Team Building Facilitation With Strengths Finder

StrengthsFinder is a tremendous tool for personal growth and development. It will be even more valuable to your organization when you apply it to a team. This post describes our approach to Teambuilding Facilitation with StrengthsFinder (now CliftonStrengths).

What is StrengthsFinder?

StrengthsFinder, is a tool designed to help individuals maximize their strengths. The tool was developed by Donald O. Clifton and is now called Gallup Clifton Strengths. It is based on the philosophy that success comes from leveraging your strengths. Success does not come from “fixing your weaknesses.”

The assessment measures the relative strength of talents in 34 themes. Your talents are things that you are good at. You probably find these easy, and natural, and you enjoy doing them. The themes describe different ways of thinking, acting, and doing. The tool is designed to determine which themes best describe you. The themes are grouped into four domains.

1. Executing | Strengths related to execution, and getting things done.
2. Influencing | Strengths related to influencing the ideas and actions of others.
3. Relationship Building | Strengths related to the cohesiveness of the team and building effective relationships with others that you interact with.
4. Strategic Thinking | Strengths related to developing strategy, making decisions, and planning.

The StrengthsFinder Assessment

The StrengthsFinder assessment is completed online. During this hour-long session, you’ll see paired statements. You have to choose which ones best describes you. There are no right or wrong answers.

The StrengthsFinder Report

The results are presented in a personalized report. It describes your top five strengths. It also suggests ways that these can be applied both personally and professionally.

Click here Sample CliftonStrengths Report. for a sample report from the CliftonStrengths site.

The Team Building Session

We do this with intact teams who work together. Everyone brings their Top-Five Strengths Report. Here is how we work our way through the team’s strengths.

Overview

We begin with a general discussion of Strengthsfinder and how people feel about their own results.

Round Robin

Next, we go around the table in a round robin to find out what each person’s top five strengths are. We collect these one at a time.

Clarification

The first time a strength comes up we have the person with that strength explain it to the rest of the group. The facilitator then checks to see who else also has this strength and records this on the screen.

Finishing the Round Robin

We keep working around the table until everyone’s top five strengths have been recorded.

Reviewing the Team’s Results

The facilitator presents on the screen the complete list of all 34 strengths. Underneath each strength will be a list of names of the people who have that strength. Here is what a couple of rows of the report would look like for Executing

We can now review the list looking at your results as a group. When a strength is possessed by many people, we talk about that.

More importantly we talk about the strengths that no one on the team possesses. The question is “how important is the absence of this strength to the team?” If it is important, we then discuss mitigating strategies, if it is not important, we move on.

The whole person

It is interesting to go around the table and have everyone share their top five. We can use the following questions to learn more about them and how to work together more effectively. (I use a participant called Mary for an example.)

• • “Everyone, does this sound like Mary to you?”
  • “Mary ,do you think this is you?”
  • “Mary, what do you need from others to be productive and happy?”
  • “Everyone else what do you need from Mary to be productive and happy?”

Composition of the Team by Domain

Remember the 34 strengths are grouped into four domains. Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. It is informative to look at the composition of the team.

Here is an example of the report we display on the screen for discussion.

Discussion focuses on what does the distribution mean to us.

Closing

We like to do a final round robin before concluding the session. The question we ask is.

“What is one thing that you are going to do differently after today’s session?”

Conclusion

We have found this approach to Team Building Facilitation with StrengthsFinder to be a highly productive and very popular with clients. It takes between two to four hours to run depending on the size of the group. It is often part of a longer day with other custom elements.