When is the last time you really sat down to think about your top 3 strengths? In any company it is very important that you are able to promote yourself. You have to be able to toot your own horn. But how can you begin to tell people how great you are, when you don't have a clear picture of your own strengths. Men have historically been better at broadcasting their strenghts, so it was time the women spoke up and gave ourselves some praise.
Abby Bangser
Thinking about individual strengths and articulating them are two very different things. I think this is the critical takeaway from the quote by Nora Denzel in her 2012 Grace Hopper key note speech. She takes the common idea of "it's not what you know – it's who you know" and takes it a step farther and adds "it's who knows what you know". In being asked to identify my three strengths I'm immediately reminded of years past and interview mode. "What highlights my hard work?", "What identifies me as a team player?", "What do they want to hear?". However, if my two job hunts taught me anything, in order to continue to grow both personally and professionally it is best to utilize strengths rather than try to redefine them.
Therefore, for each strength I have identified ways I have leveraged as well as needed to curb them:
Thorough: As a Quality Analyst I obviously use this strength when identifying test scenarios. In contrast, there are some times where the cost/value ratio is such that following the deepest of rabbit holes is not valuable.
Self-driven: I have always had a wide range of interests. This has resulted in playing 5 different competitive sports growing up, completing college with a diverse resume and Political Science major and since then entering both investments as well as software development career paths. Without the self-drive to learn and practice these skills I would never reach the levels in each activity or job that I desire. However, this innate self-drive can lead to head down working at times when leaning on teammates may result in a different and even more interesting set of learnings.
Thoughtful: I think that this has translated into both my history of coaching and mentoring because I love seeing the look on someone's face when they see their hard work pay off. But also setting personal high standards. Sometimes these arbitrary targets and expectations can lead to undue stress and worrying. While this isn't particularly great for me as an individual, it is even worse if my stress is a weight on others.
By embracing both my strengths and weaknesses I have found a place at ThoughtWorks that allows me to grow and learn without expending energies to try portray someone I am not. In identifying and reflecting on my strengths I have found that they are not what I may have thought in the past. My wide range of interests has often made me feel less than thorough and my self-drive has left me independent. For that reason I look forward to continuing to grow and see where my current path leads to!
Linda Goldstein
Strength is difficult. I prefer elegance to brute force, and 'strength' smacks of brute force. So what I use as a strength is to try to not use strength. Maybe this is a thing that our culture teaches women to do, to want. Although in code I tend to start with what I call 'the barbarian solution' - the simplest thing that will work as soon as possible - and then evolve the solution towards elegance. This is only bad if you don't do the second step, but skipping the second step offends my sensibilities, so I'm moderately safe as long as I'm still offended by solutions which would be more valuable if they were more streamlined.
1. Learning quickly. I've seen that long-term lack of encouragement to learn new things can reduce a person's tendency/desire to learn. Fortunately, I am very encouraged in this by TW. :) The downside to this is that once the curve on a new project levels off- once a lot of learning has taken place and the rate at which new things must be learned arrive slows down, I have to connive strategies in order to keep my interest from waning. A good strategy is to embrace perfectionism and stretch yourself to refactor the codebase to be as close to perfectly fitting the standards that your team can agree on as possible.
2. Helping people learn about code without offending or overly distressing them. I think of this as presenting data in such a way that it is intriguing rather than off-putting. Being considered "arrogant" is a problem that a lot of people at our company worry about, because it comes up fairly often; so I am proud of this and want to bring it up frequently.
3. What I call "yeah totally" - the ability to attack new tasks in my area of specialty without spending significant time worrying about the task being unusual or impossible. This is fuelled by the successful outcomes of learning quickly.
Is it hard to come up with a list of strengths? Well, a bit. I stalled out at two for a while. Thinking of my strengths isn't an approach I normally take. It is awkward for me to talk about my 'strengths' because part of my mind is always wondering who is about to disagree, and whether it's really strong enough to count, and whether it's the right question to ask in order to improve the rate and quality of things that I do. What if I get caught in a mindset where I end up saying "that's not one of my strengths; I can't (don't want to) do it" ...that is not a good place to be. So I hope that my "yeah totally" will be strong enough to offset the "strengths" mindset that I worry about. Strengths are dynamic and situational, and affected by the people with whom you surround yourself.
Amanda Snyder:
When thinking about my top 3 strengths it's much too easy to think in a general sense. We’ve all been so trained to come up with the buzzwords that all interviewers want to hear. So I wanted to think of this more in the sense of whom would I balance on a project? I think it’s more important, when making a team of people, to know whose strengths are going to balance out others weakness?
1) Building of complex logic from the ground up. My first strength has to do with how I approach learning. I have the ability to start with a small logical concept, and then to continuously add more and more logic. When I am able to start small, and build from the ground up, I can understand some of the complex logic systems. On the flip side of this, I would need someone who can take in small bits and pieces of a systems, and not be discouraged by the gaps and holes. When the whole picture isn’t there, I have more trouble staying focused, however this also fuels a drive within me to fill in every gap I can.
2) Teaching others. The second strength comes from feedback I have received after pairing with colleagues. It’s something that I wouldn’t naturally accredit to myself, as I’m not sure that I will ever have perfected this skill. It’s certainly not an easy task, to teach others, and efforts can be easily mistaken for judgment or criticism. The style of teaching must change from person to person, and it’s almost impossible to accomplish unless the student is willing. However, if I can get them to a place where the thought enters their head “I can do this”, then it’s just a matter of how they get there.
3) Attention to detail. The strength takes form in multiple ways. The first is when I’m pairing in a language I’m not very familiar with. The attention to the details allows me to help find bugs in code through comparison with examples or references, even when I’m not sure what all the code is doing. The second area this strength helps me is in an appreciation for good testing. I think the ability to test functionality and think up all the outlying situations is something I am able to do better with my attention to the detail. Being able to question ‘What happens when’ involves a great understanding of all the small scenarios, which could overlap to cause a problem.
Each of these strengths can be complimentary to someone else’s. Someone who can take in the whole picture, someone who keeps things moving and doesn’t loose sight of the goal when there’s teaching to be done, and someone who can move quickly without worrying about the details. I don’t think that I can’t also become these people, given then right environment, but I’m not them yet. For now I am content in sticking with my strengths. It can be hard enough for me to not conform to others styles in leading, teaching, or even pairing. However, to be able to realize that I may be there to tip the balance from time to time away from their strengths is something I am still learning how to do.
Abby Bangser
Thinking about individual strengths and articulating them are two very different things. I think this is the critical takeaway from the quote by Nora Denzel in her 2012 Grace Hopper key note speech. She takes the common idea of "it's not what you know – it's who you know" and takes it a step farther and adds "it's who knows what you know". In being asked to identify my three strengths I'm immediately reminded of years past and interview mode. "What highlights my hard work?", "What identifies me as a team player?", "What do they want to hear?". However, if my two job hunts taught me anything, in order to continue to grow both personally and professionally it is best to utilize strengths rather than try to redefine them.
Therefore, for each strength I have identified ways I have leveraged as well as needed to curb them:
Thorough: As a Quality Analyst I obviously use this strength when identifying test scenarios. In contrast, there are some times where the cost/value ratio is such that following the deepest of rabbit holes is not valuable.
Self-driven: I have always had a wide range of interests. This has resulted in playing 5 different competitive sports growing up, completing college with a diverse resume and Political Science major and since then entering both investments as well as software development career paths. Without the self-drive to learn and practice these skills I would never reach the levels in each activity or job that I desire. However, this innate self-drive can lead to head down working at times when leaning on teammates may result in a different and even more interesting set of learnings.
Thoughtful: I think that this has translated into both my history of coaching and mentoring because I love seeing the look on someone's face when they see their hard work pay off. But also setting personal high standards. Sometimes these arbitrary targets and expectations can lead to undue stress and worrying. While this isn't particularly great for me as an individual, it is even worse if my stress is a weight on others.
By embracing both my strengths and weaknesses I have found a place at ThoughtWorks that allows me to grow and learn without expending energies to try portray someone I am not. In identifying and reflecting on my strengths I have found that they are not what I may have thought in the past. My wide range of interests has often made me feel less than thorough and my self-drive has left me independent. For that reason I look forward to continuing to grow and see where my current path leads to!
Linda Goldstein
Strength is difficult. I prefer elegance to brute force, and 'strength' smacks of brute force. So what I use as a strength is to try to not use strength. Maybe this is a thing that our culture teaches women to do, to want. Although in code I tend to start with what I call 'the barbarian solution' - the simplest thing that will work as soon as possible - and then evolve the solution towards elegance. This is only bad if you don't do the second step, but skipping the second step offends my sensibilities, so I'm moderately safe as long as I'm still offended by solutions which would be more valuable if they were more streamlined.
1. Learning quickly. I've seen that long-term lack of encouragement to learn new things can reduce a person's tendency/desire to learn. Fortunately, I am very encouraged in this by TW. :) The downside to this is that once the curve on a new project levels off- once a lot of learning has taken place and the rate at which new things must be learned arrive slows down, I have to connive strategies in order to keep my interest from waning. A good strategy is to embrace perfectionism and stretch yourself to refactor the codebase to be as close to perfectly fitting the standards that your team can agree on as possible.
2. Helping people learn about code without offending or overly distressing them. I think of this as presenting data in such a way that it is intriguing rather than off-putting. Being considered "arrogant" is a problem that a lot of people at our company worry about, because it comes up fairly often; so I am proud of this and want to bring it up frequently.
3. What I call "yeah totally" - the ability to attack new tasks in my area of specialty without spending significant time worrying about the task being unusual or impossible. This is fuelled by the successful outcomes of learning quickly.
Is it hard to come up with a list of strengths? Well, a bit. I stalled out at two for a while. Thinking of my strengths isn't an approach I normally take. It is awkward for me to talk about my 'strengths' because part of my mind is always wondering who is about to disagree, and whether it's really strong enough to count, and whether it's the right question to ask in order to improve the rate and quality of things that I do. What if I get caught in a mindset where I end up saying "that's not one of my strengths; I can't (don't want to) do it" ...that is not a good place to be. So I hope that my "yeah totally" will be strong enough to offset the "strengths" mindset that I worry about. Strengths are dynamic and situational, and affected by the people with whom you surround yourself.
Amanda Snyder:
When thinking about my top 3 strengths it's much too easy to think in a general sense. We’ve all been so trained to come up with the buzzwords that all interviewers want to hear. So I wanted to think of this more in the sense of whom would I balance on a project? I think it’s more important, when making a team of people, to know whose strengths are going to balance out others weakness?
1) Building of complex logic from the ground up. My first strength has to do with how I approach learning. I have the ability to start with a small logical concept, and then to continuously add more and more logic. When I am able to start small, and build from the ground up, I can understand some of the complex logic systems. On the flip side of this, I would need someone who can take in small bits and pieces of a systems, and not be discouraged by the gaps and holes. When the whole picture isn’t there, I have more trouble staying focused, however this also fuels a drive within me to fill in every gap I can.
2) Teaching others. The second strength comes from feedback I have received after pairing with colleagues. It’s something that I wouldn’t naturally accredit to myself, as I’m not sure that I will ever have perfected this skill. It’s certainly not an easy task, to teach others, and efforts can be easily mistaken for judgment or criticism. The style of teaching must change from person to person, and it’s almost impossible to accomplish unless the student is willing. However, if I can get them to a place where the thought enters their head “I can do this”, then it’s just a matter of how they get there.
3) Attention to detail. The strength takes form in multiple ways. The first is when I’m pairing in a language I’m not very familiar with. The attention to the details allows me to help find bugs in code through comparison with examples or references, even when I’m not sure what all the code is doing. The second area this strength helps me is in an appreciation for good testing. I think the ability to test functionality and think up all the outlying situations is something I am able to do better with my attention to the detail. Being able to question ‘What happens when’ involves a great understanding of all the small scenarios, which could overlap to cause a problem.
Each of these strengths can be complimentary to someone else’s. Someone who can take in the whole picture, someone who keeps things moving and doesn’t loose sight of the goal when there’s teaching to be done, and someone who can move quickly without worrying about the details. I don’t think that I can’t also become these people, given then right environment, but I’m not them yet. For now I am content in sticking with my strengths. It can be hard enough for me to not conform to others styles in leading, teaching, or even pairing. However, to be able to realize that I may be there to tip the balance from time to time away from their strengths is something I am still learning how to do.
