Now, Discover Your Strengths

StrengthsFinder (or Now, Discover Your Strengths) is a self-help book written by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, first published in 2001. At the heart of the book is the internet based "Clifton Strengths Finder," an online personal assessment test that outlines the user's strengths. The authors advocate focusing on building strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses.

The theory behind the book is that each adult individual possesses a certain number of fixed universal personal-character attributes, defined by the authors as "talent themes," which, together, result in an individual's tendency to develop certain skills more easily and excel in certain fields in a sustainable way while failing or not being able to sustain success or high levels of effectiveness in other fields.

The authors claim that by identifying the individual strength of the members of the organization, its members can be utilized in more suiting positions, hence developing the required skills easily, helping to reduce turnover, improve employee morale and the organization's overall performance.

The Gallup Organization claims to have distilled the theory into practice by interviewing 1.7 million professionals from varying fields. Having quantified the different traits of the people they interviewed, they came up with 34 distinct patterns—what they call "talent themes"—that best describe the range of human uniqueness observed during their research:

The Gallup group has developed an online test that they claim will reveal the test-taker's top five themes. The "Clifton Strengths Finder" www.strengthsfinder.com is a web based questionnaire, which, based on the answers, claims to be able to define individual "Strengths". A single one-time access is possible by entering an access code provided with the book.

Now, Discover Your Strengths, correlating to the "Strength Finder 1.0" Web application has been replaced by the Strengths Finder 2.0 book correlating to the "Strengths Finder 2.0" Web application.

Criticisms of the strengths-based leadership model include:

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