The Importance of Context and Strengths

Do you think that your Strengths change depending on the context? Are your Strengths the same or different if you’re at home, if you’re at school, if you’re at work, or if you’re hanging out with your kids or your friends?

In this episode, you’ll hear a few minutes of an old interview with Brian Schubring, our president and founder of Leadership Vision. We discuss the role of context in Strengths and he goes into some detail that really gets at the heart of what our Strengths Communicator Training is all about.

Our next Strengths Communicator Training begins this fall in September 2022. Our Strengths communicator Training teaches cohort participants the disciplines of hearing, seeing, and understanding the behaviors of Strengths so that they can conduct 1 to 1 conversation with individuals to help them understand their own Strengths. We also teach participants the professional delivery of how to feed back this information, both to those individual participants and also to a group.

The Importance of Context

Context is everything. At Leadership Vision, we believe in a functional order, which is how you prefer to use your Strengths in a given context. What’s so important, and sometimes gets missed or lost in the Strengths discussion, is helping people understand how they prefer to engage their Strengths in different contexts. You could say the number one priority of a Strengths Communicator is to help someone do that.

One of the things that we are trying to educate our Strengths Communicators in is to understand how much context has a shaping influence on the development of Strengths. You may have a present context that doesn’t value certain Strengths of yours, and so your functional order within that context may be different than the functional order of your Strengths in a relational context.

Strengths move. Strengths are shaped. Strengths develop over time. They aren’t etched into stone and never change. There’s a dynamic to Strengths. One of the fundamental principles that Strengths Communicators are learning is that Strengths are dynamic. Additionally, the order of Strengths isn’t set and isn’t an indicator of how Strengths are used. We want people to be able to step back and look at their Strengths in a much more dynamic way.

Values & Culutural Context

One of the connections the participants made in our last Strengths Communicator cohort was how important it was to know the values of their context. Values of a culture can positively or negatively shape the way a person shows up, and it definitely affects their self-esteem. A negative perception of a strength can actually be a positive to the organizational culture.

As a Strengths communicator, one of the primary responsibilities is to be able to have a conversation with someone to understand the functional order and the pairings of Strengths, and then to be able to defend and protect that individual within the organizational culture that they exist now.

Strengths Communicator Training is a way that you can create internal advocates; to come alongside those who have been misinterpreted, misunderstood, or even devalued. It creates an opportunity to have professional compassion towards others, and also to be able to instill within them a new understanding of how they add value.

Click here to learn more about our Strengths Communicator Training. Our next cohort begins September 29th, 2022!

Your Strengths Context

Read through your Strengths results and think about the values of your cultural context and the different ways that your Strengths show up. What can you learn about your Strengths in different contexts? We’d love to hear from you! Connect with us at connect@leadershipvisionconsulting.com.