strengths

Tom Rath’s How Full is Your Bucket is not specifically about StrengthsFinder but it does contain a code and in many online bookstores it is the cheapest way to gain a code. It is also an easy and productive read. Its focus is on promoting healthy workplaces and families through the practive of “bucket filling.” “Bucket filling” occurs when we either give praise or receive praise. Check it out:

I hope that this information is helpful for you. I would be happy to converse with those interested in this resource.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted on Unleashed for God. In this essay, I suggested that it is vital for communities of faith to help each follower of Jesus to discover and unleash his or her own unique strengths and talents for the sake of God’s mission in the world. Personal transformation is the natural result of encountering God. I also suggested that employing typical Spiritual Gift Inventories and like is insufficient because most of the assessments that I have seen are cookie-cutter style tests whose categories focus primarily on the community itself rather than on deploying gifts, talents, and passions missionally in the world. As we seek to become the people that God created us to be, we need to focus helping persons to understand their gifts and talents and then groom each person to maximize and leverage these for the glory of God.

I have recently discovered that the Clifton StrengthsFinder is a powerful tool that helps people to understand more readily and clearly their innate talents. The StrengthsFinder is based on positive psychology, which focuses not a person’s weaknesses or pathologies, but on an individual’s strengths. Instead of studying mentally ill persons, Clifton conducted research into top performers from a variety of fields. This research grew into a collection of 100,000 talent-based interviews. From this body of data, Clifton and his team isolated 34 signature themes or talents that surfaced continually in the interview data.

In 1998, Clifton partnered with Gallup to develop the Clifton StrengthsFinder to help individuals to discover their signature themes for themselves.

If you are interested in discovering your own top five signature talents, you will need to purchase one of Gallup’s books that come with a code. The code allows you to complete the StrengthsFinder Assessement online. Tom Rath has just published an upgraded edition of the Online Test under the title StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths. This book is an easy read and covers all of the essential information to help you profit from the assessment. For those who are familiar with StrengthsFinder, the 2.0 version is essentially the same test, but it is provides a more individualized profile than the previous addition. There are also more resources for enrichment and ideas for application than in the earlier version.
Are any of you using StrengthsFinder in your work?

What other tools are helpful for unleashing each believer?

Updated 8/20/08
Ours is the age of the sound bite and instant gratification. Spin is rapidly replacing substance in our rhetoric. In depth analysis on a television news means a 2-3 minute clip. On the medical side, our culture recognizes ADD and ADHD without definition. PowerPoint slideshows reduce public presentations to bullet points.

It is crucial therefore for leaders today to be able to cut through the clatter and chatter to achieve maximum impact. How is this accomplished? Focus is an underappreciated skill. Focus may be defined as “condition in which something can be clearly apprehended or perceived.” The ability to focus opens up the future for us. It allows one to navigate the often murky waters of the present by steering a course toward a desired future destination.

My daughter learned to ride a bicycle without training wheels when she was five years old. We took here to a local elementary school parking lot to practice. It was after hours so there were no cars or traffic. The parking lot was wide with few obstacles. There were however a couple of islands in the middle that were planted with trees. As my daughter would take off riding her bike, I was amazed at her ability to drive straight for the nearest tree. I repeatedly had to race to grab her handlebars to prevent her from crashing. I asked her, “Why do you keep steering toward the trees?” She replied, “Daddy, I am afraid that I am going to crash into them.” I found this ironic for a moment as I thought about the size the parking lot in comparison to the few trees that stood as obstacles. Then I recognized the problem: my daughter was focusing on the wrong thing. I came up with a simple maxim that day that helped my daughter and continues to help me in my own life:
Focus on where you want to go, not on where you don’t want to go. My daughter has been able to navigate her bike safely ever sense.

How can we apply the power of focus to our own lives? Here are three ideas:

1) Focus on Mission. What is it that you as a person have been called to accomplished? What dreams has God placed in your heart? What is it that you were uniquely created to do? Or to phrase these in broader communal/institutional terms: For what purpose does your movement, group, or organization exist? What can it offer the world better than anyone else?

Focusing on mission will help us to achieve clarity and guide us to fulfill our God given callings.

2) Focus on People. John Maxwell reminds us, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Relationships stand at the core of the meaning of our lives. We were created to be in authentic, genuine relationships with others. Most of us instinctively recognize that the power of relationships can trump other factors such as reasoned argument and even financial incentives. The focused leader pays attention to people. People matter. This includes both the people with whom we labor and the people whom we are attempting to reach. The leader who invests in and serves the needs of others sets herself or himself up for longterm success.

3) Focus on Strengths. Too many of us worry about our weaknesses and spend too much time attempting to shore them up. The focuses leader recognizes his or her own weaknesses. To be ignorant of one’s weaknesses is a recipe for disaster, but it is equally important to focus on one’s strengths. As I coached by daughter, we need to focus on where we want to go, i.e., situations where we can maximize personal or team strengths; not where we don’t want to go, i.e., situations where our weaknesses will be exposed. The focused leader raises up others who have complementary strengths so that each person on the team can use their strengths to maximum effect.

This is the power of focus. Focus on mission. Focus on people. Focus on strengths. Allow God to unleash you to accomplish the dreams with which He as entrusted you and/or your team.

© 2006 Brian D. Russell