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Skills help you perform, but they will not help you to excel. This is why we also need talent.
- Antoine B. Carrière
THE STATS (FOR THE BUSINESS CASE)
Teams and leaders who focus on strengths have
GREATER LEVELS OF ENGAGEMENT
HIGHER PROFITABILITY
HIGHER PRODUCTIVITY
BETTER QUALITY OF LIFE & WELL-BEING
Three reasons to focus on strengths
SPEED & ADAPTATION
Learn the role faster and
adapt faster to changes
PRODUCTIVITY & QUALITY
Produce significantly more at higher quality and build stronger customer relationships
TENURE & ATTENDANCE
Stay longer and miss less work
Teams and leaders who integrate strengths unlock
LESS CONFLICT
LESS WORKPLACE INCIDENTS
LESS TURNOVER
REDUCTION IN ABSENTEEISM
As a society, we need to stop aiming for mediocre, or "OK". Everyone needs to strive for excellence, no matter their definition of it. This is especially true at work.
- Antoine B. Carrière
TRANSFORM YOUR WORKPLACE
Integrating CliftonStrengths within an organization can significantly enhance various business metrics and improve workplace dynamics.
Engagement & Harmony
Companies that use CliftonStrengths see huge increases in employee engagement, with numbers going up to six times what they were before. Profitability and productivity go up directly because of this higher engagement. Companies have seen profits go up by up to 29% and output go up by 21%. These measures show how important it is for employees to be engaged in their work in order for the business to be profitable and run smoothly.
Moreover, a strengths-based approach leads to a more harmonious workplace, shown by a one-third reduction in conflict and a 65% decrease in workplace incidents. These changes not only make the workplace safer and healthier for everyone, but they also help keep things stable.
Employee Retention
Companies see up to a 59% decline in employee turnover and a 41 percent reduction in absences, both of which are important for keeping a competent and experienced staff. Employees also say that their quality of life and well-being has improved three times as much, which is more proof that this approach works.
Focusing on strengths also speeds up the process of role adaptation and learning, critical in rapidly evolving market conditions. This facilitates not only faster integration into roles but also a quicker adaptation to organizational changes, enhancing overall agility and responsiveness.
Cultural Transformation
CliftonStrengths facilitates a cultural transformation within the workplace, leading to improved excellence, quality, productivity, and innovation. This cultural shift results in a more engaged and motivated workforce, driving further organizational success. The approach’s versatility across different sectors enhances its utility, making it applicable to a wide range of organizational needs.
Strong ROI
From an organizational standpoint, the direct impact on productivity is evident as employees who utilize their strengths tend to perform better and more efficiently. This optimized performance is essential for achieving key objectives and improving quarterly outcomes.
Managerial effectiveness is significantly bolstered through a strengths-based approach. Managers become more adept at leading their teams, understanding the unique strengths of each member, and leveraging these for better team performance. This not only enhances leadership effectiveness but also strengthens team dynamics, which are vital for successful project execution and public administration.
The fiscal benefits of adopting CliftonStrengths are substantial, providing a strong return on investment. By increasing program output and financial effectiveness, organizations can see a tangible impact on their bottom line, making it a prudent choice for fiscally responsible management.
Learning the rules of colors.
Learning the essence of composition.
Learning how to set the stage on a canvas.
All of this does not mean that you have the capacity to create a masterpiece.
This is the difference between having skills/competencies and having them with the talent required to create a masterpiece.
- Antoine B. Carrière
BUILD TO THRIVE
Integrating Build a workplace where everyone thrives. Discover how the strengths-based approach impacts all the areas of an organization. Learn how to integrate CliftonStrengths.
Individuals & Teams
Companies Strengths-based development focuses on identifying each individual’s unique talents and nurturing these into strengths, rather than merely addressing weaknesses. This approach is rooted in the understanding that people excel most when they are engaged in work that plays to their strengths.
By employing the CliftonStrengths assessment, organizations can discover the specific natural talents of their employees, and then tailor development programs to enhance these talents into powerful strengths.
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Tailored Talent Enhancement: Identify and develop the natural talents of employees into strong competencies, increasing job satisfaction and boosting productivity.
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Engagement Through Strengths: Utilize assessments like CliftonStrengths to discover and leverage personal strengths, leading to six times higher engagement levels.
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Sustainable Performance Gains: Foster continuous improvement and career growth by aligning personal development with organizational goals, resulting in a more motivated and committed workforce.
Managers & Leaders & Executives
Companies Strengths-based leadership is an approach where leaders assess and understand their own strengths and those of their team members. This understanding allows leaders to delegate tasks more effectively, align job roles with individual strengths, and manage teams in a way that maximizes overall performance.
Leaders who practice strengths-based leadership are adept at creating teams whose members’ strengths complement each other, ensuring that the team is well-rounded and more capable of tackling diverse challenges. This method not only boosts team productivity but also enhances the job satisfaction and personal development of the team members.
Effective delegation: Leaders understand and use the strengths of team members to assign tasks optimally, maximizing efficiency and satisfaction.
Enhanced team dynamics: Build teams whose members’ strengths complement each other, facilitating better collaboration and innovation.
Leadership by example: Leaders who focus on their strengths inspire their teams by demonstrating how to leverage personal talents effectively.
Company & Organization
CliftonStrengthsCreating a strengths-based culture involves embedding the strengths-based philosophy into the very fabric of the organization. This culture celebrates and promotes the use of strengths in daily work life. In such cultures, systems, and processes from recruitment to performance reviews are designed to recognize and leverage people’s strengths.
A strengths-based culture fosters an environment where employees are more engaged and motivated because they know their strengths are valued and utilized.
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Tailored Talent Enhancement: Identify and develop the natural talents of employees into strong competencies, increasing job satisfaction and boosting productivity.
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Engagement Through Strengths: Utilize assessments like CliftonStrengths to discover and leverage personal strengths, leading to six times higher engagement levels.
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Sustainable Performance Gains: Foster continuous improvement and career growth by aligning personal development with organizational goals, resulting in a more motivated and committed workforce.
Being successful means you have talent.
Choosing to use a talent to be successful means you are using a Strength.
- Antoine B. Carrière
A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF CLIFTONSTRENGTHS
It is imporant to understand the origins, the philosophy and the approach in order to fully comprehend how CliftonStrengths can truly impact individuals, leaders, teams and an organization.
What are the CliftonStrengths & StrengthsFinder?
CliftonStrengths, formerly known as StrengthsFinder, is an assessment tool developed by Gallup that has revolutionized personal and organizational development by emphasizing a focus on strengths over weaknesses, on successes over mistakes. This approach is rooted in five decades of extensive research, involving more than one million interviews and is now used in over 50 countries and available in 22 languages. To date, it has helped 36 million people worldwide discover their innate talents, making it a preferred development and organizational tool among 80% of Fortune 500 companies.
Incomplete models
Gallup researchers, regularly in partnership with colleges and universities, have examined decades of data on the topics of individual performance, personal development and team performance. All of this research has shown that traditional approaches to development are incomplete. To help eliminate that gap, Gallup created the strengths-based development approach and launched the StrengthsFinder assessment.
Gallup research has proven that the best opportunity for people to grow and develop — and net the greatest return on investment — is to identify the ways in which they most naturally think, feel, and behave, and then build upon those talents to create strengths: the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance.
Changing the paradigm
Strengths-based development is not just about identifying people’s talents and strengths. It is about helping people recognize and develop their talents so they learn to apply to accomplish their goals. Our greatest talents — the ways in which we most naturally think, feel, and behave — represent our innate power and potential. When we tap into this source of wisdom and power, we gain the ability to transform every moment, every interaction, and every day.
Your best potential for success lies in building on who you already are, not in trying to become someone you are not.
Achieving excellence
In the quest for personal excellence, organizational excellence and team efficiency, the StrengthsFinder and CliftonStrengths play a crucial role by allowing us to understand and leverage the unique talents and strengths of our workforce. These frameworks are designed not only to identify individual talents and turn them into strengths but also to foster an environment where these attributes can be used to maximize both individual and collective performance.
Shifting the focus
The area that is most impactful about CliftonStrengths lies within its essence: development. This assessment is none labeling, designed for development purposes. It cannot be used for hiring or selection purposes. As it measures the presence of talent, what it does not measure is the understanding, development and effective use of those same talents. Furthermore, there has been no correlations shown between individuals having particular strengths and their types of roles, positions, authority, responsibility, industry or other.
Removing potential anxiety
What Gallup research consistently demonstrates is that success and excellence comes from understanding, developing and effectively applying your talents. This essence - a focus on what is innate and natural to help develop not select - removes worry, doubt and anxiety from employees taking the assessment as no changes to their employment can occur from taking the assessment.
Intended application
The CliftonStrengths primary application has been in the work domain, but it has been used for development and discovery of individuals in a variety of roles and settings — from employees, executives, team in the workplace to students and teachers in education, to couples, parenting, families, well-being, community development to personal development.
Accelerating awareness
The Clifton StrengthsFinder is an accelerator. Instead of spending years, even decades, of personal development, awareness, monitoring, and analyzing, Gallup has developed an online tool to help individuals discover their areas of greatest talent in less than 40 minutes. With a test-retest ratio of over 98%, it has proven to be a reliable and effective source to determine an individual’s natural ways of thinking, acting and behaving.
It is based in positive psychology, is not to be used as a barrier or a label and offers a team and an organization a common language that allows everyone to recognize, connect and celebrate the strengths of their colleagues. CliftonStrengths is designed to help people go with their gut and answer as truthfully as possible as there are no right/wrong answers or good/ bad results.
Development only
CliftonStrengths Although the StrengthsFinder is a psychometric assessment, it is not intended for clinical assessment or diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, nor is it a selection or evaluation tool - CliftonStrengths are to be used for developmental purposes only. A person should not and cannot lose a position, a promotion, or an opportunity due their CliftonStrengths results as it only assesses the presence of talent, not the effective and productive application of talent.
Even more information
Conventional development and strengths-based development present fundamentally different approaches to nurturing individual and organizational growth. Understanding the distinction between these two methodologies can profoundly impact how leaders guide their teams toward excellence.
Conventional Development
The traditional model of personal and professional development, as practiced in many organizations, emphasizes identifying and rectifying weaknesses. This approach operates on the premise that improving areas of deficiency can transform an average employee into a competent one. It is based on the assumption that by fixing areas where an individual lacks competence, they can become more well-rounded and effective. It typically involves:
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Identifying Improvement Areas: Pinpointing where performance is lacking or skills are deficient.
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Developing Improvement Plans: Creating targeted plans to enhance these weak areas through training, practice, or further education.
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Acknowledge Strengths: While strengths are acknowledged, the focus remains on maintaining rather than enhancing them.
While this method may help in avoiding failures by bringing everyone up to a standard level of competency, it is inherently limited in its capacity to propel individuals toward truly exceptional performance. Focusing exclusively on weaknesses can prevent failures but rarely enables the kind of innovative thinking and peak performance associated with recognizing and cultivating individual strengths. This realization highlights the need for a more dynamic approach, one that not only addresses weaknesses but more importantly, amplifies strengths.
Strengths-Based Development
In contrast, strengths-based development advocates for maximizing an individual’s existing talents, which is more likely to lead to excellence and high levels of personal and professional satisfaction. This approach is built on several core principles:
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Leveraging Natural Talents: Recognizing that each individual’s greatest potential for success lies in areas where they show natural competence.
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Tailored Development: Offering personalized development paths that align with each person’s unique strengths, rather than imposing a uniform improvement schema focused on shoring up weaknesses.
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Continuous Enhancement of Strengths: Encouraging the continuous development of an individual’s strengths, enabling them to achieve near-perfect performance in their strongest areas, which is far more likely to result in innovation and exceptional performance.
IMPACT AND BENEFITS OF STRENGTHS-BASED DEVELOPMENT
Research and application show that strengths-based development not only fosters greater job satisfaction and engagement but also leads to superior performance. Employees who use their strengths daily are six times more engaged in their work and three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life. This approach also encourages innovation and excellence by aligning individuals’ natural talents with their daily tasks, thereby increasing the likelihood of outstanding outcomes.
MAKING THE CHANGE
While the conventional development approach has its merits, particularly in contexts requiring a broad base of competency, strengths-based development offers a more targeted, fulfilling, and often more effective path to personal and organizational excellence. By focusing on what individuals do best, organizations can unlock potential and drive success in ways that traditional methods may not reach. This paradigm shift towards strengths does not just benefit the individual but catalyzes a broader cultural transformation within teams and organizations, fostering environments where everyone is positioned to thrive.
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The strengths-based approach transcends cultural and economic boundaries, making it universally applicable. It is not dependent on a person’s educational background, experience, or knowledge base, which makes it a powerful tool for global teams. With over 36 million people having discovered their talents through CliftonStrengths, and its use by 80% of Fortune 500 companies, this approach is recognized for its effectiveness across diverse environments, sectors, industries and professions.
Here are some of the reasons that it makes it easy to work with Antoine for your workshops, your coaching or advising for CliftonStrengths.
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Gallup Methodology trained:
Antoine is one of less than a fifty independent coaches in world that have been trained in Gallup's course leading and delivery methodology - other than internal staff within the Gallup organization. You are therefore accessing an approach delivered in the manner that it was designed, and intended to be used. -
Perfectly bilingual:
Antoine has the highest level of proficiency in both of English and French - Canada's official languages (EEE rating. Not only can he train in both languages, but he spends his time equally working with French and English-only individuals, teams and organizations. He is an expert in each language with the methodology, approach, terminology that he can address any questions, in any language. -
Coach of coaches:
Antoine works with independent and internal coaches to help them better understand, refine and improve their own work within their organization, and with their own clients. -
Breadth of knowledge and experience:
Antoine has worked for multiple federal government departments, national and local not-for-profits, national charities, corporations as well as small business owners since the 1990s. -
Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths coach:
Antoine has spent the past decade helping leaders and teams all across USA and Canada, as well as organizations around the world, understand and implement the power of the strengths-based approach. Many individuals use the approach, not all have been trained in the correct approach and methodology.
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