People usually LOVE doing what they’re already great, so why not build on that? Using CliftonStrengths® to help your people understand what they are best at will help them to do their best work. Here’s how!
What is CliftonStrengths®?
The Gallup® CliftonStrengths® was developed by Don Clifton of Gallup®, an organization that is a leader in employee engagement research and consulting.
There are four domains in this assessment:
Executing
Strategic Thinking
Influencing
Relationship Building
These four domains include 34 total themes, such as Responsibility, Futuristic, and Empathy, just to name a few.
Your CliftonStrengths® results provide a rank order of your strongest themes and identify your top five -- this is your unique “talent DNA.” Knowing and using your and your team’s CliftonStrengths® can help you and your team be more engaged, more productive, happier, and healthier. Here’s how!
How can I use CliftonStrengths® to help my team be the best?
Balance strengths and weaknesses to unleash your team to do their best work.
Encourage vulnerability and foster trust. Vulnerability is essential for trust, and trust is foundational to effective teamwork.
Using an objective, research-based tool like CliftonStrengths® helps increase the likelihood that your team will communicate their own strengths and weaknesses to each other (vulnerability!) and gives everyone a common vocabulary to use.
Once your team has taken CliftonStrengths®, have them dive into their individual and team results so they can learn about themselves and each other. Cloverleaf’s team dashboard is an excellent tool for this kind of information sharing!
Increase self-awareness.
Self-awareness is essential for self-development. It’s important to make sure that your team members understand their strengths so they can effectively use them for their own development.
Try sitting down with your team members one-on-one and reviewing their strengths. Check their understanding by having them outline their strengths in their own words. One of Cloverleaf’s Strengths Partners has a free tool you can use for this activity!
Improve areas of weakness.
Weaknesses are only human. The great thing about weaknesses is that they are often areas that can be improved upon with a little self-awareness and directed action.
Use your CliftonStrengths® results to help your employees address those areas of improvement by making a development plan. Have them decide on one or two objectives for improvement and identify a few key results they can work toward over the next 90 days. You can even apply the same developmental plan structure to a whole team if the team has a collective area of weakness!
Delegate tasks.
Utilize Cloverleaf’s team dashboard to compare your employees’ strengths and delegate tasks to people whose strengths most closely correspond to the task demands. Playing to your strengths produces powerful results!
Say you need someone to take the lead on liaising between two departments on a project. You might want to delegate this task to someone who has strong Relationship Building domain themes.
Craft a support system.
When assigning multiple employees to projects, consider balancing your team with people with complementary strengths from the Four Domains. That way, when someone gets stuck on a task, their teammate can offer a fresh perspective on the problem.
When team members know each other and their team’s strengths, they have an enhanced understanding of how to effectively tackle problems and assign team members to certain tasks based on their talent DNA.