Your Significance Talent: Building a Legacy of Distinction

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

You want to be very significant in the eyes of other people. In the truest sense of the word, you want to be recognized. You want to be heard. You want to stand out. You want to be known. In particular, you want to be known and appreciated for the unique strengths you bring. You feel a need to be admired as credible, professional and successful. Likewise, you want to associate with others who are credible, professional and successful. And if they aren't, you will push them to achieve until they are. Or you will move on.

An independent spirit, you want your work to be a way of life rather than a job, and in that work, you want to be given free rein, the leeway to do things your way. Your yearnings feel intense to you, and you honor those yearnings. And so your life is filled with goals, achievements or qualifications that you crave. Whatever your focus -- and each person is distinct -- your Significance theme will keep pulling you upward, away from the mediocre toward the exceptional. It is the theme that keeps you reaching.

People with Significance aren't usually just okay with doing the job. They want to do the job in a way that leaves a fingerprint on someone's soul. They want to do lasting work that really outlives them and leaves a legacy. It is a life you live full of goals and accomplishments that you crave.

If as an individual with Significance it means you want to do something meaningful, than it translates beautifully for a leader who wants that meaningful impact to be for their organization. You are uniquely positioned to notice, therefore celebrate, meaningful milestones. This turns you into a promoter of others around you. Leaders with Significance want to feel that they are drawn to other people that are also making a meaningful impact. There is a constant curiosity about how you could do more, and how you could be more. How can you work in a way that leads to something greater, and elevate the kind of success you're experiencing? That curiosity is infectious, and it is something you can use in order to build your reputation.

It is also in many ways a theme that helps you eliminate busy work. Significance doesn't have any patience for tasks that do not help contribute to your legacy. There is also an independence to this theme. As a leader this can show up as courage. This independence can see potential in others that they themselves sometimes don't see. The desire for feedback is something that can fuel very authentic relationships within a leader. This can mean building relevant customer offerings. It can bring you and your company on the leading edge of innovation for what is truly relevant and needed in a customer space. Significance can also make you a great developer of people. It helps you push for greater affect and impact. You can notice and you can really expect that full impact piece.

If you are a leader with Significance there are four different calls of action that you can really channel your talent into in order to provide what followers need from their leaders. Leaders with Significance should practice talking about their values and their goals to build trust. In many ways the desire for recognition and to be seen is not the end goal for Significance, but it is a way to help you get to those goals. Find great ways that you can talk about your goals and values, so that people can see the big picture. Help others see your investment, and not just your actions.

A leader with Significance might demonstrate compassion by being a promoter to those closest to them. How do you find out how other people like to be recognized, and then help align them for that kind of celebration? Because your lens is really aligned for recognition, it can help you put people in a place they belong in, and really judge that place on how they're affecting everybody else. You can provide stability by talking about the potential that you see, and then confirming that with metrics once you land on a goal. A leader with Significance can find more ways to reach larger and more diverse audiences. Your message is wrapped in hope. It is all about what could be, and how what can be affects the lives of other people. Challenge yourself to expose yourself to more audiences so that others can experience that message of hope that you have to give.

Lela Meinke's Top 5 CliftonStrengths are Learner, Input, Significance, Connectedness and Futuristic.