How Individual Themes Fit into Domains of Team Leadership Strength

This is the third in a series of five posts from a book review of Strengths-Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie.

1. After you take the StrengthsFinder (as part of this book), you can plug your themes into one of the four team domains mentioned in the previous blog post: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. To do this, the authors have grouped all the 34 themes into these four domains of a team. As just one example, Strategic Thinking includes such StrengthsFinder themes such as Context, Ideation, Futuristic, and Learner among others. This grouping by the authors shows how, while a person is not usually balanced across all 34 themes, when combined with themes of other people on the well-balanced team who complement him or her, great teams form quickly and are effective, efficient, and powerful.

2. Less clear in this model is how many themes it takes to be a true strength in a domain. In similar such trait models, that decision is usually a choice made by the person him/herself to decide which of the four domains feels like a domain strength. That is, if there are two or more themes in two or more of the four domains. This is speculation on my part.