Why your natural strengths are the real starting line for influence, and what an old assessment taught me about servant leadership

Recently, I pulled up a report I had taken back in 2009. It was my Gallup Clifton Strengthfinder profile, and I had half-forgotten it existed. When I read it again as a senior  project manager rather than as a junior PM, something stopped me cold.

My top five strengths are Input, Learner, Ideation, Context, and Responsibility. Four of those five belong to the Strategic Thinking domain. The fifth, Responsibility, belongs to Executing. And here is the part that made me sit up. I had zero strengths in the Influencing domain. Not Command, not Communication, not Activator, not Self Assurance.

I now consult and teach project and program managers for a living. I also serve as Executive Vice President for a start-up.  My whole job is influence, which means moving teams, aligning stakeholders, and getting people who do not report to me to commit to valued outcomes. The strengthfinder assessment said that influence is not where my natural talent lives.

For a moment, that felt like a problem. Then it became the most useful thing I have reflected on about leadership in years, because it forced me to sit with a question, I believe every project manager should answer before they worry about influencing anyone else. Do I understand how I am naturally built?

This first issue is about that question. If you are somewhere in your first one to ten years as a project or program manager, you are probably being told to build stakeholder buy in, manage up, and drive alignment. Those are all real skills. But almost no one tells you where influence actually comes from. It does not come from copying the loudest executive in the room. It comes from knowing your own natural strengths well enough to lead through them rather than around them. Let me show you what I mean.

There is a difference between a skill and a talent, and it matters more than it sounds.

A skill is something you learned and can teach. Building a project schedule, running a risk register, and facilitating a retrospective meeting are all skills. You were not born with them. You acquired them, and someone else can acquire them too.

A natural strength is the thing you do without being asked. It is the pattern you fall into when no one is giving instructions, the way your mind moves when it is free. Gallup and the psychologist Donald Clifton spent decades studying high performers, and they found that the most effective people are not the ones who fixed all of their weaknesses. They are the ones who understood their natural talents and deliberately built their work around them.

That is a quietly radical idea for a project manager. Our profession is preoccupied with gaps. We run gap analysis, we manage gap closure, and we all know the performance review column labeled areas for improvement. We are trained to hunt for what is missing. But you will never out improve your way to great leadership by sanding down every rough edge. You get there by knowing what you are genuinely good at and pointing it at the people you serve. So, before you can influence a single stakeholder, you have to do the unglamorous internal work first. Name your strengths, claim them honestly, and aim them on purpose.

I want to walk through my own top five, not because my profile is the point, but because seeing one worked example makes it easier for you to do this with your own top strengths. As you read, notice that none of these are influencing strengths. And yet every one of them becomes a lever for influence once you turn it outward in service of the team. That turning outward is the heart of servant leadership, and I will come back to it.

The first is Input, which means I collect. My instinct is to gather frameworks, articles, templates, war stories, and the one statistic that explains a whole situation. Left unchecked, Input is just hoarding. Pointed at a team, it becomes resourcefulness in service of others. When a junior PM on my team is stuck, I rarely have to start from zero, because I have usually already filed away the checklist, the example, or the name of the person they should talk to. Influence here is not persuasion. It is being the one who reliably has what people need before they need it.

The second is Learner, which means I love the climb more than the summit. For me the energy is in getting better, not in arriving. The risk is obvious, because a Learner can chase novelty and never finish. But for a project leader this strength does something powerful. It makes growth visible. When your team sees you, the project leader, openly learning a new tool or admitting you do not yet understand something, you give them permission to grow out loud too. That is influence by example, and it is the opposite of the leader who pretends to already know everything.

The third is Ideation, which means I see the connections. I get a real jolt of energy when a messy situation suddenly snaps into a simple explanation, or when two unrelated problems turn out to share one root cause. On a project this is the strength that generates options when the room has run out of them. The servant leadership move is restraint. It means not flooding the team with my ideas, but offering one well timed reframe that unlocks their thinking. Influence is not having the most ideas. It is creating the conditions where everyone’s ideas get better.

The fourth is Context, which means I look back in order to move forward. I make sense of the present by understanding its history. When I meet a new team, a new stakeholder, or a new conflict, my first instinct is to ask how we got here. This can look slow to people who just want to act. But it is also why I rarely repeat a mistake, and why I can tell a new team member why a process exists instead of just handing them the rule. For younger PMs especially this is gold, because people commit far more readily to a decision when someone takes the time to explain the history behind it. Context, used well, is trust building.

The fifth is Responsibility, which means I take ownership, full stop. This is my only executing strength in my top 5, and it is the bedrock of everything else. When I commit to something, I feel emotionally bound to deliver it, whether it is large or small. The shadow side is real, because I take on too much, and I have had to learn to be selective. There is a story there that nearly cost me dearly, and I will save it for a future issue. But here is why this strength matters most. Responsibility is where natural strengths and servant leadership meet. A servant leader does not lead because they crave authority. They lead because they have taken ownership of the team’s success and the stakeholders’ valued outcomes. My most ordinary strength turns out to be the one that makes the leadership real because I own my work and outcomes.

Look at that list of my top 5 strengths again. Four strategic thinking strengths and one executing strength, and not one of them is about charisma, commanding a room, or winning people over. For most of my career I quietly assumed that made me a weaker natural leader than the naturally magnetic ones. It does not. It simply means my influence runs on a different engine.

Here is the reframe I most want to leave you with.

We talk about influence as though it were something we do to people, a technique or a power move that we switch on in a meeting. But the leaders I trust most do not operate that way, and servant leadership names exactly why. In a servant leadership model you lead by serving the people and the mission first. Influence is not the thing you chase. It is the thing you earn as a result.

Think of a jazz ensemble for a moment. The musician everyone remembers is not the one who plays the loudest or takes every solo. It is the one who listens most closely, who leaves space for the others, and who lifts the whole group by serving the music first. That player ends up shaping the entire performance, not by demanding attention, but by giving it. Leadership on a project works the same way.

And you serve best through your strengths, not despite them. Watch how naturally it lines up. My Input becomes a resource library for a team that is needs resources and direction. My Learner talent becomes the safety to grow without shame. My Ideation excitement becomes options when everyone else is stuck. My Context talent becomes the patience to explain why, which builds trust. My Responsibility strength becomes the ownership that makes people believe I have their back. None of that is influencing in the assessment’s sense. All of it influences people deeply, because it serves them first.

A project or program manager who takes time to learn about their natural strengths can master this.   They learn to stop asking how do I get this stakeholder to say yes, and starts asking what this person actually needs, and which of my strengths can meet that need. The yes response tends to follow. That is the quiet secret the old Gallup report handed me. I do not have to borrow someone else’s leadership style, and neither do you. Your natural strengths, turned outward in deliberate service of your team and your stakeholders, are your influence.

Robert Greenleaf, who first named servant leadership in his 1970 essay The Servant as Leader, put the starting point plainly. “The servant leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.”

Notice the order in Greenleaf’s words. The serving comes first, and the leading grows out of it. Your strengths are simply the specific, personal way you are equipped to serve. When you know them, you are not inventing a leadership style out of thin air. You are discovering the one you were already built to offer.

I do not want you to just nod along. I want you to do the same work I did. Here is a simple version you can run over the next two weeks, whether or not you have ever taken a formal assessment.

1.        Name it. List the three or four things you do at work that genuinely energize you, the tasks you would do even if no one assigned them. If you have taken The Clifton Strengthsfinder or a similar assessment, start with your top five. If you have not, this list is your homemade version, and it is more than enough to begin.

2.        Claim it. For each one, write down a specific moment it helped you succeed on a real project. Not a hypothetical, but an actual time it worked. This is how you turn a vague trait into evidence you believe about yourself.

3.        Aim it. For each strength, answer one question. Who on my team or among my stakeholders could I serve better this month by using this strength with intentional purpose? Then pick one, and act on it this week. One strength, one person, one deliberate act of service.

You do not need a thirty-four page report to start. You need to know what you are good at, believe it, and point it at someone who needs it. When you do, watch what happens to your influence. I think you will find that it was ever about volume or charisma. It was about service all along.

In the next issue I will go deep on the strength I find hardest to manage, which is Responsibility, and the expensive lesson I learned about saying yes to the wrong commitment. It involved ignoring some very good advice from my wife, and we will get into it.

If this was useful, the best thing you can do is forward it to one project or program manager who is earlier in the journey than you are. And if someone forwarded it to you, welcome. Subscribe so the next issue lands in your inbox.

You have everything you need to start leading yourself first. The rest follows!

Serve well, lead well, and grow the leaders around you.

Mareko

On Becoming a Servant Leader is a bi-weekly newsletter on servant leadership and emotional intelligence for project managers who want to deliver valued outcomes for their teams and the people they serve.

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