Blog Post #1 - Andrew Wharton

Top Five Strengths:

Self-Assurance

Adaptability

Focus

Achiever

Arranger

Overall, I would say that my themes are very complimentary of one another. When reading over the synopsis for each one, it was very easy to see commonalities between all five. I have also noticed that a great majority (3/5) of my themes are can be considered to be related to execution under the class handout. This makes sense because I often base my performance on how much of something I can accomplish in a high quality manner. I am continuously (whether I want to admit it or not) tied to my i-Phone and live vicariously through my inbox. Given the tools, I love to orchestrate my vision of a project or task at hand. I think it is also worth noting that my two other themes are very supplementary to any type of detailed execution. Self-assurance gives me confidence in my abilities as a leader and a moral compass to follow. Adaptability allows me to stay flexible in my approach in order to accommodate for unforeseeable events. Minor things rarely upset me as much as they do most people. In summary, I believe that my traits are very supplementary of each other and can all be focused towards an execution attitude.

I think that these strengths will serve me well throughout the Board Immersion experience because people will find me very responsive to thoughts, requests, and suggestions. If I am given a project or a role in a meeting, I will be able to execute it very independently on a deadline. In engineering, we eat, sleep, and breath due dates so I trust I will be very reliable to a board in that regard. I think my strengths also put me in a position to contribute from the start of the onboarding experience. Given some background on any topic, I enjoy what some people would call “just running with it” (leveraging my adaptability trait).

I anticipate using adaptability the most throughout the experience because it has proven useful already throughout my experience with the cohort. I am the only male in the cohort and am venturing into something I know very little about. As an Industrial and Systems Engineer I am trained to think about bottom lines and profits for large corporations. Helping others is not my strong point but through this cohort I hope I can leverage my educational background in order to help others. If board meetings are anything like the other meetings I have experienced on campus there will undoubtedly be multiple people of different backgrounds that bring different perspectives to the table. I will have to adapt to their meeting times and styles (the entire world we know is not based on “college time”). If I had to pick a close second I would have to say Focus will be my next most utilized strength. I should have little difficulty fronting the degree of effort to stay focused to the task on hand and I do tend to thrive in goal setting environments. Since all organizations have goals, I anticipate fitting in just fine.

Overall, I think my strengths are a very accurate representation of my person and I don’t have very many questions regarding why I possess them. I would be more interested to listen to the characteristics of other’s strengths so I can better understand what they bring to the table and what direction they are coming from.