Strength-Training

Many of us here at JJCA have worked together for years.  In fact, 11 of our 19 team members have been at JJCA for more than 10 years.  When you work together that long, you get to know a lot about each other.  But we recently discovered that there’s still plenty more we can learn about each other and even about ourselves.

As part of our continuous improvement efforts, we’ve recently kicked off what we’ll call our “strength-training” program.  Using the StrengthsFinder assessment first introduced in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths, our team has begun the journey of both self and team exploration to learn how we can better leverage the strengths of each individual to become a stronger team.  More than 100 questions make up the assessment, the results of which identify a person’s top 5 strengths from among 34 different strengths or  “themes”.  Each of these themes falls into one of four quadrants, called “Connect”, “Mobilize”, “Reflect” and “Energize”.  Finally, the unique combination of quadrants results in a list of characteristics that define a person’s specific strengths.

Referred to us by our friends at UHS, many of whom have had some experience with StrengthsFinder, and led by Rex Miller of Core Clarity, we see this process as benefiting not only our internal team, but having tremendous application to team building with partners like UHS and potentially other clients.

Our leadership team has been through an in-depth analysis of the results of the assessment and how that information can be used to allow each of us to do the things we do best while also better understanding how we can more effectively communicate and work with each other. Our next step will be to pull the entire team into the discussions.  Over the next few months, we’ll introduce you to our team in terms of their strengths.  If you know some of the folks on our team, see if you can guess in advance who in our office matches up with these descriptive strength categories:  Life Lines, Stabilizers, Super Drivers, and Gurus!