Today we’d like to introduce you to Anne Brackett.
Hi Anne, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
We (Anne Brackett and Alicia Wojciuch) worked together for years at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy in Student Affairs. Our students were always stressed and exhausted, so while we were at a conference, we attended a session about a university who used a strengths-based approach – specifically Gallup’s StrengthsQuest/Finder (which was rebranded as CliftonStrengths a few years ago). We along with some colleagues were inspired and brought it back to our campus.
As we implemented and expanded CliftonStrengths across campus, Alicia and I doubled down on our commitment and became Gallup Certified Strengths Coaches. We used our skills with our students, faculty, and staff, but we didn’t get to use it as much as we liked because it wasn’t our full-time jobs. We knew how powerful this framework was in helping individuals better understand their talents and maximize their energy, so we decided we wanted to start our own coaching and training business. We have over 30 years of combined experience in Higher Education, so we wanted to focus on that area and decided to call ourselves Strengths University. In 2017, Alicia moved into a Life Coach position at Maryville University and I decided to quit my job on campus to develop Strengths University.
At first, we like many new business owners went too broad and thought we should offer services to anyone connected with Higher Education – students, parents, faculty, staff, etc. But as we dug in, we knew we had to narrow our focus. Since we’d both been supervisors all our years on campus, we knew the rewards and challenges supervisors in Higher Ed faced. You can have very rewarding experiences as you help students’ success and your team grow. But supervisors rarely get any training on how to supervise. They get thrown in and are expected to be able to lead people without really knowing what they need to focus on, what skills they need, or how to balance their time. At the same time, enrollment and thus budgets on campuses have been decreasing for years. This meant that supervisors were all too often asked to do more with less. Most supervisors in Higher Ed are stressed, overwhelmed, and headed toward burnout.
Our goal is to provide these supervisors with the support they need to become more confident, more empowered, and less stressed. We’ve worked for the past four years to develop a strengths-based and wholistic approach, so supervisors can get the support and training they need to learn what makes an effective supervisor and even more importantly how to implement the systems they need to get them there.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has not been a smooth road. Neither of us had any business experience, so there’s been a huge learning curve – especially in the sales area. When you work on campus, the students just show up. We’ve had to work hard to focus our messaging and spread the word about what we do. Just as we were gaining momentum, the pandemic hit. Higher Education was hit particularly hard, enrollment was impacted again and now everyone was left scrambling to figure out how to even have a safe 2020/2021 academic year. For the most part, supervisors were far too busy and stressed working out logistics for their students and staff to invest in professional development. One thing that came out of this pressure was our pivot into doing more online training. Before the pandemic, when you wanted training from outside folks, they traveled to campus to do a workshop for your team. Now people are used to doing things online, so this opens up more options for us. Since things have settled down a bit with COVID and things are a bit more steady on campus, we’ve started gaining momentum again. Unfortunately, supervisors are even more stressed now and are looking for ways to make things better for themselves and their teams, but we are here to help folks address the stress for themselves and their teams.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Strengths University?
Strengths University focuses on helping supervisors in Higher Education become more confident, more empowered, and less stressed so they can become more authentic leaders. What sets us apart is that we use the CliftonStrengths framework in everything we do because everyone has different talents. Therefore, the way one person solves a problem or achieves a goal, won’t necessarily work for someone else. It’s also key because most people don’t understand that talents and strengths are not the same thing. Our talents can show up as strengths, but they can also show up as challenges which means wasted time and energy. The better someone understands their talents and invests in them, them more likely those talents will show up as strengths. We’re also different from other training companies because we take a wholistic approach. Just knowing how to set expectations or coach their team members isn’t enough. In order to be effective in doing those things, we have to understand our stories, habits, our biases, and how stress impacts us. If you know how to hold someone accountable but don’t know how to be assertive, you won’t do it. We want supervisors to understand themselves first, then they’ll be able to be more effective as they implement what they’ve learned.
We offer a number of services to help supervisors get there – coaching, team training, retreats, and online workshops.
Supervisor Training
While we’re in the process of expanding our training options, right now we have three primary ways to get supervisors the training they need – team workshops, group coaching, and our new Supervisor Strengths Institute. We can do team workshops in person or virtually. This usually consists of a half or full day with us. During this time, we focus on the basics of the CliftonStrengths and then whatever topics you think might best help your group, whether it’s team dynamics, supervisor basics, or stress management.
Our Group Coaching packages are similar in that the work is done as a team – often a team of supervisors. We divide up topics into 2-hour sessions that includes homework and opportunities to discuss how to implement what they’ve learned. These sessions can be done as ongoing professional development throughout the semester or year.
Finally, our newest offering is the Supervisor Strengths Institute (SSI). We wanted a way for individual supervisors from any institution to get the training they needed. We offer a group SSI once a semester, including the summer. It’s an 8-week program that combines online, asynchronous learning with group and individual coaching. Each week students get a new learning module with homework that they can do during the week. Then we meet as a cohort to discuss that week’s information. Participants also get three individual coaching calls to discuss anything they don’t want to share with the group or that just needs more focus. During the Institute, we focus heavily on implementing what they’ve learned. Most training falls short because it’s just about increasing knowledge, but knowing something doesn’t change anything. We want our students to not just learn about their talents and how to supervise, but actually make the changes they need to be successful. We just opened registration for our spring SSI https://www.strengthsuniversity.org/supervisorstrengthsinstitute. For folks who would prefer to get the same content and coaching support but on their own timeframe, we’ve just launched the VIP Supervisor Strengths Institute. Participants of the VIP SSI can choose the pace of the content and set up their coaching meetings when it’s convenient for them vs. the set group calls in our cohort SSI.
Coaching
Coaching is an important support for supervisors in Higher Ed. Since most supervisors don’t have training when you have a question about what to do in a specific situation for the most part your only option is to ask your supervisor or other folks who also haven’t actually been trained to supervise. They can tell you what they think you should do, but that’s isn’t necessarily the most effective thing to do AND since everyone has different talents what your supervisor might do won’t necessarily be the best move for you. The other problem with looking for guidance on campus is that anyone in the same environment – no matter how well-intentioned they may be – is always thinking about how this might impact them or their department. What’s best for this particular supervisor, might not be what’s best for them so they can’t really give objective feedback. When you’re working with us, we only care about what’s best for you.
Team Workshops & Retreats
We focus on helping supervisors become more effective, which includes working with their teams. Sometimes supervisors contact us to do a training with their team about CliftonStrengths basis and team dynamics first. Sometimes they want to get their team on board once they’ve gone through our Supervisor Strengths Institute. Either way, having your team understand their talents and how they show up for them – both positively and negatively, is key to maximizing team performance. We can do this as a half-day workshop, a full-day workshop, or as a retreat.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Adaptability is the first quality that comes to mind. Going into this, we had one vision of how it would look – we would go in person to coach or train groups for anyone related to higher education. As we progressed and learned more about business and sales, we had to narrow our focus to supervisors in Higher Ed. Then when the pandemic hit, we had to adapt and create more online opportunities. Those are relatively bit things we had to be adaptable with, but on a daily basis we see what works and what doesn’t and then adapt. Luckily both of us have Adaptability as one of our top talent themes in CliftonStrengths.
Another is investing in learning and an open mind. We are consistently learning more about how the brain and body work especially in response to stress, about what folks are looking for in a supervisor, and how to create systems of action that works. We meet each person where they are and walk alongside them as they move toward their empowerment and success.
Pricing:
- Individual Coaching Packages Starting at $495
- Half-Day Team Workshop – 3.5 hours up to 40 participant – $2395 (CliftonStrengths Codes Sold Separately)
- Full-Day Team Workshop – 7 hours up to 40 participant – $4695 (CliftonStrengths Codes Sold Separately)
- Spring 2022 Supervisor Strengths Institute $595 (enroll before 12/30) $795 (enroll January 2022)
- VIP Supervisor Strengths Institute $1,795
Contact Info:
- Email: anne@strengthsuniversity.org
- Website: https://www.strengthsuniversity.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strengthsuniversity/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StrengthsUniversity
- Podcast: https://www.strengthsuniversity.org/mycircus
