Your Futuristic Talent: Vividly Imagining What Could Be

On this Theme Thursday Season 3 webcast, Jim Collison, Gallup's Director of Talent Sourcing, and Maika Leibbrandt, Senior Workplace Consultant, talk about Futuristic with guest Travis Guse.

"Wouldn't it be great if …" You are the kind of person who loves to peer over the horizon. The future fascinates you. As if it were projected on the wall, you see in detail what the future might hold, and this detailed picture keeps pulling you forward, into tomorrow. While the exact content of the picture will depend on your other strengths and interests -- a better product, a better team, a better life or a better world -- it will always be inspirational to you.

You are a dreamer who sees visions of what could be and who cherishes those visions. When the present proves too frustrating and the people around you too pragmatic, you conjure up your visions of the future, and they energize you. They can energize others too. In fact, very often people look to you to describe your visions of the future. They want a picture that can raise their sights and thereby their spirits. You can paint it for them. Practice. Choose your words carefully. Make the picture as vivid as possible. People will want to latch on to the hope you bring.

What this Theme is about is not just imagining the future, but really truly seeing it. If you are one who truly leads with Futuristic, the future is a real place for you. It is almost a regenerating resource. It is also inspirational to others. People look to you to describe your vision of the future. Choose your words carefully to make that picture as vivid as possible so that others can latch on to the hope you bring. Focus on the choices you make today based on what they are going to become tomorrow.

If you are an individual with Futuristic, you are probably great at forecasting. You can anticipate and think about what is coming. If you a leader with Futuristic, you can be great at not only forecasting, but also bridge building. There is an ability with leaders to not just to dream about the future, but to include the cast in the plot you are writing. One of the muscles you should flex as a leader with Futuristic is getting that vision out of your head, and into the hearts and minds of others. How can you plant those seeds that you see so vividly to really speak to other people?

Sometimes something better is something unknown. You can make a positive future more clear. Involve the senses. The mission is making it more real for others, because for you the future already is. It is not a dream of where you can go, but an almost tangible understanding of where you are headed. Think about honing and fine-tuning the questions that you ask others to really help their understanding of how this is going to bring them to where they want to be. Consider how you get the best vision out of your mind and transform it into inspiration and leadership for others.

A leader with Futuristic can build trust by sharing what it is you see. Be bold enough to describe your own future, and what you are seeing when you are doing that time traveling. Include what you see for others in the future. You might build compassion by considering the individual futures of those that you lead. Ask them what their dreams are. Talk to them about where they are going. Challenge yourself to know the dreams of the people on your team. Even if those dreams don't have the same vividness you can see, you can help build on them to make them brighter. A leader can build stability by considering that forward reaching timeline. Where do you see the clearest? Six months? Five years? Get comfortable about where that future is the most clear to you, and then personalize that to the people on your team. Where is their motivation point? Allow yourself the flexibility to bring your Futuristic into an individualized place with your followers.

Futuristic was almost tailor made for creating hope. Futuristic can be very pragmatic and very black and white about what is going on. You might describe a future that includes some hard times. However, you can create hope by talking through those difficult times and what is tough. You can talk about what they lead you to, and how they lead you to better times. Using Futuristic towards hope means being able to find what is going to be improved upon by traveling into the future. It is helping others see that when things are inevitably different that they are going to be better.

Travis Guse's Top 5 CliftonStrengths are Includer, Ideation, Strategic, Connectedness and Futuristic.