Career Branding When Arranger Is Your Strength
I hear a lot of reflections about how to apply your CliftonStrengths talent theme of Arranger to your career.
In this series, you get one strength per post so that you can add to the insights from your StrengthsFinder report and make an even stronger alignment between your current job and your strengths.
- If you\u2019re exploring this concept as a manager, use this series for career development ideas and even new clues about responsibilities you could give a person with this talent theme so that they can show up at their best.
- If you\u2019re exploring this concept for yourself, use this as a chance to build a reputation for your strengths so that you\u2019re more likely to be given assignments that live in your strengths zone.
You\u2019ll get three layers to chew on:
1. Career Branding
2. Red Flag Situations At Work
3. Fresh Application Ideas
You probably already have a reputation for what you know. Think about your personal resume, CV, or your LinkedIn profile, I bet it's full of \u201cthe what,\u201d which are things like job titles, skills, knowledge, expertise, or the degree you earned. What\u2019s missing is usually "the how,\u201d and this is where your StrengthsFinder talent themes live.
Chances are good that you are a lot like my StrengthsFinder training clients, where you don\u2019t physically see your teammates and customers every day. So many of us work on remote teams. That\u2019s why LinkedIn has become so important for career branding. It\u2019s how your teammates, customers, and vendors go look you up before a meeting - to see who they\u2019re about to talk to. And rather than only telling them what you know, you should also give them a peek at how it is to work with you.
Here are a bunch of Arranger-related adjectives to consider using in your career branding efforts and your LinkedIn profile:
- Juggler
- Multi Tasker
- Organizer
- Piece Fitter
- Collaborative
- Change Lover
- Maestro
- Turnaround Queen/King
- Configurer
- Flexible
- Dynamic
- Conductor
- Coordinator
- Resourceful
- Unflappable
- Change-ready
- Puzzle Rearranger
- Interactive
- Decision Maker
- Change Agent
- Priority Adjuster
- Enlister
These are the cultures, interactions, or situations that might feel like soul-sucking drudgery to someone with the talent theme of Arranger. They could even make you want to quit the team if they get really bad. So I\u2019ll give you a couple of these to be on watch for \u2014 because if they fester, you might become detached or disengaged at work.
Here are two Red flags for Arranger:
- The Slow, Steady Slog. If you lead through Arranger and you\u2019re in a slow-paced, careful work environment, you might get antsy fast. If you feel bogged down by obsolete processes or technologies, you\u2019ll be dying to make the positive changes needed to move forward. If you happen to be on a team where the obsolete guidelines are sacred, you\u2019ll want to find other parts of the job that are not so steady-eddie to keep your Go Button firing.
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Stay In Your Lane. Let\u2019s say you lead through Arranger, and you\u2019re responsible for marketing analytics. Although the job is typically focused on the marketing and sales teams, you see a cool opportunity to bring in a panoramic view with customer data and product data. Then you get the news that you need to \u201cstay in your lane\u201d - keep focused on the job you were given. This can be extremely frustrating if you lead through Arranger because the broad collaboration and the ability to adapt to the current times is exactly where your genius lies.
These are ways to apply the talent theme of Arranger at work, even when the job duties on the team feel pretty locked in. If you\u2019re exploring this concept as a team manager, be sure to have a conversation around these ideas. You\u2019ll both be able to come up with places to apply them.
For someone who leads through Arranger, put this talent to good use with one of these options:
- Stalemate. Imagine two teams have been battling each other for years. They never seem to agree on budgets. They seem to have competing priorities. Collaboration has halted. Consider bringing in someone on the team who leads through Arranger. They may thrive on the idea that they get to put together processes, plans, events, and tasks that will actually move both teams forward. It\u2019s important to know that if you put them in a situation where you want them to get momentum where it stalled, they need to have enough sway to make things happen. If they get blocked and ignored, they\u2019re likely to find a workaround, yet running into an entire team of people bellyaching about the change or telling your team member to \u201cstop fixing what\u2019s not broken\u201d it will actually drain them rather than make them thrive.
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Progress During Adversity. Let\u2019s say you lead a team of hardware engineers. Someone discovers a defect in the product that might set your go-to-market date back by two quarters. If someone on the team leads through Arranger, see what they can come up with. The puzzle of shifting resources, remaining unflappable, and keeping people enlisted in the project during these hard times - those are all things that this person will be fired up by.
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Matrix Mess. Imagine you\u2019re like 49% of the workforces around the world, and you have a matrixed reporting environment. People might describe themselves as having 4 or 5 bosses. Let\u2019s say you have a project that has become a complete mess. No one knows who owns it. Team members are spread all over the world, and no one can attend the conference calls at the same time. Most people work remotely, so getting everyone in a room to work things out is simply not an option. When you have a messy environment and a high stakes project that must get ironed out, call on your team members with the Arranger talent. Ask them specifically to focus on bringing functional collaboration. Ask them to be the maestro of the matrix. They will likely thrive if they get to think of themselves as a conductor in this seemingly muddled-up environment.
- Go take action on your LinkedIn profile with the career branding section. Challenge yourself to write one sentence in the About section of LinkedIn that captures how you collaborate as a teammate at work.
- Then think over the red flags to see if there\u2019s anything you need to get in front of before it brings you down. You might decide to make the situation mean something different, or pre-plan a reaction for the next time it comes around.
- And finally, volunteer your talents through the application ideas. If you\u2019re a manager, have a conversation with your team members about which of these things sound like something they\u2019d love to have more of.
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