How to Discover Your Strengths (And How it Can Change Everything) with Teresa Rand
Having a clear understanding of yourself and your team's strengths can be a powerful tool for improving communication, collaboration, and teamwork. Knowing the areas where you excel can lead to better results, but it will also foster an environment of trust, collaboration, and respect between members. In this episode, we discuss the various assessments that can help you identify your and your team's strengths.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
What personality assessments can do for you
How to choose the right personality test
Assessing your personality for success
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About our guest:
As a former CEO of a multimillion-dollar organization, Teresa Rand brings more than 29 years of expertise. As a former CEO, she managed up to $35 million and employees numbering over 1,000 employees. Teresa is a certified Gallup Strengths and DISC coach, a John Maxwell Certified Speaker, and a member of the National Speaker Association.
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Recognizing Your Strengths
I worked with one organization for 30 years. I've worked for the YMCA. If you know anything about the Y, it's a nonprofit. And even though I say I worked for one organization, I was in three different cities and states, three different board of directors, three different sets of members, board staff, all, so it felt like three different jobs, throughout the years. But I retired as the CEO of Y in 2018. I decided I was done and I wanted to try this thing called entrepreneurship. So I hired a business coach for a year and started my own consulting business. And here we are.
That's a big jump to be working for a corporate and leading in a big well-known organization. How did you determine, like this is the time to make that leap into entrepreneurship? Because that's a very different skillset, I would say to have. It's a different approach to the business and there's a lot of risk involved with it as well, and it is very, very different. I joke that I no longer have people. There's only me. So I'm the only one. I'm the marketing department and I'm the customer service department, and I'm all of the above, the administrative department, all of the finance department, all of those. So that has been a big shift for me to understand that everything that gets done comes through me. Although I have hired contractors, now I have two or three contractors and just hired a virtual assistant, but I decided that I didn't wanna move again, and I'd been in the same Y as the CEO for 10 years, and running a nonprofit is not for the faint of heart. There's a lot of fundraising involved, which I loved for the majority of my career. But I really became tired of raising money all the time, and so it wasn't fair to the organization. I had been with the wife for 30 years, so I had a retirement, so my risk of jumping out wasn't as great as someone that knows they don't have a paycheck coming in.
I do have a retirement coming in, but you know, it's not what I was used to making. Plus, I still wanted to work. I mean, I wasn't ready to sit in the rocking chair, although I have several grandchildren, but I still want to work and bring in money to my household. But primarily, I didn't wanna move again for that new excitement. I had moved every 10 years and I'm in Florida, everybody's trying to retire to Florida, and my family's all close by. So I just hired a business coach and said, this is what I'm thinking. I didn't tell anybody other than my husband, and it took me two years to actually make the jump. But I spent a lot of time planning a business plan, a finance plan, developing a website, all of the things that you have to do in order to start your own business.
But it's been five years, almost five years and I say sometimes that I wish I'd done it sooner because I love it, but timing is everything. So I did it when it was right for me, but I absolutely love being an entrepreneur. And now I've got the podcast, I've got the consulting business. I have a women's membership organization. I do a women's leadership conference once a year. So just, you know, moved into all these different avenues that still pivot around the same concept.
Now you've had the opportunity to lead several people throughout your years. I mean it, I was looking at your bio and it was up to about a thousand people when you were at, with the YMCA.
How does one discover whether they're gonna be working in corporate, or whether they're gonna be working, or whether they're gonna be going out on their own? How can I understand what my strengths are so that I can be applying it towards that next step, in that next phase in my career? Whether it's to go for a promotion or even to branch out on your own or change jobs.
Sometimes people have no desire to be an entrepreneur, but they wanna change industries or change jobs. Early on in my career, I had a CEO, he had five people that reported directly to him, and those five people had been with him anywhere from three to 10 years. Underneath that level, we were having turnover, so he decided to hire a consultant that was certified in Gallup Strengthsfinder. That's what it was called at the time. Now it's just Gallup Strength. We went on a three day retreat. We did the assessment. We learned not only about ourselves, but about each other, and that's been 25 years ago, and all of us are still connected. We really got to know each other professionally and personally, and then we were able to hire people to fit into our culture. Not that we wanna hire people that are just like us. That's very different from hiring people that fit within your culture. You want diversity of thought is what I call it.
But from that point on, when I became a leader and my own CEO, I did a behavioral assessment on everybody I hired, all employees I inherited at a certain level and above, because I wanted them to know what makes them tick and I wanted to know. And it really helped figure out if they were in the right industry or if they were in the right job. Maybe they were in the right industry. I just had them in the wrong job, because your strengths, whether it's Gallup Strengths, Disk Myers Briggs, it doesn't matter. There's a million of them, but knowing how you naturally act, think, feel, and behave helps you decide where you're going to be a better fit in your job.
Establishing Communication with the Team
You and I, before we had jumped on, we had talked about some of the different personality assessments that we've taken over the years, as well as the ones that we're certified in as well. And you've probably experienced this as well, where when I'm doing trainings with an organization and we're doing an as personality assessment, whether it's disk or whether it's insight colors, strengthsfinder, what I found is, it’s been extremely helpful, not only for that one person who's navigating through building their individual development plan and looking at where they want their long-term goals for their career.
In addition, it helps with collaboration and teamwork because when you're able to understand how you communicate, how other people on your team communicate, you're able to do what I call communication style flexing, where you're flexing your style of communication for the other individual. I know for example, that there were some people on my team where they were very detailed and they wanted the specifics anytime that there was gonna be a change going on. They wanted all the details, and so that I knew for that particular person, I would go into much more detail versus somebody, if you understand disk, somebody that's a little bit more of a direct personality, they may not want all the details. They may want just the big picture, and being able to flex your style of communication has helped when it comes to conflict resolution, when it comes to communication, as well as understanding where, and identifying and building an individual development plan to get you to where you wanna go in your career.
What I do in my consulting business is primarily work with teams doing just what you said, and my tagline is, when you learn about yourself and others, you communicate better, and when you communicate better, you're more productive. So when you come in with any type of assessment with a certified coach and an assessment, and you learn what makes you tick and what makes your team members tick, you're gonna improve your communication as you describe, which ultimately improves your productivity. Because I always tell the teams I'm working with, if I'm working on a project with someone, my number one strength is achiever. So if I'm working on a project with somebody that say their number one strength is analytical and I just wanna get to the finish line, well the analytical person wants to dot every T or I am cross every T. If I don't know that about them and they don't know I'm an achiever, we're gonna take it personal. When we get upset with each other. I'm gonna say, well, she just doesn't want to do it. She can't get to the finish line for getting bogged down in details. And she's thinking, well, Teresa just wants to finish it so she can check it off her list. She doesn't care if it's right or wrong, so I always lead with my group saying this is not personal. It's how we think, act, feel, and behave, and it's different for each of us.
The other piece of that is knowing what your top strengths or your, your disk is, whatever it is, and how that plays out when you're under stress. When you are under stress, and I'll use myself as an example, as an achiever, that sounds really good. Theresa's achiever, pat yourself on the back. I'm gonna get the job done. Well, when I'm under stress and I have a deadline to achieve, I'm going to get the job done no matter what. But then I look behind me and there might be a lot of dead bodies. Because I just stepped over everybody to make it happen, then it became not so good.
And the higher you move up in your career, the more important it is for you to know the strengths or the personality or the behaviors of the people around you. I didn't need five achievers reporting to me or the teams underneath we're not gonna be successful, I needed those analytical people so that when I met the deadline, what I turned in to my boss was right. not just done, but done correctly with all the research. So it's important in building your team and working with your team and communication is the number one thing if you go into a business. Number one problem is always communication, and so this is somewhat of an answer to that.
I like how you brought up, we call them those potential liabilities because it's just as important to understand your strengths as it is to understand what those liabilities are. When you're under stress, what could possibly come out and for those that are high achievers often will just get things done, will miss out the details.
And on the flip side, those analytical, those that lead with very of an analytical type personality. Sometimes they have a hard time getting to the finish line because they get so caught up in the weeds. And that they have analysis paralysis. And so really understanding our strengths when we're under stress, what might come out, people that tend to be very direct. Sometimes when they're under stress, they can come across as abrasive and short. Sometimes a little too assertive, but also understanding if you know that about your boss and you're saying, “Gosh, he or she just really became short with me. Oh, I wonder if they're under a lot of stress. Maybe this might be an opportunity for me to ask. How are you? What do you help with? What can I do?” Because like you said, the more that we understand each other, the better we can communicate and collaborate together and moving towards that common goal.
Whenever I go into a company, the person that is hiring me, which is normally somebody in the C-suite, CEO, chief Operating Officer, sometimes the HR. Whatever team I'm working with, the highest person in that group on the hierarchy, if you will, has to take the assessment first and meet with me individually. And if they refuse to do that, I won't work with them. Because you can't just say, “Oh, I'm gonna do this assessment on my team to help them.” If you're leading the team, they need to know all about you as well. Because when I send an email to one of my employees, I need this done by five o'clock, and there's no, hello, how are you? Or have a nice weekend. They're thinking, oh my gosh, she's mad with me. No, I'm not mad. I just am trying to get something done and get it off my plate. It's not personal, but I also have to know everybody is not that direct or that high achieving, which again, sounds good, but it's not always. So I need to stop and say, “Okay, the person I'm communicating with is more analytical or more of a relator. They're more warm and fuzzy than my personality.” So I have to take time to have this small talk and go through the office and ask how the weekend was, or, you know, how Johnny's soccer game or whatever it might be. I have to mentally do that.
And it's not that I don't care about the people, it's just that the job is first and foremost in getting things done, but everybody that works with me or around me is not that way. And so I need to adapt to how I communicate with them. If I want to have a good working relationship, you know, if you're the boss you can do what you want. But ultimately, if you're not adapting to your employees’ style, they're not gonna stay with you long because it's not gonna be good, it's just not gonna be a good fit.
And I would say too, as you're saying that, I'm never gonna ask my team to do something that I won't do myself. And so I'm really glad that you brought up that point about how important it is that the leader is the one that is taking the personality assessment first and foremost. And then having everybody on the team taking it as well and sharing those results. I think that's a really fun exercise. When I'm working with organizations, I come in and we do personality assessments. It's fun to share the results, and there's been times where we've acted out and role played each other, which has been really funny. They get into it, and it's quite entertaining when we, when we do that as well. But, also understanding, there's also personality assessments when it comes to how we feel valued and appreciated.
I know that there's a book by Dr. Gary Chapman and he talks about the five languages of appreciation in the workplace. I've done an episode specifically on that earlier, I wanna say in, in 2021. But that was extremely valuable when I was leading my team because I was able to understand, okay, this particular person, values being recognized and not only recognized with words of affirmation, but they liked it on the main stage.They liked it when it was over conference calls, right? They liked other people to hear it, versus there's some people on my team that would be mortified if they were put on stage and be recognized. They cared more about, maybe receiving a handwritten card or maybe it was even a gift card because receiving gifts was their language of appreciation.
But as leaders, it's so important that we understand everybody on our team, what their communication style is, their personality, what their pet peeves are, how they feel valued,so that we can truly be the best leaders that we can.
When you use the Gallup strengths, we call those motivators. We can do motivators and values, but the motivators is what I do with groups and there's like a list of 40 things that motivate people and they narrow that down to their top five. And you're exactly right, some of them wanna win a trip to Hawaii. Some of them want to be recognized by their family. Some of them want coffee with the CEO. Some of them just want a simple thank you, you know? But you really find out what motivates each person that works with you. And then you know that I'm not a believer and you treat everybody the same way. Obviously there's HR rules and there's all those things that you know, we're not talking about, but you have to treat people as they want to be treated, not as we wanna be treated. How will they best respond? And they're gonna best respond when you converse with them in their language. I mean, it really is that simple. But to do that, you have to know their language. My favorite is when I go into a group and somebody says, “Oh, I don't think that's me,” and then we'll go over it and their peers will say, “Oh, but what about the day you did this or you said this, or, oh yes, that is you.” And by the end of it, they're like, oh, geez, okay, that really is me. I really do that. You know? So that's always my favorite. When somebody says, or I tell them to take it home and give it to, if they have teenage children. Give their report to a teenage child who will be brutally honest with you, or to a spouse or significant other, and more often than not, they come back and say, well, yeah, I guess that really is me. So it just makes sense, right? It's just, the more we know about somebody, the better we communicate with them.
Building Strong Work Relationships
Now, what might you recommend for somebody, maybe their organization doesn't do personality assessments? What might you recommend for an individual, whether they're working in corporate or even as entrepreneur? Because this is important if you are an entrepreneur as well. Absolutely. To understand how you're communicating with maybe your customers. What recommendations do you have for those individuals to take these?
You can literally Google disk or strengths or any personality assessment you've heard of, or behavioral assessment, and almost all of them have a way for you to take it right online. My advice though, is not to just take it and read your report. You need to work with somebody that is certified or in the case of strengths, there's several books that were written by, I think it's Tom Rath. But anyway, by the author and the founder of Strength. So because if its just the report, it doesn't dig in well enough for you to truly understand it.
And I know I will do individual assessments, for a reasonable price. And most people will, most people that are certified in strengths or disks or any of the others will do an assessment for you for under, summer as much as $500, summer as little as a hundred dollars. But that's my advice is, take it, but get somebody that knows what they're doing to help you analyze it. When I work with entrepreneurs or people that are trying to change careers, it's the very first thing I do. In the very first session, we do an assessment.
I would also add too, I know a lot of books, so there, the first time I took Strengthsfinder, I read the first book, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham, and it came with the promo code in the book. That was one of my first books that I read as a leader. And that came with the promo code. There's Emotional Intelligence 2.0 that if you purchase that book, it comes with the promo code to test the assessment. Or as you said, you can go to just google disk assessments. I agree with you a hundred percent that it's extremely important that not only when you take the assessment to have somebody who is certified, who can walk you through what that truly means and how to utilize these strengths to advance your career and to help you in life and when your communication. Also how to start to understand other personalities, whether they take the assessment or not, so that you can better communicate with other people, especially if you're in sales. I mean, I would know that when I would do co-travels with people on my team, I'd say, “Okay, well, let's kind of talk about what personality do you think that they are and how do you think that? What's led to your conclusion on that? And it would help us change our style of sales approach depending on what was the personality that we thought that that individual was.
It's so important in sales and as you go through it, you start to pick up on what people are with the different, you know, when you really study any of the behaviorals assessments, you start to say, “Based on what they're saying or sometimes what they're wearing or how they're acting, they're probably this.” And more often than not, you're gonna be close. You're gonna be close enough to know how to approach that person. If somebody comes to me with a manual this thick trying to sell me something and they want an hour of my time, my eyes glaze over time. After five minutes, tell me what you got. Leave the material with me. Tell me the price and why I need it and move on. But I have friends that want the manual and they're gonna read the manual. But knowing that ahead of time is incredibly important if you're in sales of any kind, and we're all in sales, quite frankly.
I do believe we're all in sales because even if you're in customer service, your role is to retain the customers and your role is to service the customers. So no matter what, we are all in one way, shape, or form in sales, always. For some reason we don't wanna put the name on it.
And even with your peers, if you're working on a project, you're trying to convince someone to do it your way. They're trying to convince you to do it their way. At the end of the day, we're all trying to convince each other, this is how we need to do it. So if we know about that person, we're gonna save a lot of time. A lot of time in trying to guess or getting upset or taking it worse.
What I'm hearing from you today is if you are leading a team, absolutely ensure that you're taking that step and understanding the personalities of each member on your team. Implement taking personality assessments. Hire somebody who's certified in these different various personalities. It's gonna improve the collaboration, the communication, the teamwork. The productivity amongst your team. And for individuals, also understanding your personality is gonna help you identify what your individual strengths are, so then you can pivot and, and maybe go for certain promotions that might be really aligned with your personality, and also might help you identify what are your strengths and hone in on those particular areas within your business. And the other ones, maybe you're gonna outsource those particular steps. I know accounting is not one of my forte and what I enjoy doing, so I outsource that particular part of my business. But I love marketing, so I do all my own marketing as an entrepreneur. And as you said, as entrepreneurs, we wear many business hats.
Strengthening Our Goals
But what else, what other else advice do you wanna people and they're looking at, okay, well I really wanna understand what my strengths are, especially going into 2023 and achieving their goals.
The other thing that I find very important, especially if you're an entrepreneur, is surrounding yourself with other people that will be honest with you. I call it your personal, my personal board of directors. And these are not necessarily your best friends. These are people that may not be in your social circle, but there are people you can call upon for business advice. They're people you admire and nobody that I've ever called has refused to have a cup of coffee. If I say, I'd like to ask your advice on something, people like to give their advice. Let's say you do one of these assessments and you think maybe you don't totally think that's how you act. When you have that personal board of directors, you have people that you can go to and ask that are not just your friends that are gonna agree with you all the time.
But four or five people that you can go to for good, sound, honest advice is, and whether you're an entrepreneur or not, I've always had a personal board of directors, even in corporate America, but as an entrepreneur it's even more important. So find out all you can about yourself and then surround yourself with people that will be honest with for on those hard questions.
It's very important to have accountability. I have a small mastermind group and it makes all the difference in the world. And knowing that this is what I said I was gonna do, and when we meet next month, did I do it and if I didn't? Surrounding yourself with other people and just being a lifelong learner, you're never too old to keep learning and to stay relevant. In your business, you don't even know it all, especially in the world we live in right now.
As much as we think that we may know it all, the reality is the world is constantly changing. And it's evolving and we're adapting through every new phase of it.
Especially now post Covid, the whole hybrid thing. I mean, we could have a whole conversation just about the hybrid workforce, so that's the biggest question I'm being asked. With my company, it says, how does this work? How does this look? What's the best way to do it? What's not the best way? We're all figuring that out as we go, because it's here to stay.
Yes, it is here to say, and I'm happy to see that a lot of organizations are adopting more of that hybrid type work because it is challenging. We all have lives outside of work and when a kid gets sick, or you've got doctor's appointments and you're having to take time off work. It's so nice to say, well, I'm gonna work from home today. The hour or two hours that I would've spent on the road driving to my work, I could go run to that doctor's appointment and then come back. And what they've actually found is people that work from home are actually highly productive. Sometimes even, unless they have a hard time shutting it off when they're working from home.
But it's also important to stay on topic; that when we're working remotely, it's even more important that we are intentional about getting to know our peers. Because it doesn't just organically happen over the water cooler. So to have these types of team building things is a way to keep your team cohesive, even if they're not coming in the office all at the same time, on the same days. It becomes more important to be very intentional about how we keep this group acting as a team. Because even if you're working remotely, you're not alone on an island. You're still part of a team.
What's resonating through our conversation is no matter if you're leading a team or you're looking to advance your career within yourself, whether it's in corporate or as a business owner, take the time to understand and really understand your personality type and understanding your strengths, because that's gonna help you in the long run when it comes to communication, and as well as with growing your business.
