Identity Part 4: Relational and Task Skills
Are you creative or reactive?
There are a number of models that look at the kind of relational or task skills we have. They may reference skills like “Connector” or “Equalizer.” Models like StrengthsFinder split these into domains, like the executing and influencing domains. The Leadership Circle provide an axis across creativity and reactivity, task, and relational skills. But what does it all mean?
Marcus Buckingham originally created the StrengthsFinder model and then the Standout model. Buckingham is not a believer in trying to work on your weaknesses. He believes in maximising your strengths and addressing bad behaviour without getting too caught up in it.
Video time: 14 minutes
The science backs this up, with the Harvard Business Review highlighting an optimal praise-to-criticism ratio of about 5.6 to 1. This means that for every negative or corrective comment, teams that perform the best typically offer around five or six positive remarks.
This ratio comes from research by Emily Heaphy and Marcial Losada, who examined leadership teams across various companies. They found that teams with more positive feedback generally had higher financial performance, better customer satisfaction, and stronger peer relationships.
So, if you match the skillsets with a positive environment in your family, with friends, or at work, you can gain momentum quickly.
Going deeper
Once you’re clearer on what your skills are, you can dig deeper into relational and task skills.
One of the models I have found particularly useful is the Leadership Circle. It measures maturity on a relational and task level through a creative vs reactive lens, where creative skill sets are collaborative and innovative, and reactive skills involve exerting control over others.
Creative skills include areas such as:
Good relational skills (e.g. collaboration)
Self-awareness (e.g. composure)
Authenticity (e.g. integrity)
System awareness (e.g. productivity)
Achieving (e.g. decisiveness)
While reactive skills are centred around:
Compliance (e.g. passivity)
Defensiveness (e.g. arrogance)
Controlling (e.g. autocratic behaviour)
This kind of graph will give you a clear idea of where you are in terms of relational and task maturity.
Video time: 4 minutes
What to do about it
That’s a trickier question. Once you’ve worked through your skillsets and are maximising them, you can organise your efforts using willpower to try and live differently. But what becomes clear quickly is that your willpower will only take you so far.
Other things, such as reading your Bible or attending church, can provide experiences of God’s love and power. These will obviously help in the short term to make some quick wins on the character front, but if you’re doing deep work like this and you’ve also done work around personality and work alignment as mentioned in my previous posts, you’ll likely find yourself reaching the limits of your ability to transform your character and internal wiring.
There are some additional things that can be really helpful. These include:
Coaching: Having another pair of eyes on how you’re living your life and someone to ask good questions.
Spiritual direction: Having someone walk the road with you around what God is doing in your life.
Therapy: Processing emotions and trauma is vital for personal development.
John Mark Comer mentions three things that make a significant difference to a person’s spiritual formation:
Meditation/contemplative prayer
Deep community work with others
Suffering
Other practices that can also be helpful include Sabbath, a Rule of Life, fasting, solitude, etc.
Video time: 54 minutes
Yes, it's Wyrd, I know.
If you’ve made it through three posts on these different elements of self-discovery, you’ve probably thought at some point that this is all a load of rubbish. After all, the brain has 100 trillion synapse connections, and we are all unique.
To contextualise 100 trillion: it’s 1,000 times more than the number of stars in the Milky Way, or if you had 100 trillion dollars, you could spend a million dollars every day for over 27,000 years.
So how can there be such commonality among us? Marcus Buckingham calls this your "wyrd," a Norse term that refers to your essence—your unique combination.
With all that difference, how can people be so similar?
Well, the answer is quite simple. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” One God, male and female variants of His image.
Secondly, your brain tries to automate things. Since we all share the same DNA as a species, our brains function similarly. This means we all have default behaviours that our brains automate to simplify our lives.
These models don’t define your conscious thoughts; they reveal what’s happening in your unconscious mind. The more you understand these patterns, the more you can choose to make conscious decisions that don’t align with your default behaviour patterns.
And that is how I define self-awareness.
Identity Series:
Identity Part 3: Why Work is Challenging. How we show up at work.
Identity Part 2: Knowing Ourselves. Personality And Family Origin
Identity Part 1: An Intro to Identity. How to get out of default behaviour