Managing your Talents [14] - WOO

According to Gallup, the essence of the talent theme of WOO is the following:

Woo stands for winning others over. You enjoy the challenge of meeting new people and getting them to like you. Strangers are rarely intimidating to you. On the contrary, strangers can be energizing. You are drawn to them. You want to learn their names, ask them questions, and find some area of common interest so that you can strike up a conversation and build rapport. Some people shy away from starting up conversations because they worry about running out of things to say. You don’t. Not only are you rarely at a loss for words; you actually enjoy initiating with strangers because you derive satisfaction from breaking the ice and making a connection. Once that connection is made, you are quite happy to wrap it up and move on. There are new people to meet, new rooms to work, new crowds to mingle in. In your world there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet — lots of them.

But a talent like this on itself is quite meaningless unless you develop and manage it. That is why we believe that "a well managed talent becomes a strength, but a mismanaged talent becomes a detriment".

How do you manage the talent of WOO?
  
First, your WOO talent is energized by your interaction with people, but it goes further than simply that. Your WOO needs to "win them over".  This means that there are always an agenda or goal when you gather people around you, or when you mix with them.  From a personality perspective - when you are extroverted - the interaction alone energizes you. But the talent needs more than interaction. It goes towards interaction with a reason. This reason need not be practical at all....like selling something.  It can be purely for the sake of sharing thoughts, for instance, and winning people over towards your ideas or opinions.  A WOO talent needs to understand their need for winning over, and how they actually naturally think, feel and behave in this manner.  This talent could go into "overdrive" and it can actually be to your detriment if mismanaged, as people might not understand your need or your agenda, and they might misunderstand your intentions, and then  actually even feel used in this manner.  You should manage your WOO well in this matter.

 How?

Openness and honesty are mostly the best way to win people over - and the lack of it always lead to trust being broken.  Manage you need to win others over with the values of being open and honest regarding your intentions.  People will respond with more openness then also.  Also, make sure people understand that if you have a goal tied to connecting with them, it does not de-value your respect for them.  People will always push back when they feel they have been used.

Secondly, aligning with the previous point, your WOO talent can be received as you being shallow, not being able to connect deeply.  This is not necessarily true, but people have different capacities for relationships.  Your WOO talent usually increases your capacity in this regard, and when others - with a smaller capacity in relationships - see this, they simply come to the conclusion that it cannot be real. This is not necessarily the case. Your capacity for having relationships, remembering names, interacting socially and connecting people are all part of your amazing WOO talent. But, you must know that others might not understand this.  Make sure they do.

How?

Again, explain your talent to them.  Knowledge about a talent and what it needs and contributes will also be a great help to those who do not have this unique ability.
 Be proud of your strength in this regard, and share the details about it with others.

Thirdly, a WOO talent demands healthy boundaries.  A miss-managed WOO because of a lack of healthy boundaries can be extremely annoying. You need to work on this, and understand that your WOO talent is by nature "audible and visible".  This demands healthy boundaries so that people do not feel overwhelmed or steamrollered by this talent.

How?

Healthy boundaries goes with respect for other peoples needs and wants.  It gives you the much needed skills to know when to engage and when to back off.  It helps you understand when to accept "No", and when not to.  This is a mature skill, and many people lack this ability.  Your strong WOO talent seriously needs to be balanced with healthy boundaries, as you should not disregard your talent or shut it down, but you need to manage it well.  I can strongly re comment the book "Boundaries" by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. Get it, read it and apply it.

Now go and offer this awesome talent to the world!

- by Dries Lombaard, founder and owner of Africanmosaic and TALENTmosaic.

Important note when reading this: in this series, I simply focus on the specific talent in isolation. I do not take the crucial element of Talent Dynamics (two or more talent themes combining) into consideration. This is very important as any Coach should take that into consideration when coaching people in their talents. But you need to understand the challenges that the talent theme on its own might hold. Therefor the challenges in managing the talent as explained below might not be applicable to everyone, as the dynamics with some of their other talent themes might override the specific challenge and "make up for it". But, knowledge of the most common management challenges in every talent theme still is crucial in talent development and when turning the talent into a strength.  All information is my own, acquired by years of Strengths Coaching experience, and not verified or scientifically tested by Gallup. The definition at the beginning is the intellectual property of Gallup, and well researched.