14 years ago, Marcus Buckingham and the late Donald Clifton introduced a “game changer”: a new psychometric tool called StrengthsFinder. Over that time, thousands of people around the globe have used it to identify their strengths. The new release, ‘Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder’ (ESF) helps you to identify your entrepreneurial strengths.
The original Strengths Finder was an online assessment that reported our top-five talents from a list of 34. Backed by an early research base of over 2 million leaders, it found that only 20% of us are using our strengths at work. Becoming a ‘twenty-percenter’, they said, is not about mercilessly beating out your weaknesses, but rather focusing on your naturally hard-wired talents and building upon them with skills and experience. The last people to go on a Time Management course, for example, are usually those who are naturally good at it, yet the StrengthsFinder philosophy suggests that these are exactly the people who would benefit from it the most, by becoming outstanding at something they already enjoy and have a talent for.
So what is the new ESF?
This time the online assessment reports our unique mix of what Gallup’s research identified to be the 10 talents that “explain a large part of entrepreneurial success”. The report ranks these 10 in an order specific to each person from ‘dominant’ to ‘contributing’ through to ‘supporting’. This is defined by whether a person has a high level of a particular talent, shows some evidence of it, or doesn’t lead with it.
Donald Clifton’s son, Jim, introduces ESF by arguing that the current view on “how to fix” the economy is flawed as it is built on the premise that growth is driven by innovation, whereas Gallup’s research is that “Jobs and GDP growth…predictably follow entrepreneurship”. ESF, then, is on a mission to help us all to build this mind-set and in doing so find and develop those with “the rare gift to build successful businesses”.
Given Gallup’s solid research base, this may soon become the gold standard in developing entrepreneurial capability. Some of red10’s clients have recently adopted entrepreneurialism as a value, making this tool potentially very useful in their leaders’ personal development plans. As with the original StrengthsFinder, the results of the online assessment are best explored with a personal coach to avoid them remaining simply an interesting list of words on a page.
If you are interested in finding out more about ESF, contact red10 on info@red10dev.com or call 01494 564049.
To find out more about Will Sudworth, read his bio here.