September: the month I found my own strengths and my own way to play
Hi, I'm Josh (Hyosig Jo), a cheerful B2B marketer based in Korea.
September, which wraps up Q3, is over, and now there are only three months left in the year.
September brought plenty of new challenges and chances to grow, so personally it felt like a pretty rewarding month :)
Above all, I found an answer to a question I'd often wrestled with, and that led to a result worth circling on the calendar.
The keyword that runs through this month, and through this post, is "Strengths." 😄
What am I actually good at?
It's a question most people have asked themselves at some point, and many are still looking for the answer.
Especially these days, with so much hiring and job-hopping going on, most of the people I meet at communities and networking events say they want to find their own strengths and talents.
For me, this thinking deepened after I came across several studies showing that building on the strengths you already have is far more effective than trying to overcome your weaknesses.
The University of Nebraska ran a speed-reading test. The average group read 90 words per minute; the fast group read 350. After a period of training, they tested again. What happened? The average group read 150 words, and the fast readers read 2,900.
- On why finding your strengths matters
So what could I be good at?
Does it even have anything to do with marketing?
A string of questions followed.
I have no talent for marketing, so I'll just have to work harder than everyone else.
I think I even made that kind of resolution when I first joined a marketing club in college.
I also wondered whether someone who struggles with Instagram, with picking up memes, with going to new places, and even with meeting new people should be doing marketing at all.
Fortunately, I learned there are industries and marketing channels that fit my personality.
B2B marketing for IT companies, and LinkedIn, are niche in Korean marketing, but for me they were a space where my strengths could shine.
And this year I spent time figuring out specifically what those strengths are and how to put them to use, and I found my own answers.
Three activities helped a lot.
1. Gallup's StrengthsFinder: my five strength themes
The first is Gallup's StrengthsFinder, which I give as a gift every time I have a coffee chat.
A 30-minute test picks out the five themes that fit you best from a list of about 30 strength keywords.
It laid out my traits far more clearly than an MBTI test and also told me how I could put them to use.
Summing up my results: I'm someone who "quickly grasps a problem in its larger context and can come up with several concrete solutions."
That resonated to a degree. Looking back at the ten or so competition proposals that won awards when I was in college, I always did well because I considered the whole context of the competition rather than just the topic.
And it applies at work, too.
I'm definitely quicker than most at picking up how customers see a service, what draws positive reactions, and where they struggle, and I think that quietly helps when I design marketing strategy 😃
Maybe that's why I've come to think a small place that can move in an agile way suits me better than a big company or a big project.
2. Tanagement: strengths rooted in inner drives and rational judgment
The second was the Tanagement assessment I took with my teammates at an Indent Corp. workshop.
Tanagement is a portmanteau of talent and management, and as the name says, it's a Korean assessment for managing the strengths you have.
What impressed me most was that when you combine your results with your teammates', you can find the whole team's strengths and gaps together. Apparently the more jagged and dissimilar the diagrams below are, the more complementary the team 👍
The Tanagement results showed that "motivation" and "diplomacy" are the two strengths that come from my instincts.
When I compared the detailed analysis with the Gallup test above, curiously, the results pointed in a fairly similar direction. 👍
The behavioral-judgment strengths below, "evaluation" and "completion," are apparently things I work hard at rather than things I'm naturally good at.
And the more the two strength patterns diverge, the more work stress you feel, they say.
So I decided to focus on what I can do well and boldly ask others for help with what I can't. Design work would be the prime example. 🤔
What if I motivated people who share my struggles, and we grew together?
The last detail that stuck with me was that I enjoy developing people and prefer getting close to a few people rather than many.
It was fun to see how that connects to why I started this blog. 😄
3. Worthpick Salon: a time to find "my own weapon"
Finally, at the Worthpick Salon community meetup on Sunday, September 23, I reorganized the strengths I'd found above and talked about them in front of other people.
Talking it through with others, rather than just keeping it in my head or on a sticky note, clearly gave it sharper meaning and the momentum to keep going.
It was also a day when I understood clearly what kind of people I like :)
Finding "my own play" based on my strengths
If all I'd done was figure out what my strengths are, it wouldn't count as a work retrospective, would it? 😊
This month I applied the strengths I laid out above to marketing and sales work and got a special result.
Specifically, among the prospective accounts we'd selected for ABM (account-based marketing), I reached out to the people in charge at the companies I particularly liked and wanted to work with, and created meeting opportunities, and the strengths above came into play in that process.
Drawing on my "Strategic" theme, I figured out what topics they were probably wrestling with right now, then "motivated" them around those points in emails and direct messages, and that got meetings on the calendar. 👍
In particular, in my September 7 meeting with Director Yang Su-seok of LF Mall (a major Korean fashion e-commerce site), I skipped the solution pitch and instead spent the time communicating well and motivating each other around the things we were each working through, and wrapped up my first external meeting successfully 😃
That meeting stuck with me for a long time because it gave me a hint about how I can work as a B2B marketer and how I can produce results going forward.
You could say it was the day I found "my own way of playing." 😎
* Apparently the professional term for this is ODR (Outbound Development Representative). Sander from Channel Talk (a Korean business messenger and CRM tool) covered it in detail on Brunch (a Korean blogging platform), so it's worth a look.
Preparing the ground for Q4 2023
Tomorrow, the last day of the holiday break, I plan to sit down and map out how to spend the remaining three months of the year.
This quarter also completes my first full cycle since joining Indent in January, so I want to plan it even more carefully.
And it's one of those days when I feel confident that maximizing the strengths I uncovered in September will lead to good results 😊
People I'm especially grateful to this month
- My company, Indent Corporation, for the great workshop opportunity!
- "B2B Marketing Hustle" & "Worthpick," for building solid insights through community
- Myself, for running hard again this month 😎
