Using StrengthsFinder to Understand Teams

I love CliftonStrengths #strengthsfinder.

While often used as a tool for individuals, it can also be used to get to know teams, revealing the overall dynamics of strengths, rare strengths held by individuals in your team, and how similar/dissimilar combinations of strengths are overall. You can see in this example below, the people in this team are highly strategic and relational, there are a number of unique strengths (highlighted in yellow), and individual E is the most dissimilar/unique in their combination of strengths based on the similarity index. Individuals A and H have the highest number of strengths share with others.

Additionally, this is a team that is "less strong" in Executing and Influencing strengths (at least according to the result of their top 5 strengths... but who knows, everyone's number 6 strength might have been Command!).

What does this tell you, really? Well, maybe not a lot and maybe a whole bunch. I tend to use these matrices to generate hypotheses about how a team prefers to work and what it feels like to work with the team. More than anything I use this tool to help my teams develop a shared lexicon about strengths, to understand that there is diversity in strengths, and to come to see each other for our unique and similar strengths. It can be surprising to learn that learning is a discrete strength, as is positivity and woo (winning others over). Sometimes this can help us see things we thought were shortcomings as, well, strengths.

As an example, I remember learning that a colleague of mine had the strength of Context. Their long emails and frustration when asked them to shorten their 3 page report into a succinct paragraph for the organization's board suddenly made sense. They were not being difficult, they just couldn't understand how any decision could be made without the cull context. Coming to see this as a strength and a tendency for how they wanted to work rather than as an annoyance, we agreed they would provide my with both the summary and the full length document, that the summary would be submitted to the board as planned and that I would also take the full report with me into the board meeting in case I needed... which I often did! As you can guess, Context is NOT my strength and it actually creates a bit of a blind spot for me.

Another way this tool can be useful in team settings is in instances when a leader is particularly interested in new ideas, approaches, and perspectives on problem solving, it *can* be useful to consciously create teams that are less similar in their strengths. The same of course applies to thinking about ensuring problem solvers reflect differences in lived experience, neurodiversity, ability, and disciplinary expertise.

A few words of caution. This is not a diagnostic tool. It will not tell you why a team is doing well or not doing well, why people get along or disagree. But it can help you narrow in/anticipate potential challenges, understand core conflicts in approaches to work, and tune your management style. In this example, the team excels as relational strengths and likely expects a higher degree of communication, involvement, and emotional intelligence; not addressing these strengths could cause friction. Another team I worked with was heavy on Strategic Thinking strengths. While concerned about each other and by no means an emotionally cold team to work with, they instinctively followed the data above all else.

Another caveat: I strongly advise against using StrengthsFinder to weed out candidates during hiring or attempting to craft job descriptions or assessment criteria around strengths. Doing so will almost certainly introduce all sorts of bias into a search. Clifton Strengths makes clear that there is a huge range of ways any one strength is expressed (almost to the point of being contradictory at times) and that more important than any one strength is the interplay of these strengths together. They also make clear that a strength is a natural ability that is nurtured. They can change over time as we practice them or are asked to practice them with a change in responsibility or a specific request to approach a problem in a certain way!

Finally, one should not be surprised to find that a team is actually quite similar in their collective strengths. This isn't a problem necessarily. There are a few reasons for this including the fact that we tend to gravitate towards what we are good at and people who are good at similar things tend to be good at those things in similar ways... there are only so many ways to hit a golf ball really well. In contrast, one would expect a group of VPs in a company, each of whom oversees a different operational area, to have much more different strengths from each other than say all the people in a communications department or all the researchers in R & D. So the lower abundance of influencer strengths in the example matrix above may not reflect a shortcoming of the team at all and should not be thought of as such without a deeper understanding of the team's responsibilities, skills, needs, and performance.