Is There Any Significance to the Order of My Signature Themes?

Technically, the answer is yes, but in practical terms, no. The StrengthsFinder Profile evaluates each of your responses, calculates your strongest themes, and presents your top five in descending order. Thus, technically, the first theme listed is your strongest theme. The fifth theme listed is your fifth strongest.

However, we advise you not to place too much emphasis on the order of your Signature Themes. First, the actual difference between your number one theme and your number five theme, and those in between, may well be infinitesimally small. In the world of mathematics, the differences exist, but in the real world, they may be meaningless.

Second, the practical purpose of StrengthsFinder is to highlight your dominant patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior. Here we are drawing a distinction between your Signature Themes and your responsive themes. Your Signature Themes are those that you lead with. No matter what the situation, they filter your world, forcing you to behave in certain recurring ways. By contrast, your responsive themes fire only occasionally, usually when a very particular situation presents itself.

For example, if one of your Signature Themes is Developer, you will actively look for opportunities to set other people up for success. Their growth will always be on your mind. If Developer is a responsive theme, it will kick in only when the other person is sitting in front of you asking for your advice on her career. Similarly, if Strategic thinking is a Signature Theme you will approach every situation by asking “What if?” Whether standing in the shower or jogging or lying awake late at night, your mind will not be able to stop itself from its instinctive contingency planning. However, if Strategic is a responsive theme, it will be switched on only when the time comes to carve the five-year business plan.

Responsive themes can come in handy sometimes because they enable you to perform acceptably well as long as everything is cued up for you, but your Signature Themes don’t rely on cues. They are powerful precisely because they are instinctual. Each of them, one through five, is a self-starting theme and is a critical component in strength building.