Do you know what your top five strengths are?

If you’ve ever taken the Clifton Strengths Assessment, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Several years ago the staff here at Business Publications Corp. all completed the assessment, and many of us still have small blue plaques with our personal strengths posted at our desks.

Developed by psychologist Don Clifton, the Clifton Strengths Assessment involves selecting from 177 paired statements to choose the one that best describe yourself. At the end, you have a remarkably accurate, concise picture of your top strengths, based on your natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

I recently sat in on a visit by Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, who spoke to a small group of business owners hosted at Avail Professional Services in Urbandale. Allen is traveling around the country as the “chief evangelist” for the program, which he is promoting through an initiative he launched last year called Soar. Allen’s organization is creating a network of professional coaches through the online hub at soar.com, as well as offering leading-edge tools, partnerships and strategies for building sustainable relationships between coaches and clients.

Allen’s vision is that entire companies, not to mention communities, can maximize their potential by knowing and using their top strengths. Locally, business coach Jeff Garrison, principal of Results on Purpose, has connected with Soar as an evangelist in Iowa.  

Although organizations can use the Strengths Finder tools on their own, it’s better if they have a coach come alongside to help them, Garrison said. “So I’m connecting coaches here in Iowa with our platform,” he said. “And it’s a way for people to get connected with them.”

He’d like to see Iowa become a strengths-based state, much like Rhode Island, where an estimated 1.5 million residents have taken the assessment, with involvement from the governor’s office and top employers and nonprofits.

Awareness of personal strengths can really help individuals and organizations maximize their potential, Garrison said. “To be able to do that, that’s what really puts gas in the engine.”