Gallup’s CliftonStrengths: Individualization
If you’re a people leader, then learning to use “Individualization” (from Gallup’s CliftonStrengths) is a non-negotiable.
(When I say “people leader”, I don’t mean a manager necessarily. I mean “people leader” in the most literal sense of the phrase, as in a person whose role formally requires the leadership of people. If you lead peoples’ skills, like most software development or engineering teams, you’re excluded. (Skill-based teams are funky and play by slightly different rules.) But if you lead people themselves, like most business function teams, then this is for you.)
Individualization is described by Gallup as the ability to “appreciate the uniqueness in each person you meet”. In other words, this learnable skill is about wanting to identify others’ individual strengths, weaknesses, stories, thought processes, motivations, favorite ice cream flavor, beach or mountain preference, and prior experience with underwater basket-weaving. Essentially, a leader with well-practiced Individualization is someone who will see the differences in his or her team and bring out the best of those variances.
Okay.
Now that we’ve double-clicked on the jargon, here it is again:
If you’re a people leader, then learning to use Individualization is a non-negotiable.
This statement hinges on the following logic. A: People are different. B: Differences indicate limitations. (After all, if every single person could do every single task flawlessly, we would all be perfectly identical. Given that we obviously cannot do everything flawlessly, our differences lie primarily in what we can and cannot do with excellence.) Conclusion: To lead people well, you need to know the differences of your people to navigate their limitations.
Here’s a goofy metaphor about navigating others’ limitations. A chef wouldn’t ignore that an oven makes things hotter or that a fridge makes things colder - and then just start chucking dishes into either willy-nilly whilst hoping for the best, yes? Nor does a chef complain that his oven only gets “so cold” or that his fridge only gets “so hot”. A chef does not submerge a plugged-in toaster into a sinkful of water, assuming it’ll work out the same way as a handful of dirty utensils would.
Similarly, no sane conductor treats a violin like a timpani drum. (As the owner of a very expensive violin, this thought makes me cringe viscerally.) Nor do conductors ask sopranos to practice hitting the same notes as bassists.
Au contraire - these leaders individualize based on the skills of their tools. Then they orchestrate to create masterful results.
This should also be true in people leadership. But more often than not, I find that Individualization, as a skill to practice, is being disproportionately overlooked by people leaders who are increasingly frustrated by their team members’ bewildering behavior.
“Why does Jane refuse to turn in her reports on time?!”
“What is leading John to be so combative in our team meetings?”
“Mary is always derailing us with new ideas, but she won’t flesh out any of the previous ones we’ve assigned to her. I don’t understand her at all.”
Many people leaders ask these questions to themselves, decide that there is no knowable answer, shrug in stifled discouragement, and then move on with their day. And to me, that’s a real loss: for the leader’s emotional health, the direct report’s productivity, and the team’s output quality.
In my opinion, these are questions that can be answered with the power of Individualization. If you actually lean into your “why” questions, get serious, and decide you’ll do your best to understand the confusing actions of others, you might learn that Jane is a Perceiver in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and she needs time pressure to perform. You might learn that John is a High D/C in the DiSC profile, and he likes to take charge of initiatives while ensuring high accuracy, quality, and structure are maintained. You might learn that Mary types as Invention in the Working Genius, and she is much stronger in creation than in follow-through.
When you learn to Individualize, what you’ll often discover is that your potato is just a potato. As much as you want your potato to be a dog, your potato is a potato. You can gripe that your potato never wants to go on walks. You can glue dog hair onto your potato. (Ew.) You can take your potato to dog training school. But if you do that, you’re, one, going to look like the perfect residency candidate for an asylum, and, two, your potato will still be a potato. As soon as you can learn the proper boundaries and attributes of a potato and accept that your potato is just a potato, you’ll be a lot happier. If necessary, you can buy (*cough hire cough*) a dog, separately. Then you can take your potato, peel it, and turn it into tasty hash browns. You’ll finally get some use out of your potato. In fact, you’ll get the intended use out of your potato.
(Okay, this analogy is really derailing. You get the point.)
People have differences. Differences indicate limitations. If you’re going to be an effective people leader, you need to know the limitations of your people, what drives those limitations, and how to effectively work with those limitations. In 2026, we’re no longer going to hold dog treats over our potatoes and ask them to sit. We’re going to eat really crispy, salty, fluffy, tasty French fries.
Yummm.
(…wait, where was I again?)
To grow in Individualization, here are some suggestions:
Be curious like crazy. Individualization starts by asking ten million questions. What do your people like to do? What excites them? What bores them? What frustrates them? What makes them angry? What tends to come naturally to them? What doesn’t come naturally to them - but they’ve learned through repeated practice to do it anyway? What do they tend to avoid, due to past negative experiences? What are their dreams and aspirations? How do they think? What do they think? Why do they think that way? What do they feel? Why do they feel that way?
When you’re in this process of being curious like crazy, make sure to avoid being judgmental. In other words, avoid making calls on if you think others’ differences are good or bad, right or wrong, likable or dislikable. Judgement prevents you from genuinely learning; you won’t accept someone’s true limitations if you furiously insist they shouldn’t have those limitations in the first place. No matter how bizarre, backwards, or illogical someone else’s way of living life seems to be to you, hold your judgmental horses. Just file away the information as fact and truth. (Quite frankly, what’s actually bizarre, backwards, and illogical is getting irritated that people are acting in ways you can’t understand, and then insisting they all ought to act like you or utterly refusing to see that any perspective outside of your own exists. Cough. Yeah, I said what I said.)
Be confident that you can find the answers to your questions about people. Rather than getting frustrated that your potato is not acting like a dog and then deciding that your “dog” is really defective, have a sit down conversation with your direct report and genuinely try to at least gain an intellectual comprehension of their way of living life. If that fails, then go forth into the internet and start Googling your questions. Alternatively, talk to someone else who is like your troublesome direct report, in order to see if there are similarities or explanations that make sense to you. No matter what, don’t just dismiss your un-dog-like potato. Be confident that you can figure out the answer to the question: “If I don’t have a dog, then what on earth do I have?”
Explore a bunch of psychometric assessments and see what’s out there. Psychometric assessments are tests designed to measure skills, knowledge, personality traits, and other mental capabilities. There are an absolute metric frick ton of them in existence, including the ones I mentioned earlier (Myers-Briggs, DiSC, Working Genius) and others like the Enneagram, CliftonStrengths, EQ-i 2.0, the Big Five, and Hogan. The concept of Individualization has been around for a looong time. These assessments will give you language for the various spectrums and categories that already exist when it comes to describing the differences of people. (For example, technically, everyone in this world is either likes red, likes blue, likes both, or doesn’t like either. But that’s not a very useful categorization in a workplace context. What might be more useful is realizing that everyone in this world is typically either inclined to promote truth (even at the expense of harmony and peace) or harmony (even at the expense of truth and fact). That’s the T/F preference in Myers-Briggs. You could actually do something with that information, yeah?)
Okay. Before I close this post, I’ve briefly used my psychic powers of foresight to predict your objections. Here’s a quick response for yon skeptics (which, by the way, is another one of those traits that can be frustrating for people leaders but is not inherently wrong and can be well-explained!).
Caveats for Individualization:
Individualization is not an excuse to cover up poor performance. A chef can know that his sous chef’s knife is blunt, but the sous chef is still responsible for sharpening his knife. A conductor can tell that his trombone section is dragging down the tempo, but the section still needs to pick up the speed. If your direct report is struggling to fulfill his responsibilities, you ought to seek to explore why he is failing and what can be done to help him succeed. But you should not ever delude yourself into thinking that his poor performance is anything other than poor performance. And even if you can use Individualization to explain all of the many reasons why he’s struggling (“he’s an INFP, Enneagram 9w1, High S/C, Wonder, Top 5: Empathy, Harmony, Positivity, Relator, Connectedness, bla bla bla”) and even if you do set him up for success as much as you can, he still needs to be responsible for doing his gosh-dang job. Period. If he can’t, that’s on him, not on you.
Individualization can be implemented, hand-in-hand with fairness and consistency. Individualization does not mean you have to start treating every single person in their preferred style, all of the time. Quite frankly, this is impossible. If you have an Extravert, High I on your team and an Introvert, High C on your team, you might want to make team meetings fun and meandering for the former and focused and concise for the latter. But you can’t do both simultaneously. Individualization is not meant to psych you out as a leader, forcing you to be two (or three or fifteen) faced. Individualization is purely meant to help boost your understanding of your team members’ differences, so if necessary and possible, you can pull on the drivers that help bring out the best of them. As far the day-to-day operation methods of your team, that’s your judgment call as the leader. Some chefs give a whole lot of creative freedom to their kitchen; others are more controlling and precise. Some conductors are more loose and whimsical; others give cues for every single section entrance. But all successful leaders know what they’ve got on hand, and that’s a byproduct of Individualization.
Did I miss any objections? If so, drop me a comment below, and I’ll get to it! Otherwise, that’s everything from me.
Have I convinced you to start working on Individualization?
Either way, thanks for reading. Catch you on next month’s episode of The Soapbox!
Hey, Megan here! I love hearing from you. If you have any thoughts about this blog post, if you found anything funny or thought-provoking, or if you just want to let me know you were here, please drop me a comment below!
