The Clifton Strengths-Based Approach

Donald Clifton’s strengths-based approach to management and leadership powers the greatest teams in the world’s most successful organizations every day (CliftonStrengths, 2017). The emphasis of the strength finder is to focus on building strengths as opposed to accentuating weaknesses. The Clifton Strengthsfinder assessment measures responses to 177 statements, and from there gauge the tester on 34 distinct patterns. My top five strengths are as follows: belief, restorative, harmony, learner, and focus. The strength that stood out to me the most was the restorative talent. According to the Clifton Strengthsfinder, people with strong restorative talents love to solve problems, and are energized by their problem solving ability (CliftonStrengths,

According the Clifton Strengthsfinder, people with strong focus talents prioritize and then take action, set goals and determine priorities, and make alterations when needed to get back on course (CliftonStrengths, 2017). The focus talent can be a bit difficult to maintain at times especially in the auditing field because daily activities can become very repetitive. As a leader, you must maintain focus when you have several tasks that must be completed daily, weekly, and monthly, all while ensuring that your team stays on task as well. If your team does not reach their goals, it makes it impossible for you to reach your goals. Strong focus pushes not only you, but your team to be as efficiently effective as possible. The same goes with the auditing field. If I do not focus on my tasks and complete them in a timely manner, it makes it impossible for the rest of the people on my team to do the same. If I lag behind, it makes everything else lag behind and vice versa because we all depend on each other. If I am auditing a department, when I complete my testing, there is someone else on my team that has to review what I have tested. At that point, I have to wait on that person to finish reviewing my work to know if I need to go back and correct anything. If I am behind or the reviewer is behind, it makes everything else run behind, and that is when deadlines are missed. Essentially, we are all in leadership roles because we have to keep each other focused on our tasks to complete our team