How The World Sees You – Book

Optimizing your team through passion

Sally Hogshead released How the World Sees You: Discover Your Highest Value Through the Science of Fascination in July 2014 and it quickly make its way to the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s bestseller lists. I’ve been a huge fan of Sally’s work ever since she was a speaker at the first OTA Sessions back in 2011. So when I heard she had a new book out, I pre-ordered it and cracked the cover the day it arrived.

To get the most out of her books, you need to go through her companion profile test called “Fascination Advantage Assessment” which asks you 27 questions which drill into how the world sees you. You can read all about that on her Web site or the billion other blogs and podcasts already out there, so that is not what I am covering today.

The point of knowing how the world sees you is to optimize the skills you already have, not to change them. For example, my dormant advantage is passion – that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me. By teaming with someone with a primary advantage of passion, we complement each other and form a stronger, more successful sales team. I can work on my passion skills, but it will never be my dominant advantage.

Since her book was released, I’ve had a number of my colleagues read it and everyone in our office has participated in the Fascination Advantage Assessment, which classifies people into one primary and one secondary archetype, which is how the world sees you. Mine is the “The Anchor”: protective, purposeful and analytical. I think it’s spot-on and that’s how I hope the world sees me as well.

The purpose of getting my entire team involved is to pair people with complementary skills together to improve our culture and success. Often we pair colleagues with similar skill sets, since we like to be around others who are similar to ourselves, however, that may not be our most successful pairing. There is a lot of science behind what Sally has done and grouping teams based on complementary skills is the best way to improve success and culture.

Our first step was to collect up our team’s results from each person’s assessment report and plot them out; Sally’s got a great template in the report for doing this step. We have a pretty diverse team with little overlap in archetypes, which is what you would expect. In general everyone felt that their assessments on how the world sees them were pretty accurate, but there were a few dissenters.

This is long-term play for us, so we don’t have any immediate success stories. Plus, if you have ever tried to get 12 people to read the same book at the same time, you know the challenge that can be. Our next step is to have an afternoon session with our full team to continue the process, from outlining everyone’s archetypes to optimizing pairing of skill sets.

I will report back on how our team does over the next few months, hopefully with a few great success stories.

Sally has done a fantastic job putting together all the resources necessary to build on her research; you should pick up her book today, go listen to her many interviews, and catch up on the great blogs written about the book. You may be surprised by what you learn about how the world sees you.

I would love to hear about your implementations of Sally’s methods. Please send me a Tweet at @wbushee, or drop me an email. After all, shouldn’t we all share more?

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