Pete Pereira's Blog

Strengths Quest is the latest personality assessment tool that has caught fire in Student Affairs. Ed Cabellon posted a question several weeks ago posted on twitter: “could strengths quest be counter-intuitive to our work in student affairs”? So, several folks, including myself, shared our thoughts with Ed.

Before I share my thoughts about this question, I must acknowledge that I’m a fan of Strengths Quest. It makes a lot of sense to me at this point of my life. It could be because I’m at the “Self-Actualization” part of my own personal development. I just believe that I am who I am and odds are that I will most likely not go through some dramatic change in what I am skillful and not skillful at.

So, back to the question and here’s my answer: Yes, it is. At the time, I said no but when I looked at my thoughts that I shared, I was really making an argument that it is. I don’t think we should stop utilizing it however what makes it counter-intuitive is because SQ goes against the mentality of student affairs. In general, student affairs professionals are over-achievers. We are amazing multi-taskers that get a lot done with the least amount of resources that are allocated to the various areas of higher education (which I think is part of the problem of student affairs always getting the short of the of the stick – but that’s another post). We always do “more with less” and in a way, take a lot of pride in how we can get so much done. We also like conquering our weakness so that we can be the best practitioner possible – and we take this approach with our students for the sake of helping them with their development. We want to help them “grow” when we really mean we want them to fix their weaknesses.

I’ll also throw out one more dynamic: the “medal for participating” dynamic. Starting in the 80’s children were rewarding for trying something in addition to any accomplishments they may have achieved. For example, when I first started to play baseball, I got a certificate of participation from my local state congressperson because I participated in my local little league baseball league. It didn’t matter that my team performed poorly and I didn’t play as well as I would’ve hoped. I tried and that was a good thing. The end result didn’t matter at all.  This dynamic happens in higher education: even though we don’t know what their skills are we take the approach: Hey, just give it a shot. Follow your passion! Instead of finding out what they are good at, our prerequisite is simply an interest in the co-curricular opportunity that we’re promoting.

I am a big believer that we should focus on what are strengths are because I also believe that are weakness are really are strengths when they are not used properly. Either we go in to overdrive or don’t use it at the right time, right place, or with the right people. I also think that when focusing on other’s strengths, we must also acknowledge what their weaknesses are. We should still look at the student holistically but let’s just stop spending so much of our time trying to fix their weakness.

So, that’s my two cents on the topic. I’m going to (as I’ll do with the majority of my posts) leave this post not having flushed out every possible angle. Want more? Ask away. I’d also love to hear what others think.