From Assessment to Action: How Strengths Coaching and Facilitation Improves Leadership Effectiveness
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I have recently been involved in a lot of strengths coaching and workshops to help leaders and teams improve their internal self-awareness and collaborative productivity. I always experience a deep sense of joy when I see people become more fully alive as they better understand their unique design. When someone truly understands their core talents and abilities, they can make stronger, more effective contributions and enjoy healthier working relationships. In turn, they will experience a deeper joy as they see their focused efforts benefit others toward a worthwhile objective.
I am a certified Core Clarity strengths facilitator using the Clifton Strengths assessment. The Clifton Strengths assessment has been a popular onboarding and development tool for many years within the for-profit and non-profit world. But I often bump into clients and others who have taken the assessment, yet receive little to no coaching or follow-up instruction. They are intrigued by the initial assessment findings but often frustrated, not knowing what to do with the new information or how to practically apply it. This is where personal and group coaching — along with group and team workshops — can prove extremely valuable.
Let me be clear: in our Western obsession with assessments of all kinds, no single assessment defines you. You are way more than your core strengths. But I do think there is great value in better understanding your core abilities and talents. Below are at least six remarkable benefits that I have seen over time when you have a stronger sense of self, beginning with your strengths.
Self-Awareness: Naming Your Natural Patterns
We all can benefit from knowing our natural tendencies. What might be our default decision-making patterns? Where do we automatically experience recurring sources of energy or depletion in our work and relationships? How can we become more aware of natural blind spots that a particular strength might reveal?
Application: You gain clarity on how you naturally think, feel, and behave.
Practical outcome: You stop trying to “fix” what isn’t broken and instead steward what is innate.
Performance Optimization: Working From Strength
Knowing our core talents and abilities can help us shape our ongoing responsibilities around what we do effortlessly well. We can design better workflows that leverage our natural productive style. We can reduce the time spent in chronic weakness zones.
Application: You intentionally align tasks, roles, and rhythms with your dominant themes.
Practical outcome: Higher effectiveness with lower burnout risk.
Leadership Effectiveness: Leading With Authenticity
Knowing our core strengths puts us on a path to clarify our leadership edge — whether it's strategic thinking, relational depth, execution, or influence. A clearer understanding of your leadership edge will also free you up to consider opportunities for complementary partnerships, realizing that no leader or team possesses everything they need to really succeed.
Application: You lead from your wiring rather than imitation.
Practical outcome: Credible, consistent leadership rooted in congruence.
Team Dynamics: Building Complementary Collaboration
When a whole team understands their strengths profile, they can better collaborate internally to tap into the full potential of the team. You can assign responsibilities based on talent alignment. You can also reduce relationship misinterpretations--and you have the added benefit of dealing with internal conflict through the use of neutral language around strengths.
Application: You see talent diversity as an asset rather than a source of friction.
Practical outcome: Increased trust, clarity, and collective productivity.
Personal Development: Investing Intentionally
Knowing our core strengths provides an opportunity to set personal growth goals tied to specific strengths. This allows us to take latent talents and sharpen them for greater effectiveness. We can better track progress through real-time feedback and outcomes. Developing our strengths will also help us guard against underuse or overuse.
Application: You move from awareness to disciplined development.
Practical outcome: Compounding growth rather than scattered improvement efforts.
Vocational and Calling Discernment
The more we know and understand our core talents and abilities, the better we can evaluate role and job fit. We can also begin to see fruitful patterns and pathways in our leadership story that can be more productively applied. We will also begin to see that there is more joy and personal reward in seeing our effective contributions over time than in simply reaching the next title. We can make transition decisions based on design rather than fatigue.
Application: You discern where your design most fruitfully intersects with need.
Practical outcome: Increased clarity around contribution and calling.
Growing leadership self-awareness is a necessary pursuit for every leader. We must keep growing in our understanding of who we are and how others receive us to be truly effective. We all have blind spots that need to be uncovered. Taking the Clifton Strengths assessment, combined with personal coaching or a team workshop, is a great first step toward raising the bar on our leadership fitness.
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