Professional Strengths Profile 
                 
                 Tony Joyce

The Gallup Organization, founded in 1935, gathers detailed information about seven billion citizens worldwide by using continuous polling in 160 countries.

Leveraging this vast database of human behavior, Gallup operates a consultancy specializing in enhancing the effectiveness and professional development of corporate executives.  

To this end, Gallup conducts an executive evaluation called a Professional Strengths Profile, which identifies the five most dominant themes of an executive after analyzing responses to a wide-range of questions.  Of the 34 themes measured the following are the top five professional strengths of Tony Joyce:

Responsibility

Your Responsibility theme forces you to take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and whether large or small, you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion. Your good name depends on it.  If for some reason you cannot deliver, you automatically start to look for ways to make it up to the other person.  Apologies are not enough. Excuses and rationalizations are totally unacceptable. You will not quite be able to live with yourself until you have made restitution.  

This conscientiousness, this near obsession for doing things right, and your impeccable ethics, combine to create your reputation: utterly dependable.  

When assigning new responsibilities, people will look to you first because they know it will get done. When people come to you for help, and they soon will, you must be selective. Your willingness to volunteer may sometimes lead you to take on more than you should.

Strategic

The Strategic theme enables you to sort through the clutter and find the best route.  It is not a skill that can be taught.  It is a distinct way of thinking, a special perspective on the world at large.  This perspective allows you to see patterns where others simply see complexity.  

Mindful of these patterns, you play out alternative scenarios:  “What if this happened?”  “Okay, well what if that happened?”  This recurring question helps you see around the next corner.  There you can evaluate accurately the potential obstacles. Guided by where you see each path leading, you start to make selections.  You discard the paths that lead nowhere.  You discard the paths that lead to resistance.  You discard the paths that lead into a fog of confusion.  

You cull and make selections until you arrive at the chosen path - your strategy. Armed with your strategy, you strike forward.  This is your Strategic theme at work: What if?  Select.  Strike.

Input

You are inquisitive.  You collect things. You might collect information, words, facts, books, and quotations or you might collect tangible objects such as butterflies, baseball cards, porcelain dolls, or sepia photographs.  Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you.  

Yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting.  The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity.  If you read a great deal, it is not necessarily to refine your theories but, rather, to add more information to your archives.  If you like to travel, it is because each new location offers novel artifacts and facts. These can be acquired and then stored away.

Why are they worth storing?  At the time of storing it is often hard to say exactly when or why you might need them, but who knows when they might become useful?  With all those possible uses in mind, you really do not feel comfortable throwing anything away.  So you keep acquiring and compiling and filing stuff away.  It is interesting and keeps your mind fresh.  And perhaps one day some of it will prove valuable.

Learner

You love to learn.  The subject matter that interests you most will be determined by your other themes and experiences, but whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning.  The process, more than the content or the result, is especially exciting for you.  You are energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence.  The thrill of the first few facts, the early efforts to recite or practice what you have learned, the growing confidence of a skill mastered this is the process that entices you.  

Your excitement leads you to engage in adult learning experiences like yoga or graduate classes.  It enables you to thrive in dynamic work environments where you are asked to take on short project assignments and are expected to learn a lot about the new subject matter in a short period of time and then move on to the next one.  

This Learner theme does not necessarily mean that you seek to become the subject matter expert, or that you are striving for the respect that accompanies a professional or academic credential.  The outcome of the learning is less significant than the process of getting there.

Arranger

You are a conductor. When faced with a complex situation involving many factors, you enjoy managing all of the variables, aligning and realigning them until you are sure you have arranged them in the most productive configuration possible.  In your mind there is nothing special about what you are doing.  You are simply trying to figure out the best way to get things done.  

But others, lacking this theme, will be in awe of your ability.  “How can you keep so many things in your head at once?” they will ask.  “How can you stay so flexible, so willing to shelve well-laid plans in favor of some brand-new configuration that has just occurred to you?”  But you cannot imagine behaving in any other way. You are a shining example of effective flexibility, whether you are changing travel schedules at the last minute because a better fare has popped up or mulling over just the right combination of people and resources to accomplish a new project.  From the mundane to the complex, you are always looking for the perfect configuration.  

Of course, you are at your best in dynamic situations.  Confronted with the unexpected, some complain that plans devised with such care cannot be changed, while others take refuge in the existing rules or procedures. You do not do either.  Instead, you jump into the confusion, devising new options, hunting for new paths of least resistance, and figuring out new partnerships because, after all, there might just be a better way.