Understanding and Investing in Your Restorative Talent

In this Theme Thursday Season 4 webcast, Jim Collison, Gallup's Director of Talent Sourcing, and Maika Leibbrandt, Senior Workplace Consultant, talk about Restorative.

The Restorative theme describes the talent present in individuals who continually and effectively create solutions where others may see problems. They calmly bring back what is off-track to a place, restoring working order and moving forward. People with dominant Restorative talents believe brokenness is not permanent, but something we pass through on the way to improvement. In many cases, this executing theme enables people to interact well with real, practical, and perhaps technical options rather than anticipating imagined solutions.

If you have high Restorative, you're at your best when bringing solutions to daily challenges, approaching what is difficult with what can be the answer. Not just naming the problem, you are able to bring forth both awareness of what needs to improve and a way to create that solution. In a team, you play the vital role of "Reviver," energized by restoring what others may otherwise give up. You make necessary adjustments with existing resources.

To make the most of your talent, put yourself in turnaround situations. What can be saved, fixed, or restored? Challenges will be interesting to you. Show up there. Consider how you might hone your radar for the right kind of problem, specific to your own theme dynamics and interests. It's likely you'll be more attracted to an existing hurdle or stumble, rather than accentuating a process that's already working well. How can you quickly identify your best broken space to restore?

Learn all you can about problems that seem to be trending among your peers, colleagues, or industry. The more you know about not just the problem, but about the whole related system, the more agile you can be when offering creative solutions or advice.

Curate the best environment for your Restorative talent theme by looking for champions who can help you with particularly thorny problems. You may pride yourself in your ability to cope, and you might also be even better when you have people to cope with in collaboration. Simply put, don't take it all on by yourself. Create a network of experts you can turn to for guidance when you need it. Also, find ways to invite problems into your space early and often. This will serve two benefits: putting more context into your hands to help you make the most of your solution, and creating the habit of sharing and transparency among your colleagues.

Worry less about flying high on imagination alone. Your access to creativity will be by tinkering with reality, on the ground. You might feel impatient when people are talking about all the possibilities, because you can see potential problems and it may seem out of touch to create something new when there already exists so much to be done. It's perfectly okay not to be the most imaginative person in the room. Give others the space to dream if they need it, and find ways to ask questions that anchor your role in current expectations rather than new ideals.

Working With Restorative:

If you're working with someone with dominant Restorative talents, you can expect speed, energy, accuracy and joy when they are invited to solve something. These people are not intimidated by mess, rather they are patient and thoughtful when things are broken. They might be reluctant to give up on something, because they are attracted to situations, relationships, and products that others may be quicker to move past or discard. Prepare for an awareness of issues that need to be addressed or fixed. Be careful not to dismiss this as complaining. Listen for the solution they are offering, or draw it out through your own interest in their talent.

Recognizing Restorative might not be as obvious or easy of a task as recognizing or celebrating other themes, particularly because these people tend to deal with fixing existing situations rather than gathering or winning new things. So, celebrate them by honoring their area of expertise. Look for topics they talk about often or know a lot about. This is a great clue to where their mind and resources are being spent. Pay attention to things that are easy for you or your team. How is this person working to create ease or speed for others?

You can work to develop someone with Restorative by helping them specialize their skills and knowledge to problems that are most important to solve. How can you help them prioritize by paying attention to what is repeating, what is integral to the organization's success, or what especially piques their interest? Elevate this person as a problem-solver and solution delegator.

Partner with someone dominant in this theme by being very clear about what your targets are, and when we should revive something that will help us get there. Explicitly share measurable goals. Don't just offer your diagnosis without sharing your symptoms: Offer what you know about a situation, and allow them to sort through your experience and ask questions. You can always say you know what you think might be going on, but tap into their talent by exploring problems together rather than just passing them on to each other in varying degrees of completion.

If Restorative is one of your Dominant Themes, invest in it this week through the following challenge items:

• Develop an opening solution statement that shares your calmness with others. Try it out:
  • "This is going to be okay." "We can handle this." "I'd like to share how this can be better."
• Polish your problem-solving tool kit. What are the best resources you tend to call upon often? Name 3-5 "resources" and make sure they're available to you. (People? Software? Space?)
• Hone your problem-solving topics: Take a course, read a book, listen to a podcast about a specific area you are addressing over and over again.

If Restorative is not one of your Dominant Themes, invest in it this week through the following challenge items:

Often having low restorative can mean you're better at progressing beyond problems than you are addressing them. This is always okay if you're alone, but could cause an issue if others depend on you addressing things they consider to be a problem.

• Get in touch with your constituency: Consider the people who count on you. Name a problem you've heard them share more than 3 times recently.
• Get a partner: When are you repeatedly less effective than you'd like to be? How can you delegate this away completely or find a partner who could help you?