How Meeting Donald Clifton in 1986 Reshaped My Leadership—and Inspired My Calling to Coach Others

​What began as a single seminar became a lifelong commitment to strengths-based leadership.

My introduction to Donald Clifton’s work goes back to 1986. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I was stepping into the early stages of what would become the global strengths movement. At a seminar that year, I first heard Dr. Donald O. Clifton speak on the revolutionary idea of building on a person’s strengths rather than trying to correct their weaknesses. Up to that point, everything I had learned in management and leadership emphasized finding deficiencies, pointing out what people were doing wrong, and working to fix their weaknesses.

When Dr. Clifton presented a completely different way of thinking—focusing on what people do right—I was captivated. I was so drawn in that I purchased an entire management tape series simply to obtain the single tape that contained his talk. His imagery was unforgettable: let the rabbits run, let the ducks fly, let the squirrels climb. In other words, encourage people to operate in their natural strengths and manage weaknesses without letting them overshadow potential.

Until that moment, like most people, I assumed the pathway to growth required fixing weaknesses. Strengths, we thought, would take care of themselves. Clifton challenged that assumption and offered a more hopeful, more effective framework for personal and organizational development. His insights reshaped the way I viewed my own growth and influenced the way I began investing in the development of others.

At that time, however, all I had was the concept. I could see that people had unique strengths, and I knew instinctively that focusing on their talents produced better results than trying to repair weaknesses. But I had no reliable way to identify those talents with clarity or consistency. There was no shared language, no common terminology, and no framework to describe what I was observing. Every person required a brand-new description, which meant I was continually reinventing the language and could never categorize or communicate strengths in a meaningful, systematic way. I knew strengths mattered—I just didn’t yet have the tools to understand or articulate them.

Just two years after that seminar, in 1988, Dr. Clifton’s company--Selection Research, Inc. (SRI)--purchased and merged with the Gallup Organization, with the unified company continuing under the Gallup name and Clifton becoming its Chairman. Under his leadership, Gallup expanded far beyond polling and became a leader in research on human behavior, workplace performance, and strengths-based development.

During the 1990s, this research led to the creation of a practical assessment designed to identify a person’s natural talents. Before the assessment became widely known, I purchased and read Soar with Your Strengths (1995), a book that captured Clifton’s philosophy long before strengths language became mainstream. I read that book so many times—and listened to the accompanying cassette tape even more times while driving—that I eventually memorized large portions simply from repetition. His concepts became deeply ingrained in me, reinforcing and expanding the ideas I first heard from him in 1986.

In 1999, Gallup launched the StrengthsFinder assessment online, making Clifton’s strengths science accessible to the public and ushering in a new era of personal development. The later books Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001) and StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007) expanded its reach even further. In 2015, in honor of Dr. Clifton’s pioneering work, Gallup officially renamed the assessment CliftonStrengths.
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Today, I continue to build on my own strengths—and I have the privilege of helping others discover and develop theirs. I rely on Clifton’s legacy through the CliftonStrengths assessment and combine it with Social Style insights to help individuals understand how their natural talents can be leveraged for performance, influence, and impact. When clients share their results with me, I prepare a personalized analysis showing how their strengths and their interpersonal style can work together to help them grow into confident, effective, and exceptional leaders.