What is Leadership Vision?

Leadership Vision has been at the forefront of the Strengths movement since the very beginning. Back in 1999, Brian was working at Bethel University in St. Paul MN and had just received a grant to identify a cohort for distance education. They needed to use assessments and psychometrics as part of the grant requirement. Gallup found out about this, and someone from the organization reached out and asked if he wanted to partner using this new tool, StrengthsFinder. Since the year 2000, Leadership Vision has provided strengths based leadership and organizational consulting to all sectors of business, education, technology, healthcare, and nonprofits. Since then, we’ve worked with something like 33,000 people across 350 different organizations in 31+ countries. In today’s show, we’re going to break down each of those statements, not only to share our Strengths philosophy, to help you better understand the importance of building your own Strengths culture. We’ve also got a super simple tip to share at the end, so stick around.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Leadership vision has been at the forefront of the strengths movement since the very beginning. Back in nineteen ninety-nine, Brian Schubering, our CEO, president, and founder, was working at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and had just received a grant to identify a cohort for distance education. They needed to use assessments and psychometrics to fulfill the grant requirements. Someone from the Gallup organization heard about this and reached out asking if he wanted to partner using this new tool called Strengths Finder.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

I had never heard of Strengths Finder. I didn't know that it had just been released. So part of the story is in those very early days, we entered into a partnership with Gallup on the delivery of Strengths Finder, and we were truly focused on students between the ages of 18 and 32 years old who we wanted to recruit for distance education. And it was through that effort that we began to be asked to talk more about strengths.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Since the year 2000, Leadership Vision has provided strengths-based leadership and organizational consulting to all sectors of business, education, technology, healthcare, and nonprofits. Since then, we've worked with something like 33,000 people across 350 different organizations in more than 31 countries.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

We are using Strengths Finder to help people better understand themselves, number one. Secondly, we're using Strengths Finder to help people better understand who they are in relationship to the teams that they're working on. We also have a very clear expectation of using a strengths-based approach to influence culture.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Hello and welcome to the Leadership Vision Podcast. My name is Nathan Freeberg, one of the consultants. And since this is our very first episode, we thought we'd take some time to tell you a little bit about who we are, to share our unique approach to building strengths-based culture, how we began this line of work, and the five things that we believe will help anyone live and operate from a place of strengths. In the early days of strengths, the focus was primarily on individuals and just getting the language of strengths out to the public. It was about helping a person leverage their strengths on a daily basis. In the years that followed, Gallup did some research showing that individuals are really only able to improve the way they engage their strengths by about 8% at best. That wasn't good enough for Brian, and an intentional shift towards a team mentality began.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

But the moment at which we really did make a turn to kind of go from the presentation on individual uh strengths to moving more towards this idea of how do we get this into teams and culture, that happened with some of the research that Gallup was doing bef prior to the release of Strength Finder 2.0. And just the understanding that when you focus on your strengths, um when you know what your top five strengths are, and then you do the best you can to engage in a strengths-based way, the level of improvement could go up six, seven, eight percent. And that statistic to me um just I had this like response of that's just not good enough for me. I think like if I'm moving the needle by single percentage point, in the best case scenario, that's just not it's not what I'm here for. This idea of moving the word of strengths out. How do we take it from there to make it really sustainable or just engage people more?

SPEAKER_00 3:45

This is why we use Strengths Finder to work with people, teams, and culture. At Leadership Vision, we believe that knowing your top five strengths is only the beginning. A person's greatest potential lies in their ongoing exploration of talents. And it is our objective to shape culture that intentionally aligns people around a strength's philosophy. And we also believe that ultimately it is within a team where people gain insight into others while sharpening their own strengths' potential, capacity, and influence. In today's show, we're going to break down each of those statements, not only to share our strengths philosophy, but to help you better understand the importance of building your own strengths culture. We've also got a super simple tip to share at the end, so stick around. You'd be surprised how many people we work with who have previously taken it and still don't know the names of their strengths. Obviously, this is where we need to start, but it's just that a start.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

So we know that just knowing your top five strengths, that's a great start. But how do you understand what that strength actually looks like to others? How is it that you use that strength? And that asks us to dive deeper into the understanding of the talent.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Talents are the patterns of thought, feeling, behavior, and motivation that come naturally to you. The things you do without even thinking about it. They are the identifiable behaviors that you see.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Talent is the building blocks of strengths. Talents are the identifiable behaviors of how a person thinks, how they form relationships, how they get work done, how they influence other people. Those identifiable behaviors are the things that you actually see with the strengths. You don't see the name of the strength, you actually see the behaviors of the strength. A lot of that information is embedded in some of the materials that Gallup has produced. A lot of the behavioral definitions that we are using for the strengths have come through the tens of thousands of interviews that we've done. So that's where the talents are coming from. So we want to get into that, that level.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

We begin each and every one of our client engagements with some form of behavioral understanding of the talents because we believe that a person's greatest potential lies in their ongoing exploration of those talents.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Any engagement that we begin with somebody, whether it's an hour and a half or whether it's a long-term relationship over years, it always begins with a behavioral understanding of the strengths.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

All right. So two people who share a theme of strength won't necessarily share the exact same talents. And likely they'll display different behaviors of that strength. Since talents are the building blocks that make up a theme, it's important to understand the individual talents behind each of your five themes of strength.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

You have to recognize what it is that a person is bringing the the five strengths. Um, and all we're asking is, well then what does that look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? And all of those sensory reactions to strengths are then attached in some way to the behaviors of strengths.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

This is important. This is very, very important.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

It's really important for us to begin to understand how an individual is approaching any given situation, what it is that is their unique perspective on how they're interpreting relationships, how they're perceiving that they're being understood, um, how I'm interacting with you. It's extremely important for us to know that kind of approach that a person is bringing to the table. Because what that's also doing is then it's engaging some of our assumptions and presuppositions. Good old assumptions, right? Yeah, which tend to always get in the way. But they certainly can be great ways to understand each other better, is if we also name those assumptions.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Focusing on behaviors, on the talents, is important and critical for building a strengths-based organization because it allows us the flexibility to understand each other in a greater, more meaningful way.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

We want to introduce this concept that's that strengths are dynamic. Um, strengths are not set, uh, they are a dynamic entity of how it is that we can understand each other, meaning that those talents, the the very elements that are coming together to bring strengths alive, those are changing, those are adapting. Some are are growing, some are recessing. And when we understand that there's a dynamic there, I think that we begin to give us ourselves the room to understand each other in a greater way because we give people the kind of flexibility that is that what that's what they need to be understood. When you focus on the behaviors, you're looking at how maybe two or three behaviors are working together. At another time, it could be three other behaviors that are working together, but they're still coming from the same strength.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

This can be difficult. This can be really, really difficult. And before you think it's hopeless, because you've just barely mastered the names of all thirty-four themes of strength, and now we're asking you to understand the 14 talents that make up each of the themes, which is 476 behaviors, by the way. Don't despair. Brian says to just start naming what you see.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

The ongoing exploration starts with your naming the identification, or saying that's someone's focus. And then my first response to that is, well, what are you seeing? I want to ask, how did you get to that deduction? This is a person's strength of focus. And so by asking you, what do you see? I'm enticing you or inviting you to actually begin to name the behaviors that you're seeing, right? That you're associating with your understanding of focus. Um the ongoing exploration then occurs with you maybe then broadening your understanding of what the strength of focus actually is. And then when that can be attached to an individual, then that can open up a whole gateway of ways to better relate to someone, to better understand someone. How we can use strengths as a way to inform how we partner with each other and when are the different appropriate partnerships that we should or should not be involved in. Because there are times when, you know, depending on whatever it is we're working on, certain people maybe are better partnered together than others. Right. Which is an ongoing process as well. It's a whole nother thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

That's good. Yep. So what are we doing this for? What's the goal? Well, it's our objective to shape culture that intentionally aligns people around a strengths philosophy.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Our objective is to shape the culture, for a culture to begin to entertain the possibility of taking a strengths-based approach to how it is that they work with their people, how it is that they're teaming, and actually the environment that they're investing in to create the kind of health that they're looking for. And I just think that we're coming to the table with that objective in mind. So we're never simply focusing only on one person one event or just one person, whatever it is. There's always something greater that's going on there because we also know that we're looking at as the start of a pathway. And I think it's really important that we understand the direction that we're going. We are going in a direction to have an influence on culture. And I look at the different operational or the different offerings that we have, the different professional services are merely stepping stones to get there. But each of those stepping stones, as they're laid in front of each other, are having an effect on the culture.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

No matter what our big end goal is to helping people, teams, and culture leverage their strengths, we begin by introducing a common language.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

And we also know through our own research and research that we're using to support the work that we're doing that when you introduce a common language, that's one of the key elements to shaping culture. Sure. And in the work that we do, we have a vocabulary that we use, which is the introduction of a language. We are also obviously using the language of strengths as a common language for people to gather around. Um that's just the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Now, when you're learning anything for the first time, understanding the language, the common terms that people use can feel like a huge barrier. If you're getting into wine or football or woodworking or gardening or whatever it is, each of those activities have a shared common language. And when you don't know what that is, you feel like an outsider looking in. But as you begin to know that shared language, as you begin to understand those terms, it begins to make sense. And that's when you start getting a lot more out of it. Brian refers to this as pause.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

If I simply can create a pause in someone's interaction with somebody else, where they may be um working with someone and and the work is difficult or it could it could even be frustrating. If I can cause someone to begin to think, is that a strength? You know, like they're taking what's really going on here. Yep, conflictual or challenging, sure, or even great collaboration. And then for someone to turn that corner and say, I wonder if that's an area of someone's excellence, of someone's expertise, then I think that we're beginning to move the needle more than what people actually realize.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

This changes the way we think about people. We have a phrase at leadership vision that's part of the language we bring that says, There's a beauty and brilliance to everyone.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

And if I just introduce that, like there's a beauty and brilliance with people, and just to cause someone to pause and just wonder what's beautiful about that person, what's the brilliance that they bring. And then on the other hand, we give them this language of strengths, and we we give them a lens through which they begin to interpret that beauty and brilliance. Just those two things now that can come together to create a stronger bond between people, it's saying somebody has something to offer that's unique and distinct from me. There's a beauty and a brilliance to them that no one else possesses, and then you kind of then then ask yourself, then how can I help make that more beautiful? How can you elevate it? Yes, and help find a place where that person is best fit for that beauty and brilliance, not only be appreciated, but to be understood.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Everyone wants to be understood. We all crave to be known for who we truly are. Think about how many conflicts come from simply not understanding the perspective of another person. The way we use strengths can help bring understanding. Finally, we believe that ultimately it is within a team where people gain insight into others while sharpening their own strengths, potential, capacity, and influence. Brian talks about why we believe that the team setting is where you begin to know people in a way you can't otherwise.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

We encourage everyone who is asking us to work with them to bring a functional team to the table. Right. So we believe that from the first presentation throughout whatever process someone chooses to work with us, that there is a functional team that's coming together. Functional team meaning a team that's actually working on some shared objectives, or there's something organizational that brings these people together on a regular basis. We believe that it's this it's within that small grouping, that small ensemble where you begin to know people in a way that you couldn't know, even if you're sitting next to someone. Even if you've known them for years, knowing them for years, but not on a functional team. We believe that in this environment where there's a functional team, there is a way that you can work off each other and see things in yourself and in someone else that you may not see in any other context because you're repeatedly with that person day after day. We believe that in those relationships there's a mirror that's held back up to you. You can see yourself more clearly.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Sometimes I hate that mirror. But that mirror is a helpful mirror. It is a helpful mirror, and especially if you're willing and open to see what's reflected. Yeah. I'll keep holding the mirror up to you. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. Likewise, yes. This helps us rethink the way we're looking at people. So don't be annoyed. Just reframe the way that we interact.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

But we believe that there's also an imbalance to this too. No matter how much I gain in my understanding of you, we believe that there's more to understand in ourselves through the interaction with someone else. That's why we say that within a team context, if you're sharing the language of strengths, if you share common experiences on the work that you're doing, it's within that context that if you're willing, you can have a better understanding of what are my true capacities. Right. Um, where is it that I need to be more dialed in because I have more potential over here. And also we believe that it's within the team context that you can begin to truly understand with accuracy your influence, how you influence other people. We think that there is a safety to teams, and there's a a protection that can happen there. Because we also know that within that that team construct, within that small group, that we can learn things there that can at some point be more influential out towards the culture. Because we know that within that that team, you can practice things there that you wouldn't be able to try somewhere else. You can take risks. You can take risks. In that setting that you might not be able to do another one. Yeah. Yep. And if there's a mutual respect on that team, you know you're all kind of doing the same thing, you're helping each other out developmentally, then there's a way that I can help you and that you can help me become more effective in what it is that we're trying to do as team members, as individuals, and as influencers beyond that team structure. We really believe there's something catalytic that happens when a team is focused on understanding each other and aligning that understanding towards how can you work together towards a common goal. There's something that's happening there. We spend a lot of time working with teams in brief sessions. And on our own team. And on our own team. In our own team. Yes, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

So I want to read our mission statement again because I think it's important to understanding who we are and what we strive to do. At Leadership Vision, we use Strengths Finder to work with people, teams, and culture. And we believe that knowing your top five strengths is only the beginning. A person's greatest potential lies in their ongoing exploration of talents. And it is our objective to shape culture that intentionally aligns people around a strengths philosophy. And we believe that ultimately it is within a team where people gain insight into others while sharpening their own strengths, potential, capacity, and influence. But this is not easy work to be sure. But Brian will close out our first show with a simple tip that will help any team get started.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

I really think that obviously, once people have their strengths results, I think a very easy way to begin to engage this wherever you're at, whatever your interest is, if it's just like an icebreaker thing, or if you're really trying to start a conversation on building a strengths platform, take your strengths, have each person read through the five descriptive paragraphs on what those strengths are. Then here's a simple assignment choose one and tell us a story. Just one, not all five. Choose one strength, the one you probably know the best. And just tell a story on how that strength is seen by you or is used by you. Or just tell a story of why it is that you connected with that strength so strongly. Because we know this too. Sharing a story is a great, a great way to remember what it is that someone's trying to communicate. It adds a deeper level of meaning. And then you're not getting into like explain this strength and go on the table, but it's sharing something that you know personally. You know yourself, you know your own story. Tell a story about how you see that strength working in your life on a day-to-day basis.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Thanks for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast. My name is Nathan Freeberg. Special thanks to Brian Schubring, our founder, president, and CEO. If you'd like to learn more about the work we do, visit us on the web at Leadership Vision Consulting.com.