In my previous article, I explored what really happens in a CliftonStrengths team workshop—and why it so often reveals much more than just people’s strengths.

The buzzing energy in the room when people start to really “see” each other is addictive; as is the shift that takes place when people realise that what looked like a personality clash in a team is very often strengths colliding. And because we look at those dynamics through a strengths lens, even difficult conversations become constructive.

But here’s the thing. These insights only have value if you do something with them after the workshop ends.

You’ve had your workshop.
Your team had a great time.
People learned something new about each other.
There was probably a moment or two of genuine recognition—“oh, so that’s why you keep insisting we assess risks” or “oh, so that’s why we kept clashing on this project”.

And then everyone goes back to their desks.
Now what?

That’s the question I tackle at the end of every workshop I run. And my answer is always the same:

CliftonStrengths journeys are marathons, not sprints. And a workshop is a starting point, not a destination.

The real value doesn’t live in the event itself—it lives in what you build afterwards, making your initial investment ten times more effective.

Working with many different teams, I’ve come to think of this as three layers of practice that build on each other: 1) individual ownership, 2) the manager conversation, and 3) team amplification. Each layer depends on the one before it. Skip a layer, and you’ve built a Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Here’s how it works.

Layer 1: Individual ownership

Many teams want to jump straight from the workshop to embedding strengths into their everyday work. The ambition is exactly right—but for most teams, it’s too big a leap to start there.

The reason is simple: you can’t build a strengths-based team out of people who don’t yet fully understand their own strengths. Individual ownership is the foundation. Without it, team-level conversations stay surface-level. In fact, I often recommend teams (if time and budget allows) to start at that individual level first before any workshops.

When every team member genuinely understands their own profile—how they prefer to build relationships, influence others, process information, and get work done—that’s half the battle won. They now have a language for things they previously couldn’t articulate. They start to see their patterns more clearly: what energises them, what drains them, where they naturally excel, and where they tend to overcorrect—and, more importantly, the possible whys behind it all.

It also hands them something powerful: agency. Suddenly they can take ownership of their own development: in their next check-in with you, when deciding which project to volunteer for, what support they may need, or what training to pursue next.

This means that beyond the workshop itself, it’s worth investing in helping each team member truly explore and own their report. Ideally with the support of a certified coach—because that’s where the real depth happens. Not just understanding what each theme means, but how themes interact with each other: amplifying each other, balancing each other out, expanding each other’s power—and occasionally how they may drive you and others a little crazy.

No budget for individual coaching? No problem. Gallup has an extensive library of resources—podcasts, YouTube videos, articles—covering every CliftonStrengths theme in depth.

And there are simple, visible ways to keep strengths present in everyday life too. Team members can add their Top 5 or Top 10 themes to their e-mail signature. And, if you’re co-located, a team strengths grid on the office wall becomes a surprisingly meaningful conversation starter.

Layer 2: The manager conversation

Individual ownership sets the foundation. And the single most powerful thing a manager can do to build on it is this: show genuine interest in your team members and have a strengths conversation with each one of them, one-on-one.

And the good news: it doesn’t require anything elaborate. You don’t need access to their CliftonStrengths report. You don’t need to be a certified coach. All you need is genuine curiosity, good intention—and the right questions.

None of this is theoretical. I’ve personally experienced how this kind of conversations can shift whole dynamics, relationships, and performance in teams. A manager who takes the time to ask “what do you do best, and are we actually using that?” says: I see you. I care about you. And I want to enable you to work at your best and to grow. That’s the foundation of trust. And trust is what lubricates your team’s engine and makes everything else in a team possible.

Part of what I offer is preparing managers for exactly this kind of conversation. To that end, I’ve developed The Strengths Conversation Guide—a practical tool with 20 questions designed to open up honest, constructive dialogue between managers and their team members.

A few examples:

• What do you love most about your role?
  – What activities do you pick up quickly?
  – What brings you the greatest satisfaction?
• Which tasks do you enjoy least—past or present?
  – Why? What makes them less enjoyable?
  – How does this connect to your strengths profile?
• How would you like to be supported in your work?
  – What factors distract or get in the way of your best work? How can I help minimise those?
  – Do you have talents that could benefit the team if you had better opportunities to use them?
  – What steps can I take to ensure you have opportunities to apply your natural talents to your role?

One more thing worth naming: unless your team member specifically expresses a wish to work on a weakness, your greatest leverage as a manager to support their success is to help them develop their strengths—and manage around their weaknesses.
What does that look like in practice?
Invest your development budget in helping your people go from good to great, and from great to exceptional:
– Have a team member who enjoys giving presentations? Pay for a membership at a local Toastmasters club.
– One of your team members is particularly talented in “getting things done”? See if they may be interested in a PMP or Agile certification.
The return on investment will almost always outperform the return on shoring up what doesn’t come naturally (unless that’s what the employee really wants).

Layer 3: Team amplification

With individual ownership in place and the manager conversation underway, you have everything you need to take strengths to the team level—and this is where it gets genuinely exciting.

Beyond the initial workshop, I encourage team members to have informal one-on-one conversations with each other to explore their strengths together: where are we similar? Where are we different? Where could we complement each other? Nothing formal or structured—just a relaxed conversation over a cup of tea or coffee. I often start teams on this path during the initial workshop itself, but the real power lies in keeping these conversations going long afterwards.

Team meetings are another natural home for strengths—and an often underused one. Most teams have a standing meeting rhythm already; the question is whether strengths can become part of the conversation.

– When a team is preparing to take on a new project, a question like: “looking at our collective strengths, where are we well placed, where might we have blind spots, and who on the team can help with those?” can change the quality of the planning conversation entirely.
– When tensions arise or a decision goes sideways, asking “where did our strengths collide or go on overdrive?” reframes blame and opens up a very different kind of dialogue.

These don’t need to be long detours. Even five minutes of strengths-informed reflection in a regular team meeting, done consistently, builds a shared language over time and a new way of working.

For more structured amplification, follow-up workshops are a powerful option. Two of my favourites (though there are many more):

• What I bring, what I need. Each team member shares two things: what they contribute to the team through their strengths, and what they (and their strengths) need from their colleagues in order to work at their best. It’s a remarkably honest exercise—and it shifts the team dynamic from assumption and underlying conflicts to explicit mutual understanding, respect, and accountability.
• The talent marketplace. Team members name where they need support on a current challenge or task, and colleagues volunteer help based on their own natural strengths. It turns the team’s collective talent into a living, shared resource. And it can surface combinations of strengths that no one had thought to put together before.

All of these suggestions work because they build directly on layer 1: they only have depth if individuals already understand and own their profiles. And they work best when the manager is genuinely invested in the process and knows their team members’ strengths and preferences. That’s why the sequence matters.

Now, it’s your turn

The teams I’ve seen get the most out of CliftonStrengths are the ones who treated their initial workshop as just the beginning— and kept going. Individual ownership. The manager conversation. Team amplification. Three layers, each building on the last. It’s a marathon, not a sprint—and, in my experience, one of the most rewarding journeys a team can take together.

📌 What are some of your favourite ways to keep the strengths conversation alive after the initial workshop?

I’d love to hear what’s worked, and what hasn’t.

With love,

Dina 🫶🏽

PS: All em dashes are my own.

Recommended resources: 

• Gallup also has its own Strengths Discovery Discussion Guide for managers. Less extensive than mine :), but still very helpful.

• Part 1: Are CliftonStrengths team workshops worth it?

One of the most common reasons teams contact me to run CliftonStrengths workshops is this: they want to strengthen team spirit and help team members get to know each other from a different perspective.

But very often, the real value of these conversations lies somewhere else.

Business and HR leaders are not just looking for a one-off “feel-good event”. They’re looking for a practical way to help their teams communicate better, understand each other better, and manage pressure and workload more effectively.

Now, I’m normally not a big fan of psychometrics.

Many of these tools can feel like they place people in boxes that are a little too neat, and a little too tight for comfort.

That hasn’t been my experience with CliftonStrengths.

I first encountered it while recovering from a burnout eleven years ago. It gave me a new perspective on how I show up in the world. More importantly, it didn’t make me feel boxed in. Instead, it opened up a conversation with my coach at the time, Gaby Lederer-Ganse, about some of my natural talents—and allowed me to define for myself how they show up in the world, while recognising that this is only one piece of the much larger puzzle of “who I am”.

That experience led me to become a certified CliftonStrengths coach through Gallup (the organisation behind the assessment). I also became the first (and only) certified internal coach at my former employer. Back then, there was little demand for CliftonStrengths. Most teams opted for the DISC profile instead, which I personally disliked (but that’s a topic for another post…).

Then COVID hit. And suddenly, many line managers were looking for new ways to bring their teams together during a very challenging period.

Common criticisms to CliftonStrengths

Now, I’m well aware that CliftonStrengths has its critics.

Sometimes I see people question its validity, even though Gallup is considered to be a highly reputable and trusted source for public opinion polling, social research, and workplace analytics, and is known for its rigorous scientific methods. Having said that, I do concede that many of the validation studies have been conducted and reported by Gallup itself, rather than independent academic researchers, which may understandably lead to some skepticism.

However, a much more common critique I’ve seen is that it’s “too positive”—that it only talks about strengths and ignores weaknesses.

So let’s dispel that myth right away.

CliftonStrengths is not just about strengths.

What actually happens in a CliftonStrengths workshop

When I do individual report debriefs and run team strengths workshops, we certainly explore your strengths—i.e., your preferred ways to get things done, influence, analyse information, make decisions, and build relationships. In other words, the lenses through which you see and interact with the world around you.

But we also look at something equally important: how those same strengths can sometimes get in the way. How they can drive you—and other people—crazy when they are overused or go on “overdrive”.

• The colleague whose stamina and drive for getting things done start making it feel like work matters more than people.
• The colleague who keeps analysing when others want to decide.
• The one who pushes for action while others still want to manage risks.
• The one who keeps changing targets and plans when others just want to move forward with “a” plan.

We also explore the themes at the bottom of your report—the ones that don’t come as naturally to you but may come very naturally to others on the team.

Looking at these perspectives helps teams understand why tensions or friction may arise—especially in times of pressure and stress.

What looks like a personality problem in teams might be strengths colliding...

And because we look at all of this through a strengths lens, even conversations about weaknesses become constructive. Why? Because the focus shifts from deficiency to difference, and from blame to understanding.

When teams become aware of these dynamics, it becomes much easier to assume positive intent and give each other the benefit of the doubt when things go sideways.

So, to answer my own question…

Are CliftonStrengths team workshops worth it?

After having designed and led many CliftonStrengths team workshops, yes—I do believe they are worth it.

While psychometrics as a scientific discipline is complex and debated, the value of tools like CliftonStrengths in my work lies more in creating structured conversations that help teams understand and collaborate with each other.

But this comes with a caveat.

If a strengths workshop is treated as a one-off exercise, you and your team may end up investing a substantial amount of time and money simply to have “a good time”. And there is certainly value in that!

However, if you want more sustainable results and a real impact, you want to find ways to embed the strengths philosophy into your way of working as a team.

It then becomes a marathon, not a sprint.

That starts with each team member truly understanding and owning their individual CliftonStrengths report—whether they do so with the help of a coach, through their own exploration of the many online resources available, or both.

Just as importantly, the conversation needs to stay alive within the team.

How you may ask?

That will be the topic of my next blog post on the topic.

Now, it’s your turn…

If you’ve been part of a CliftonStrengths team workshop, I’d love to hear: what worked? what didn’t?

If you’ve taken CliftonStrengths yourself, I’d love to know: what surprised you most when you first saw your results?

And, if you’re curious about what a strengths conversation could open up for you or your team, feel free to reach out. No obligation—just a conversation about what new perspectives and opportunities this kind of exploration might offer.

With love,

Dina 🫶🏽

PS : all em dashes are my own.

Recommended resources: 

• Link to original LinkedIn post
• Part 2: So, you’ve had a CliftonStrengths team workshop. Now what?