When you’re a new employee at DMC, amidst receiving welcome parties, high fives, and access to the most well-stocked kitchen in Chicago, you’ll also receive a copy of StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. The book details a list of 34 strengths that a person may have. In the back of the book there is a code giving you access to an online survey to help you determine your top five strengths.
Since the goal is to get your gut reaction, the 30 minute assessment allows you only 20 seconds to answer each question. When you’re done, you’ll receive a ranked list of your top five strengths. The aim of the book, and its accompanying survey, is to identify what a person’s inherent skills are and then give suggestions on how that person might develop habits and practices that correlate with their determined strengths.
Rath argues that people often attempt to attain competence in something that they are not innately adept in, ignoring what they are intrinsically good at. He goes on to state that this allows “our natural talents go untapped,” and that this is a serious problem if we want to find deep seated success in our jobs and in our lives.
At DMC, we've tried to identify our employees’ strengths so that we can all understand our personal value and the skills we bring to the table. There are 34 strength themes in total and we've got them all covered at DMC! The graph below shows the top five strengths for 47 of our employees.
The most common strength theme is “Learner” followed by “Achiever” and “Analytical”. I suppose we didn’t need a survey to tell us that DMC is full of people who love to learn, overachieve, and analyze everything, but perhaps this is a testament to the accuracy of the assessment!
We've shared this information with the entire company, as we do with all information, and not just because “Share Information” is one of our core values. We shared it because knowing someone’s strengths can help improve people’s interactions. The book provides a description of each strength, “Ideas for Action” if the strength applies to you, and tips for working with other people who have that strength.
Top Five Strengths of DMC Employees:
1. Learner: Learners love the process of learning. The process is more important than the content. The outcome of learning is less important than the journey.
2. Achiever: Constant need for accomplishment and need to accomplish something tangible in order to be fulfilled. Benefits include energy to work continuously without burn-out.
3. Analytical: Likes data, objective, likes to understand pattern. Need for other's theories to be sound.
4. Input: People with an Input strength collect things because it interests them. They find many different things interesting. They tend to keep things rather than throw them away - at some point they hope to be able to prove their collections valuable.
5. Ideation: Very keen observer of people’s strengths. Great at building teams. Don't like generalizations of groups of people - want to know the attributes of the individual.
By playing to our own strengths and being aware of others' we hope to enhance the entire DMC team!