We know that people do well at work when they engage their strengths in unique, complementary and redundant ways. After long working with leaders and teams, I would argue that people only engage most consistently engage strengths they can name. So part of this work is expanding people's strengths vocabularies. We give them access to the myriad of strengths focused assessment tools. We have them create personally meaningful labels and phrases to name their strengths.
What we find is that the more personally meaningful these strengths names are, the more poignantly they support their engagement. Academic and consultant speek vocabularies are often too inaccessible or anemic to provide a significant emotional hook to the resonance of people's strengths.
Of course getting people to tell stories featuring their personal strengths culls out langauge that matters and works.
