What is CliftonStrengths?

CliftonStrengths is an assessment developed by Gallup that helps you identify the natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that you use most consistently.

Put simply, it helps you understand what you naturally do well.

Rather than focusing primarily on weaknesses or trying to make everyone good at the same things, CliftonStrengths gives people a language for understanding how they naturally approach work, relationships, decisions, problems and opportunities.

At Strengths Academy, we use CliftonStrengths as a starting point for helping people become more self-aware, lead more effectively and work better with others.

How CliftonStrengths works

The CliftonStrengths assessment presents you with a series of paired statements and asks you to choose which statement best describes you.

Your responses identify patterns across 34 CliftonStrengths themes.

Depending on the assessment you purchase, you'll receive either your Top 5 CliftonStrengths or your complete CliftonStrengths 34 profile, ranking all 34 themes from strongest to least dominant.

Your results don't tell you what job you should do or put you into a personality "type."

Instead, they help explain how you naturally tend to approach what you do.

Two people can be equally successful in the same role while achieving that success in completely different ways.

That's one of the reasons we find CliftonStrengths so useful in leadership and team development.

The 34 CliftonStrengths themes

Gallup's CliftonStrengths framework identifies 34 distinct talent themes.

These include themes such as Strategic, Achiever, Relator, Communication, Responsibility, Learner and Activator.

Everyone has access to all 34 themes, but we don't use them with the same intensity or in the same combinations.

Your unique ranking helps explain why some activities feel natural and energising, while others require considerably more conscious effort.

The real value isn't simply knowing the names of your strengths.

It's learning to recognise when they are helping you, when they might be getting in your way, and how to use them more intentionally.

The four CliftonStrengths domains

Gallup groups the 34 CliftonStrengths themes into four broad domains.

The domains help us understand the different ways people contribute to a team.

Executing

Executing themes help turn ideas into action.

People with strong Executing themes often bring an ability to get things done, establish processes, maintain standards or turn decisions into tangible outcomes.

Influencing

Influencing themes help people take charge, communicate ideas and bring others with them.

They can be particularly useful when a team needs someone to speak up, create momentum, persuade others or make sure an idea is heard.

Relationship Building

Relationship Building themes help create the connections that hold teams together.

People strong in these themes often notice what others need, build trust and create the relationships that allow people to work effectively together.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic Thinking themes help people absorb information, analyse possibilities and imagine what could happen next.

They contribute ideas, perspective and thinking that can help teams make better decisions and prepare for the future.

A strong team doesn't need everyone to have strengths in every domain.

What matters is understanding what people naturally contribute and how those different contributions work together.

The history of Strengths

In the past, psychology primarily concentrated on interventions aimed at reducing an individual's misery. However, Don Clifton, founder of CliftonStrengths, recognised a chance to improve this conventional approach by focusing on the "enabling conditions of life." Instead of solely examining what was wrong with people, Clifton believed in exploring what was right with them, which is the essence of strengths science. As a result of his pioneering work in this field, Clifton was recognised by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2003, receiving a Presidential Commendation. He was acknowledged as the father of strengths-based psychology and the grandfather of positive psychology for his groundbreaking efforts.

What’s the difference between Talents and Strengths?

Talent and strength aren't quite the same thing.

A talent is a naturally recurring pattern of thinking, feeling or behaving.

A strength develops when you invest in that talent through experience, knowledge, practice and deliberate application.

That's an important distinction.

Simply discovering that Strategic or Empathy appears in your Top 5 doesn't automatically make it a strength.

The development happens when you learn how that talent shows up, understand its impact and become more intentional about how you use it.

This is why we see the assessment as the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.

Don Clifton wrote that Talents are your "naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling or behaviour." They're the innate, natural abilities you can productively apply.

When he studied human behaviour, he noted hundreds of positive characteristics and saw that many of those characteristics had commonalities. Based on those common traits, he distilled them down into the 34 talent themes we know today as part of the CliftonStrengths platform. To identify the rank order of those 34 themes for yourself, take the CliftonStrengths assessment, which measures the presence of talents.

A Strength is the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific task. 

But to turn those talents into strengths, you must invest in them–practice using them and add knowledge and skills to them. Like any muscle, talent or skill, it requires practice and repetition to strengthen and improve it. The formula for this is simple: Talent x Investment = Strength.

Learn more about the Science of CliftonStrengths.

Why use CliftonStrengths at work?

CliftonStrengths gives people a practical language for understanding differences at work.

Instead of thinking:

"Why don't they approach this the way I do?"

people begin asking:

"What are they seeing that I'm not?"

That shift can have a significant effect on how people communicate, delegate, collaborate and solve problems together.

We use CliftonStrengths to help organisations develop:

• greater self-awareness

• more confident leaders

• clearer communication

• better collaboration

• more effective delegation

• stronger working relationships

• greater appreciation of different ways of contributing

But CliftonStrengths isn't the outcome.

Better performance is the outcome.

The strengths framework simply gives us a powerful way to understand the people responsible for creating it.

CliftonStrengths for teams

CliftonStrengths becomes particularly useful when individual results are brought together at team level.

A team might discover that it has enormous Strategic Thinking capability but relatively few people naturally inclined toward execution.

Another might have strong relationship-building talent but struggle to challenge ideas or make difficult decisions.

Neither profile is inherently good or bad.

What matters is understanding the patterns.

We help teams explore questions such as:

• What does this team naturally do well?

• Where might we have blind spots?

• Why do particular people work differently?

• Where are misunderstandings occurring?

• Who should we involve when different challenges arise?

• How can we use our collective strengths more intentionally?

The goal isn't simply for everyone to know each other's Top 5.

It's to change how the team works together.

Explore CliftonStrengths for your team

CliftonStrengths for leaders

Leadership becomes more complex as responsibility increases.

What made someone an excellent technical specialist, teacher, engineer, architect or professional doesn't automatically make them an effective people leader.

CliftonStrengths helps leaders understand their natural leadership patterns.

That includes recognising where they instinctively add value, but also where those same talents can become overused.

A highly responsible leader, for example, may take on too much themselves.

A highly strategic leader may move to the solution before everyone else has caught up.

A leader with strong relationship talents may avoid a difficult conversation for too long.

Understanding these patterns gives leaders more choice in how they respond.

That's why we often combine CliftonStrengths with leadership coaching, manager development and leadership team programs rather than treating the assessment as a standalone activity.

What happens after you take the assessment?

You'll receive a personalised CliftonStrengths report showing either your Top 5 themes or your complete ranking of all 34.

You can certainly start exploring the report yourself.

But the most useful question isn't:

"What are my strengths?"

It's:

"What am I going to do differently because I understand them?"

That's where development begins.

You might use your results in a one-to-one CliftonStrengths debrief, leadership coaching, a team workshop or a broader leadership development program.

For organisations, we can also bring individual profiles together to explore the collective strengths, patterns and potential blind spots within a team.

How do I get started?

If you're looking at CliftonStrengths for a team or organisation, we'll help you go further than simply completing the assessment.

We'll help you turn the insights into better conversations, stronger leadership and more effective ways of working together.

Take the CliftonStrengths assessment
Explore CliftonStrengths for your team
Talk to us about leadership development