StrengthsFinder Team Presentation: A Slide-By-Slide Plan for One Hour

13 min read

Most of a StrengthsFinder team presentation happens before the meeting

Most of the work in a StrengthsFinder team presentation happens before anyone opens a slide. If two people haven't finished the assessment, or the results show up the morning of the meeting, the hour turns into people reading their own reports for the first time while you wait.

The prep, counted back from the meeting date:

1. Two weeks out: send everyone an access code and a deadline at least five working days before the meeting. Gallup's assessment takes most people around 35 minutes, so tell them to block that time.
2. One week out: ask each person to send you their top 5 themes in order. Ask, don't pull them from an admin account without saying so. People share more freely when they chose to hand the results over.
3. Three days out: build the team grid (covered below) and look for the one pattern worth an hour of discussion.
4. The day before: write the meeting's goal as one sentence and put it on slide two.

Syracuse University's HR team publishes a short checklist for preparing a StrengthsFinder team workshop that matches this order, if you want a second version to hand a co-facilitator.

A StrengthsFinder team presentation exists to change one habit

The point is for a team to see how its members work, side by side, and then change one habit because of it. It is a working meeting. If nothing about the team changes, you ran a nice hour and nothing more.

So pick one goal. Pick one goal for the session before you build a single slide, because the goal decides which slides get the time.

Presenting results by pattern first, then by person

Open with the team, then let each person speak for themselves. When you read someone's themes out to the room, you are telling them who they are in front of their peers. When they read their own, they choose what to say about it.

Give each person about 90 seconds and one prompt: “One theme that is true of me at work, and one that surprised me.” Before the meeting, tell everyone their name will appear on the grid, and let anyone opt out of that. The rule: the person owns their results, and you only show the pattern.

Present your StrengthsFinder team in four domains, not 34 themes

CliftonStrengths has 34 themes. Walk through all of them and you burn the hour. Gallup sorts those 34 into four larger groups it calls domains. Present at that level.

Present four domains instead of 34 themes, and the whole team pattern fits on one slide.

Each of the 4 CliftonStrengths domains, in plain words

Gallup describes each CliftonStrengths domain on its own site. The short version below shows what each one looks like in a normal week on a team:

None of the four beats the others. For a deeper look at each group, see how the StrengthsFinder quadrants break down theme by theme.

How to group your team's top 5 results by domain before you present

This takes about 20 minutes in a spreadsheet:

1. List each person's top 5 themes in one column.
2. Next to each theme, write its domain.
3. Count how many of the team's theme slots land in each domain.
4. Note any theme that only one person has.

Say you have a six-person team. That's 30 theme slots. If 11 land in Executing, 9 in Relationship Building, 6 in Strategic Thinking and 4 in Influencing, you already have your discussion: this team finishes things and looks after each other, and it may struggle to push its ideas with other teams.

A 60-minute StrengthsFinder team workshop: understand first, decide second

Here is the agenda. It assumes a team of eight or fewer and one person running the StrengthsFinder team presentation, usually the manager. Every block points at the goal you wrote on slide two.

The hour, block by block

The first half is for understanding. The second half is for deciding. Spend the last 25 minutes on your team's goal, because that is where the meeting turns into a decision. If you run long, cut the explaining slides.

With more than eight people, the sharing round gets too long. Split the team into pairs for five minutes instead, then ask three volunteers to share with the room. For a half-day session, keep the same order and double the time on the goal blocks.

Six StrengthsFinder team activities that fit the hour

Pick two or three and run them inside the block they fit. Their minutes come out of that block.

Twelve slides, in order

1. Title: the team name and the date.
   Say: “Thanks for doing the assessment. Today is about how we work together, not about grading anyone.”
2. The goal: your one sentence, in large type.
   Say: “By the end of the hour, we will have agreed one change on this. Everything today points here.”
3. What these results are: people answered questions about themselves, and the results describe how they tend to work. Nothing on the screen is a grade.
   Say: “You answered questions about yourself, so treat this as a starting point, not a verdict.”
4. The four domains: one line each, from the table above.
   Say: “Every theme sits in one of these four groups. No group is better than another.”
5. Your turn: the sharing prompt, left on screen while people talk.
   Say: “Give us one theme that feels true of you at work and one that surprised you. Pass if you like.”
6. The team grid: names in alphabetical order, themes grouped by domain.
   Say: “Read down the columns, not across the rows. We are looking at the team, not at one person.”
7. The domain count: a simple bar for each domain.
   Say: “This is where our top 5s land. What do you notice first?”
8. Where we're strong: the crowded domain and what it does for the team.
   Say: “This is work we do without thinking. Where has it helped us this quarter?”
9. Where we're thin: the light domain and how that work gets done today.
   Say: “Light does not mean missing. Who covers this work now, and what does it cost them?”
10. The goal question: “Given this pattern, what should change about [your goal]?”
    Say: “Let's spend real time here. This is the part that changes how next week goes.”
11. The change: the one thing, who owns it, and when you'll look again.
    Say: “So the change is this, it belongs to this person, and we check it on this date.”
12. What happens next: the follow-up plan from the section below.
    Say: “You'll get the grid by Wednesday, and we'll use it at the next project kickoff.”

Running the presentation for a remote or hybrid team

A remote StrengthsFinder team presentation needs one change above all: on a video call, send everyone a link to the grid so nobody squints at a screen share. Call on people by name, in the grid's alphabetical order, so the quiet ones aren't skipped. In a big group, run the sharing round in the chat and read a few aloud. For a hybrid room, give the remote people the first turn in each round.

The StrengthsFinder team grid is the one page people open again

If you keep one thing from a StrengthsFinder team presentation, keep the grid. It is the one page people will open again in three months when they're staffing a project or onboarding someone new.

One row per person, one column per theme

On a team grid, each person gets a row and each of the 34 themes gets a column, with the columns sorted by domain. Each cell shows whether that theme is in the person's top 5, often with the rank number.

Gallup will build a CliftonStrengths team grid for you, free for small teams, with larger teams on a paid plan. A shared spreadsheet works just as well, and you can copy a ready-made one from this free StrengthsFinder team chart.

How to read overlaps and gaps on the grid without ranking people

Read columns, not rows. Read the grid by column to see what the team has a lot of and a little of, and leave each row to the person it belongs to. Ask three questions:

• What do we have a lot of? Four people with Achiever means a lot of drive to finish, and maybe a team that rushes past planning.
• What do we have little of? A light domain means the team gets that work done some other way. Ask how.
• Who has a theme nobody else has? That person may be doing a job for the team that nobody has named yet.

This is the approach Marcus Buckingham described in his Harvard Business Review piece What Great Managers Do: great managers discover what makes each of their people unusual and shape the work to fit. The grid shows the differences. It never says whose are worth more.

Your own grid beats any StrengthsFinder presentation template

Three sources hold up for a StrengthsFinder team presentation: Gallup's own slides, a coach's guide, and a deck you build yourself.

Gallup's official CliftonStrengths slides and who can download them

Gallup's own team deck sits inside its Strengths-Based Coaching With Managers and Teams kit. In Gallup Access, open the menu, go to the Learning Center, open that kit, choose the team coaching section, then the session called Team Session: Introduction to CliftonStrengths, and download the slides from its materials page. You can only see it if your account has access to the kit, which usually means a Gallup-certified coach or an organization that bought it.

The second source is a facilitation guide from a certified coach, which usually adds a script and timings to Gallup's slides. Ask any coach you hire whether you may keep the deck.

The third source is your own deck. Use the 12-slide order above. A plain 12-slide deck built around your own grid works better than any downloaded template, because the grid is the one slide only your team can have. One idea per slide, in large type.

Rankings and skeptics are what shut a StrengthsFinder team down

Two failures do most of the damage in a StrengthsFinder team presentation. Results start to read as a ranking, and one skeptic pulls the room off course. Both are easy to prevent if you plan for them.

How to avoid turning a strengths presentation into a ranking

Nobody announces a ranking. It creeps in through small choices: sorting the grid by who has the most Executing themes, calling Influencing “the leadership domain”, or saying one person's themes are “exactly what this team needs”.

The fixes are simple. List names alphabetically. Give every person the same 90 seconds. Describe every domain by what it does for the team. Never show the grid next to performance reviews, pay or promotion talk, or the whole team will hear it as a ranking.

How to handle a skeptical or resistant team member

The skeptic in a StrengthsFinder team presentation often has a fair point. These results come from people answering questions about themselves, and some people don't recognize their top 5. Agree with what's true. Then invite them to test it instead of accepting it: “Watch your next two weeks and see if any of these show up.”

Let anyone pass in the sharing round. And never argue someone into their results. If a person wants to read the case against the assessment, our piece on whether StrengthsFinder has been debunked lays out what the critics say and where they have a point.

Small habits keep CliftonStrengths alive after the team presentation

Most teams give one good StrengthsFinder team presentation, and then the grid lives in a shared drive and nobody opens it again. A few small habits keep it alive.

How to keep strengths language alive after the presentation ends

A follow-up plan that takes almost no extra meeting time:

• Within two days: send the grid and the one change you agreed, with the owner's name.
• In every 1:1 for the next month: ask one question. “Where did one of your themes help you this week?”
• At every project kickoff: open the grid when you decide who does what.
• Once a month: spend five minutes of a team meeting on a short exercise, such as one of these StrengthsFinder reflection questions.
• When someone joins: put a new hire on the grid within days of starting, and give them the same 90 seconds.
• Each quarter: check the change you agreed on. Keep it, adjust it, or pick a new one.

Strengths language survives when it shows up in 1:1s and project kickoffs, not in a second workshop. Gallup's data points the same way. In its research, people who get to use their strengths each day were three times as likely to report an excellent quality of life. The part that matters is each day.

Self-reported strengths start the staffing talk, track records finish it

Every theme on the grid came from a person describing themselves. That's fine for starting a conversation, and it's shaky ground for deciding who leads the next big project. Research on self-assessment is blunt about this. A review by Dunning, Heath and Suls found that people's self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with how they behave and perform.

So before a manager uses the grid to hand out roles, it helps to add a second source of evidence that doesn't come from the person's own answers.

Self-reported strengths vs. a capability-based check: what each is good for

Use the strengths conversation to start the staffing talk, and the work people have already done to finish it. No questionnaire should decide who gets a role on its own, ours included.

There is one more thing these sessions often stir up. Some people leave a StrengthsFinder team presentation with a personal question: if these are my strengths, is my job the right one for them? CliftonStrengths itself states that it wasn't built to point people toward a career. The Pigment career test is built for that question. It is forced-choice, and its results turn into career directions: the kinds of work that tend to suit your pattern, and specific roles to explore. It's still answers about yourself, so read it alongside your own track record. Use it for your own career call, never to decide someone else's.

Frequently Asked Questions

CliftonStrengths and StrengthsFinder are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. Pigment is not affiliated with them.