Team strengths workshops
With Gallup CliftonStrengths (StrengthsFinder)
- Build awareness of the skills and preferences within your team
- Gain a detailed picture of team dynamics
- Learn how to adapt to others’ thinking and communication styles
- Agree new ways of collaborating to maximise team effectiveness
- Create practical action plans or a team charter to embed learning
Make a Strengths Workshop part of your team building day
A Strengths Workshop is ideal as part of your team development activities, offering a way to help colleagues understand each other better and to think about how to improve the ways they work, in an enjoyable and engaging way.
We can deliver the workshop in a range of formats to fit around existing plans, for instance, as a full- or half-day classroom session, or online as a virtual workshop for remote teams.
How knowing your strengths helps you and your team
Are you better at planning, at coming up with ideas or at getting projects across the line?
The self-knowledge provided by a strengths assessment is invaluable in helping individuals to understand how they can make their most effective contribution at work. But working with strengths doesn’t just make people more productive, studies have found it can boost engagement and satisfaction at work as well (see below).
As a team manager, understanding the strengths of your colleagues provides you with the key to unlocking their full potential.
By ensuring responsibilities are allocated optimally and that project collaborators have the right mix of talents, you can make the very best of those around you. Achieving this ‘skills congruence’ has been shown to be one of the most important controllable factors available to managers for boosting team performance.
A measurable impact
Gallup CliftonStrengths™ has been developed and refined in the light of extensive and rigorous research that shows the importance of strengths-based development for engagement, performance and lower rates of staff turnover.
Can your team afford not to realise these kinds of performance gain?
Increase in engagement
7% – 23%
Increase in performance
8% – 18%
Decrease in attrition
20% – 73%
The benefits of a strengths-based approach are manifold, encompassing wellbeing, job satisfaction and team cohesion, as well as performance. Numerous studies have helped to establish these impacts, including:
Enhanced team satisfaction, cohesion, and performance when focusing on strengths:
Dubreuil, P., Forest, J., Gillet, N., Fernet, C., Thibault-Landry, A. and Crevier-Braud, L. (2019). Facilitating positive team dynamics: A strengths-based intervention. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 34(5), 345-362.
Link: Promoting positive outcomes through strengths interventions: A literature review: The Journal of Positive Psychology: Vol 13, No 6 (tandfonline.com)
Higher work engagement, productivity, and performance when aligning work with strengths:
Lavy, S. and Littman-Ovadia, H. (2017). My better self: Using strengths at work and work productivity, organizational citizenship behavior, and satisfaction. Journal of Career Development, 44(2), 95-109.
Link: My better self: Using strengths at work and work productivity, organizational citizenship behavior, and satisfaction. (apa.org)
Personal growth and development, including improved self-confidence, goal-setting, and reaching full potential through strengths:
Clifton, D. O. and Harter, J. K. (2003). Investing in strengths. Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline, 111-121.
Link: WhitePaper–InvestingInStrengths.pdf
Above: A Gallup CliftonStrengths™ Assessment Team Strengths Grid
Understanding the mix of skills in your team can help everyone do a better job. It can also be useful when looking to recruit or develop staff: Which relevant skills are missing in your team?
Our approach
1. Initial meeting to identify your priorities (free of charge)
We’ll discuss your team’s background and what you’d like to achieve from your Strengths Workshop, enabling us to tailor the work we do to your specific needs and objectives.
2. Take the online Gallup CliftonStrengths™ assessment
Team members take the online Gallup CliftonStrengths™ assessment to discover their top strengths. They’ll receive reports showing their dominant talents and explaining how to make the most of them, and will also gain access to the Now Discover your Strengths e-book.
As the team’s manger, you can also opt to receive an overall report describing your teams range of strengths, as well as a coaching call to help you understand how to make the most of the mix of talents in your team.
3. Coaching call (optional)
The individual strengths assessment can be followed by one-to-one coaching calls that provides each team member with personal attention from our qualified coach. The scope of this call varies depending on your needs and will be agreed between us. The aim of the call is usually to enable team members to:
- Develop their understanding of their top five strengths
- Identify how they use their strengths at work and how they can use them further
- Discuss the ‘shadow side’ (weaknesses) of any of their strengths, how this can cause difficulties for themselves (and others) and how to manage these
- Articulate their shadow sides, and impact of them, to team members and colleagues
- Draw up a plan to actively put their strengths to work
- Build rapport with the coach to help facilitate the workshop that follows
4. Team Strengths Workshop
Finally, we get together for a deep dive into your team’s strengths, helping the whole team to understand the resources, skills and talents around them, as well as how they can make their best contributions.
We can build the day around specific issues or scenarios, or take a more broad approach, supporting the team to create new processes that play to the team’s strengths.
More details of what your workshop could involve are described below.
Making it stick: The Team Workshop
A Strengths Workshop can be delivered in-person at your offices or live online, and is facilitated by one of our expert trainers. It is a great way to help your team get to know each other’s talents and qualities better, and to identify how you can work together more effectively to deliver shared goals.
The precise aims of the workshop are determined in consultation with you, but a typical session will include opportunities to:
- Consolidate your team’s understanding of their individual strengths
- Provide an opportunity for everyone to share their top 5 strengths with the rest of the team
- Increase your team’s self-awareness of the similarities and differences in the strengths of other team members
- Discuss how team members can use their top five strengths at work
- Articulate the reasons for similarities and differences in the preferred ways of working / decision-making / energy levels / pace / communicating etc. within the team
- Discuss the negative or ‘shadow side’ of their strengths, and how and when they can cause difficulties for themselves, their team and others
- Identify how to manage their ‘shadow sides’
- Identify where their individual and team strengths fall into the four different categories of: Executing, Influencing and Relationship-building and Thinking – and understand the impact of this
- Plan how individual strengths can work best together in future to achieve shared goals
Our clients include
Let's talk!
If you would like to learn more about how a Strengths Workshop could work for you, including costs and timescales, please get in touch to speak to one of our specialist consultants.
We can deliver the workshop in a range of formats to fit around your working practices and existing team building activities. For an accurate quote for your team please just drop us an email or call on 0845 2260624 letting us know the size of your group, any time constraints around the session, and whether you would prefer a classroom or virtual workshop.