Leading with the Responsibility StrengthsFinder Talent

Responsibility StrengthsFinder TL;DR

The responsibility StrengthsFinder talent means you’re a person who is honest, loyal and keeps their commitments. You take strong ownership of your responsibilities until they are complete.

Your drive to be true to your word and not let others down makes you a great team player. But it also puts you at risk of being taken advantage of and burnout. You may also struggle with staying committed to something that needs to be let go, especially if you also have the deliberative strength in your top 5. 

To stay healthy in your responsibility strength, you must learn to delineate what is yours to own and what isn't.

When leaders learn to navigate the tension between healthy boundaries and owning their commitments, they are poised to make a huge impact.

If you’re already familiar with StrengthsFinder, you can skip over the next section.

How do you lead well with responsibility in your StrengthsFinder top 5?

So you’ve taken the StrengthsFinder assessment, received your results and found responsibility in the list. Now you’re wondering how to grow or leverage this strength in your leadership. 

I hate going back on my word, and I'd rather stay up all night and deliver. I've grown and helped other responsible leaders grow in finding the tension between healthy boundaries and owning their commitments.

These are four strategies I’ve seen leaders use to leverage their responsibility talent into a strength.

1. Know your capacity.
2. Help your team with shared commitments.
3. Look for responsible team cultures.
4. Don’t own other people’s responsibilities.

Know your capacity.

Your yes's are true yes's. You don’t easily go back on a commitment you’ve made. So you need to know if you have the margin to follow through on something before committing to it. 

This sounds simple, but I’ve seen most leaders with a responsibility strength struggle with it. There are two common contributors.

1. They feel committed just because they were asked.
2. They don’t know how to measure their capacity. 

Let’s look more closely at each of these.

Feeling committed just because you were asked.

If you’re good at what you do, people will ask you for help. This means, at a point, you’ll have to say no. 

If saying no is difficult for you, remind yourself that by saying no, you are saying yes to everything you’re already committed to. Your no is a yes to all your current commitments.

Not knowing how to measure your capacity.

Measuring your capacity will be personal because we all have different abilities and skills. Your capacity will also change as your context changes. A parent who is up at night with a newborn baby will likely have less capacity than someone who gets eight hours of sleep.

It can be easier if your work is modularized, meaning you can easily break it down into elements like the number of projects, number of clients, number of calls, etc. 

Your no is a yes to all your current commitments

In this case, you need to record how many you’re responsible for at a given time. Then observe how that workload feels. Over time you will be able to determine where your optimum capacity is. 

View your capacity, not as the highest possible amount of work you can do but as the level of work where you’re most effective.

Help your team with shared commitments.

Effective teams win and lose together. When someone on the team has a commitment, the rest of the team should want to support them in following through. Everyone owns the whole and does their parts. 

But there are also commitments that are truly shared across the team, and everyone is working to contribute to a shared deliverable. 

You need to know if you have the margin to follow through on something before committing to it.

As a leader with the responsibility strength, help your team use inclusive language for these commitments. Instead of, “how will you get this done?” it’s, “how will we get this done?” 

Everyone still owns their contribution, but there should be no room for someone thinking they succeeded, but the team failed.

Look for responsible team cultures.

Your team or organization's culture will significantly impact how your responsibility strength is lived out. 

When looking for a job, ask how often the team meets deadlines or what happens when a commitment isn't kept. The answer will tell you much about how personal responsibility is viewed in that organizational culture. 

You take strong ownership of your responsibilities until they are complete.

While you can positively impact an organization’s culture, don’t go somewhere you will be taken advantage of.

Don’t own other people’s responsibilities.

This is a common struggle for anyone with a responsibility strength, especially if they also have the empathy strength in their top 5. 

To stay healthy in your responsibility strength, you must learn to delineate what is yours to own and what isn't. This doesn’t mean you can’t help other people, but don’t take their work and make it your own. 

Everyone owns the whole and does their parts.

You don't actually do people favors when you consistently do their job. You’re robbing both them and yourself of growth opportunities. 

As you learn to lead using your responsibility strength, you can help your team move work from committed to completed.

No more having to go back on your commitments or owning so many you burn out. Instead, you can consistently deliver quality work on time, and others will know they can count on you and your team.

Leaders with the StrengthsFinder responsibility talent can struggle with an antipattern of rigidity when they’re unwilling to cut their losses and move on from a commitment. Learning the strengths antipatterns will allow you to continue growing as a healthy, intentional leader. 

You are on an extraordinary journey to living and leading from your strengths. You can explore the list below to learn about the rest of your top 5 strengths.