Last Wednesday morning, I was in a midtown conference room with a team of senior leaders of a Fortune 500 company. I was facilitating a CliftonStrengths leadership session, and I’d just pulled up their Team Grid on the screen—a visual map of where their collective talents cluster. I love using this tool with leadership teams, as it is a powerful visual representation of how individual talents contribute to collective success, how the team naturally works together, and where there is potential for growth. The room got quiet as people took it in. They saw a clear pattern in their Grid, which jump-started their biggest ‘aha’ conversation of the morning.
Why Team Strengths Matter
Gallup’s research tells us that teams that know and leverage each other’s strengths have:
- 23% higher employee engagement
- 18% increased performance
- 73% lower attrition in high-turnover organizations
The Team Grid reveals patterns you can’t see when you’re just looking at individual strengths: where collaboration opportunities naturally exist, how different perspectives shape team dynamics, what talent combinations create your team’s unique capability.
When teams understand these patterns, they can make smarter decisions about everything from how they structure projects to how they resolve conflicts.
A Visual Story
This team’s strengths were heavily concentrated in the Executing domain—about getting things done. Achiever sat at number one, a drive to accomplish at a high standard. Execution is a company strength, they acknowledged. It’s recognized and rewarded.
And Strategic Thinking strengths? Those were present, but not as dominant. This opened an interesting question: what becomes possible when a team that’s naturally excellent at execution becomes more intentional about leaning into the thinking behind what to execute?
Where Opportunity Lies
As we explored what it meant for Achiever to sit at the top of this team’s profile, the group reflected on how they’d been prioritizing achievement over the past months—achieving through their natural themes, staying focused on measurable results.
Someone articulated what others were thinking: their Executing drive brings incredible stamina and productivity. But it can also make it hard to see reflection and strategic thinking as valuable unless they produce immediate, tangible results.
With that in mind, someone said, what if we protected time for the strategic thinking that helps us decide what’s worth doing? What if we amplified the voices of team members whose strengths reflect the strategic thinking that we want to do more of as a team?
By the end of our two hours together, this team had moved from knowing their individual strengths to understanding how they worked as a collective. One leader captured it well:
Your Leadership Invitation
This is what a leadership workshop using the Team Grid makes possible. It transforms individual strengths into a shared language for how your team works together. It reveals where partnerships can form. It shows you how to embed strengths into the actual work, not just talk about them in theory.
The teams that perform at the highest levels are the ones that understand their patterns, recognize what each member brings, and position each person to contribute at their best.
Your leadership team already has everything it needs to succeed. The question is: can you see your team’s strengths clearly enough to leverage them fully?
