By Craig Whitney

Insight #5 – What we’ve Learned from Online Assessment

(Note this is the fourth in a series. See Insight #1 for background on the research project.)

In 1998 the Gallup organization published StrengthsFinder™ – a tool to help people identify their talents. Church Planter Profiles encourages potential church planters to use this assessment and share their results. In our recent research project, one of the questions we asked was which talents were most common among highly effective church planters. The top four are listed below:

My reaction to 3 of the 4 was that makes sense. Strategist create alternative ways to proceed. Communicators are good conversationalists and presenters. Futurists inspire others with their visions of the future. These talents intuitively connect to church planting. Learner surprised me, at first, especially since it was a talent found in almost half of the highly effective planters. Learners are drawn to, and excel at, discovering and absorbing new ideas and new ways of doing things. It’s easy to see how this talent for learning propels a leader forward. Church Planting challenges become just another opportunity to learn something new.

The adage is leaders are readers. Reading is merely one form of learning. What our research reveals is that leaders are learners. The good news is even if you don’t have this talent naturally, you can develop this habit in your life by creating regular time and space for acquiring and testing new ideas.

(If you have never completed a StrengthsFinder assessment, it would be well worth the small investment of time and money. You can learn more about Strengths, and receive a code to complete the assessment by purchasing either StrengthsFinder 2.0 or Strengths Based Leadership.)

Next: It’s Not Enough