CliftonStrengths at Luther College

Don Clifton was a popular psychology instructor and researcher at the University of Nebraska. In the early 1950s, he started thinking about all the ways the field of psychology had to describe what is wrong with people and the very few ways it had to identify what is right with people.

Clifton began researching why some people become great at what they do and others don’t. For one project with ROTC students in the mid-1950s, he looked at the common factors of successful people. The study kept expanding. In 1998, Clifton, then the chairman of Gallup, sought to establish a common language to describe what people do well.

Gallup researchers mined their database of more than 100,000 talent-based interviews. They examined specific questions that Gallup had asked successful professionals across several fields. They looked for patterns

Through this process, Clifton and Gallup researchers established the 34 themes of talent. They then developed the first version of the CliftonStrengths assessment to measure these distinct talents. As of this writing, more than 29 million people have taken the assessment. And the American Psychological Association gave Clifton a presidential commendation as the Father of Strengths Psychology.

You are different from the people sitting around you. In fact, you are so unique that the chances of you having the same top five talent themes as someone else are about one in 275,000. The odds of having the same top five themes in the exact same order is one in 33 million.

Because of your talent themes, your experiences and your environment, you look at life in a unique way. Many people think they need to be exactly like someone else—a celebrity, a towering figure of success, or somebody they know and admire. But trying to be someone else doesn’t work. Becoming more of who you already are is the key to your success.

Who you are is a gift given to you at birth—you are born with a set of talents that nobody else has. Turning your unique talents into strengths requires skills, knowledge, and conscious effort. Success means different things to different people. But everyone achieves their version of success by embracing and applying their strengths. 70 years of research has proven it.

Building your talents into strengths requires practice and hard work. It’s a lot like building physical strengths. That’s where your Luther College Strengths team comes in. Schedule a coaching session or invite us to your team or class to take a deeper dive into your strengths development.

Interested in a workshop for your department or team? We can help with that! The Strengths team can provide a workshop on anything from the basics of strengths and what they mean, to team dynamics, to telling your story in an interview. We can tailor any workshop to meet your particular teams needs and objectives. This is a wonderful opportunity to foster positive and productive conversations that elevate teams and invigorate their goals.

Here’s how the typical workshop planning goes:

1. We will meet with you to discuss your goals and objectives for the workshop
2. We will discern together how many sessions and the session length that will best fit your group’s availability and what you hope to accomplish.
3. We will come up with the tools, framework, date(s), time(s), and location to host a successful workshop.
4. Then we will come in and share a fun and meaningful time with your team!

Some typical workshops include:

• Self- Exploration and understanding your group members better
• What You Do- How to apply your strengths to your particular tasks and responsibilities within that group
• Career Exploration- How your strengths might help or explain a career path or how you can be successful in that career
• Effective Team Dynamics- This workshop is aimed at discovering how people’s strengths interact to form a team and how to be effective collaborators by meeting the needs and celebrating the strengths of each group member
• Telling Your Story- Finding out how your strengths have had an influence on your everyday life and how to tell your story using your strengths (interview prep, elevator speech, and cover letter preparation)

Schedule a Group Strengths Workshop

Hey Faculty! We’d love to explore how we might assist in your course objectives. Whether you’ll be away for a class or want us to join you, we are happy to provide our resources. It is our hope that after an interactive classroom experience with strengths, your students will be better able to articulate the unique ways of thinking, behaving, and decision making. We’ve seen students become more active learners, increase their productivity, and benefit their interactions with fellow students and professors.

Here’s how the typical classroom presentation planning goes:

1. We will meet with you to discuss your goals and objectives for the workshop
2. We will discern together how many sessions and the session length will best fit your group’s availability and what you hope to accomplish.
3. We will come up with the tools, framework, date(s), and time(s) to visit your class.
4. Then we will come in and share a fun and meaningful time with you and your students!

Some typical workshops include:

• Self- Exploration and understanding your classmates and professor better
• What You Do- How to apply your strengths as a student in general or how to apply them for a particular upcoming project
• Career Exploration- How your strengths might help you to understand why you are drawn to particular classes, majors, or careers and how to follow those discoveries and maximize your potential
• Effective Team Dynamics- This workshop is aimed at discovering how many people’s Strengths interact to form a positive classroom experience and how to create a successful classroom environment
• Telling Your Story- Finding out how your Strengths have had an influence on your everyday life and how to tell your story using your Strengths (interview prep)

Here’s an example of a classroom presentation we have done in the past:

The Strengths Program was invited into three Religion 101 sections to implement an ‘Effective Team Dynamics’ framework. The objective was to provide students with skills to communicate their potential needs and contributions to the group. Students write out the things they ‘Hate’ and the things they ‘Bring’ from the strengths theme insight cards. The groups share those statements and together develop a team contract in order to celebrate and show respect for how each group member operates.

Schedule a class strengths presentation

Please fill out this form to request a Door Tag from the Strengths Program at Luther College. If you have any questions please email strengths@luther.edu.

Please fill this out this form if you have a group of people you work closely with who have all taken the Strengths assessment. If you have any questions please email strengths@luther.edu.