OK fair warning (are you paying attention?), there will be some content on ChaseSnider.com over the next few months that will be presented in a new style. As you may know I am currently a student at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri pursuing a degree in Management and minors in Communication and Law and Society. One of my focuses that I remain committed to is also completing the Leadership Drury Certificate Program.

One of the courses I am taking for that program is Leadership and the Individual. A requirement of this course involves blogging about the material we learn in class, our experiences on campus, and our path of discovering the strengths that help us become better leaders. This requirement left me with a choice, start a new website that would just be used for one semester or integrate my posts into my existing website.

I chose the latter because I think that having access to an inside look at my path to refining my leadership skills will be relevant to some of the other people viewing my website which includes peers looking for guidance or potential employers wanting to know more about my background. In addition, students from our leadership class that have to view my blog as a class requirement may also then be exposed to some of my other projects and content on this site.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's dig into the course!

StrengthsQuest: What It Means and What Mine Are

StrengthsQuest is a term you will see used often in my upcoming posts. So what does it mean? They define their purpose as:

StrengthsQuest is part of Gallup's Education Practice. Gallup is a thought leader in education, and our research and insights inform discussions from local school boards to college classrooms to national debates. Experts in K-12 education, higher education, and community engagement work together to bring your school or campus the most effective answers to today's most pressing issues.

According to their website, more than nine million people have taken part in the program. For me, like so many before me apparently, it began with a half-hour timed online assessment. From that assessment came my custom StrengthsQuest Themes.

My five themes include (in order from highest relevant to lowest): Achiever, Futuristic, Relator, Strategic, and Responsibility. After reading the chapter that dug into what these themes actually meant it was almost eerie to me how closely they resembled how I live my life. As someone who has grown up in a generation filled with online testing and skill generators I have never seen much value in this type of testing.

However these results mirror much of how I place value on my work, friendships, and lifestyle. The two of highest relevance according to the results, Achiever and Futuristic, are traits I have been characterized as having for as long as I can remember by family, friends, colleagues, and professors.

I strongly and passionately believe in pushing a project to its boundaries of success. There is nothing that can't be achieved if you take the right approach and I have more than once in life been classified as someone who needs to learn to disconnect from work. This also ties into my second theme of Futuristic as I am constantly looking for the "next big idea". In terms of my job with Journal Broadcast Group I am weighing listener and client benefits to determine the return on investment for us as a company. It is a trait that has earned me one of the highest company score for innovation as well as a peer-nominated award for company innovation.

Applying this background to my theme report has only made me more intrigued to see how this class can help me further develop my leadership skills, one day at a time.

You can read my full report below: