Identifying and Using Cliftonstrengths in the Leadership Development of Doctor of Physical Therapy Students
Purpose/Hypothesis: The CliftonStrengths assessment categorizes an individual’s naturally occurring talents into 34 strength themes. The assessment has been used to identify the strengths of millions of individuals including healthcare professionals and students, including those in health care, such as pharmacists, physician assistants, physicians, and physical therapists. The purpose of this presentation is to describe the top five recurring strength themes of five consecutive cohorts of Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) students and discuss the use of CliftonStrengths in the leadership development of DPT students.
Number of Subjects: 178 DPT students
Materials and Methods: In the final course of a four-course leadership series within the DPT curriculum, students completed the CliftonStrengths assessment by responding to 177 online questions. Based on their responses, the top five strength themes were reported directly to the students and then submitted by the student through an electronic learning management system as an assignment. A lecture, followed by interactive classroom activities, assist students in learning more about their strength themes, and those of others, and how to maximize strengths in their future practice. Frequencies of each strength theme were calculated. Data were also sorted into one of the four leadership domains described by CliftonStrengths: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. Strength theme and domain were analyzed using descriptive statistics.
Results: Although results varied by DPT cohort, the frequencies of the top five strength themes among the 178 DPT students (99.9%) who completed the assessment were: Empathy (55), Achiever (54), Restorative (50), Harmony (49), and Developer (46). Executing and Relationship Building were the most common leadership domains in each of the individual cohorts. Collectively, the frequency of the four leadership domains were Relationship Building (332), Executing (280), Strategic Thinking (164), and Influencing (115).
Conclusions: The most prevalent strength themes from these five cohorts are different than those reported in the literature for student physical therapists, as well as physical therapists in non-leadership, leadership, and academic positions. This study provides more data than the greatest number of DPT student strength themes currently available in the literature. The ability of DPT students to understand and apply their own natural strengths in self-assessment, future patient/client management, and leadership activities, has important implications for personal interactions, improving care, decreasing costs, and advancing the profession.
Clinical Relevance: Aspects of the individual strength themes of sensing another person’s feelings, willingness to work hard, determining the cause of problems and resolving them, seeking consensus, and cultivating potential in others seem consistent and useful for physical therapists in patient/client management. The lesser number of students with the leadership domains of Strategic Thinking and Influencing provides an opportunity to purposefully address the importance of creating new ideas, communicating a vision, and advocacy, which have impact on the future of physical therapy patient/client management.