CliftonStrengths assessment gives you a structured picture of the talents people bring to their work. The assessment identifies 34 recurring talent themes that describe patterns in how people tend to think, feel and behave.

Individually, those themes can help you recognise the approaches that come most naturally to each colleague. Bring everybody’s results together, and you can also see how different strengths are distributed throughout the team.

At Penguin Learning, we help you take that information beyond the assessment itself. We work with individuals and teams to interpret their results, connect them with the work they actually do and decide how those strengths can be applied strategically across the group.

Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking.

Together, they describe broad patterns in how people tend to turn ideas into action, influence others, build relationships and think about possibilities.

In our CliftonStrengths assessment sessions, our trainers help people interpret those themes in the context of their own responsibilities.

That might mean recognising where somebody injects momentum into a project, where another colleague is strongest at building support around an idea, or where someone else is more inclined to step back and examine the wider picture before a decision is made.

See how your team’s strengths fit together

Individual reports become more revealing when you look at them side by side.

When exploring CliftonStrengths for teams, Gallup’s Team Grid maps the strengths across the group, showing which themes appear frequently, which are less common and where they sit across the four domains. This gives you a clearer picture of the different approaches already available within the team.

You may, for instance, find a strong concentration of Strategic Thinking themes, or discover that responsibility for Influencing or Executing tends to fall to a much smaller number of people. Those patterns can help you examine how work is currently shared and where different strengths could be brought together.

There is no ‘ideal combination’ that every team should aim for. The purpose of mapping your collective strengths is to understand the team you actually have and how its talent patterns relate to the work you need to deliver.

At Penguin Learning, we also use CliftonStrengths alongside DISC in our own quarterly team meetings. This gives us regular opportunities to revisit our individual insights, consider how our strengths complement one another and discuss how we can apply them in our work.

What does the research show?

Gallup reports that people who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged at work, and in a separate study of 530 work units, teams whose managers received strengths feedback showed 12.5% greater productivity following the intervention than comparison teams whose managers had not received that feedback.

The figures also show why identifying strengths is only part of the process:

Your employees

Need opportunities to use them

Your managers

Need to recognise where they are already showing up in the work

Your teams

Need a clear view of how different strengths combine

What Happens During A CliftonStrengths Team Workshop?

A CliftonStrengths team workshop helps colleagues move from understanding their assessment results to considering how those insights can support their everyday work.

Depending on the team's development goals, this may involve discussing individual talent themes, exploring how different strengths complement one another and identifying opportunities to apply those strengths more deliberately.

The aim is to turn the findings of the CliftonStrengths assessment into practical development conversations and agreed actions that colleagues can revisit after the workshop.

CliftonStrengths Training For Teams

How does the CliftonStrengths test work?