A Talent Terror Tale: A CoreClarity & Gallup Color Confusion Cleanup

I thought it was a Halloween prank. A text message from Beverley in Arizona. An email from Jason in Virginia. A voicemail from Cary in Colorado. All concerned, confused, and confounded about the same traumatic talent transformation. Some silent and unseen force had rearranged their Strengths, altering their superpowers and CoreDrill profile!

Beverly went to bed a Stabilizer and woke up a Bridgineer.

Jason drifted off into a Passionato slumber but rose from bed a Force of Nature.

And Cary, poor Cary, hit the bed the night before as a Guru, only to awaken a Lifeline. 

(Psycho music playing in the background).

What led to this diabolical metamorphosis? Beverley, Jason, and Cary had gone through a CoreClarity workshop and were now referencing their talents according to the Gallup website instead of ours.

“Bert-why did you change my talent colors? Am I a really a Trail Blazer now?”

Let me clear this mysterious fog of confusion. Gallup categorizes the 34 talents into four domains: Relationship Building, Strategic Thinking, Executing, and Influencing. On their website, Gallup poses four questions to help define each domain: How do you build and nurture strong relationships? How do you absorb, think about and analyze information and situations? How do you make things happen? How do you influence others? The 34 talent themes are distributed somewhat evenly between their 4 domains with 9 in Relationship Building and Executing and 8 in the Strategic Thinking and Influencing.

CoreClarity, on the other hand, divides the 34 talents into four quadrants: Connect talents which help create, develop, and sustain relationships over time. Reflect talents that gather, process, and make decisions with information and mental images. Energize talents that push oneself toward results and Mobilize talents used to motivate others to action. 

CoreClarity adds an extra layer of definition that gives talents an added value. Some talents function externally with others, while others function internally within ourselves. There are talents with a motivational dynamic towards others or ourselves while the rest have an interactive dynamic for depth either relationally or personally. The quadrants are placed adjacently to form the CoreClarity Key. Another major deviation from Gallup is that CoreClarity places the talents with 12 in Reflect, 9 in Energize, 7 in Connect and 6 in Mobilize.

Why the discrepancy? As Gallup has developed and tweaked their domains over the years they focus on how the talents are experienced by other people. In other words, how do I and other people experience your Arranger talent? CoreClarity focuses instead on how you personally experience the talent working. How do you implement and experience your Arranger talent? 

See here for a visual on the Gallup Domains vs CoreClarity Quadrants.

Until recently I never received questions about the difference because Gallup domains were black and white and CoreClarity added color to its domains. But about 10 years ago Gallup made their domains more dominant in their reports and on their website. The initial confusion came in the form of “Why the different colors?” as Gallup used a different color scheme than CoreClarity. Then in the fall of 2020 Gallup began to use similar color schemes as CoreClarity, using blue, green, orange, and purple, thus creating the confusion of my opening drama.

So which talents are categorized differently, and does it include you? That is a spellbinding tale…to be continued next month.