Not a workshop. A strengths-based team development relationship.
CliftonStrengths is the instrument. What your team builds with it is something a one-day session was never designed to deliver.
Most teams have done the assessment.
Fewer have done the work.
Most leaders have been through a strengths workshop. There was a moment of recognition — yes, that's me — and then the report went into a drawer, the team moved on, and not much changed. That is not a failure of the instrument. It is a failure of what surrounded it.
Assessment data produces insight. Insight is the first necessary step — not the destination. What turns a moment of awareness into sustained growth is a coaching relationship that knows how to make the data mean something over time, in the specific context of your institution, your team, and the pressures you are actually navigating.
A SPARC strengths engagement is not a training event. It is the beginning of a developmental relationship — held by coaches, built for your team, designed to last.
SPARC Executive Development and Consulting
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Coaches, Not Facilitators
Both SPARC founders hold Gallup certification and ICF PCC credentials — a combination uncommon in the strengths market. The distinction matters: a certified facilitator delivers a workshop. A credentialed coach holds a developmental relationship.
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Your Team's Context, Not a Template
Every engagement begins with discovery. We learn your institution, your team's history, and what you are actually trying to build — before we design anything. What follows is built for you, not borrowed from a standard program.
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A Starting Point, Not a Destination
The team workshop is Stage 1 of a four-stage leader development arc. What you discover about your team's collective talent opens questions that a single session was never designed to answer — and that is exactly the point.
Gallup certified. Doctorally trained. ICF PCC credentialed.
Active practitioners — in executive rooms every day.
Gallup certification for CliftonStrengths coaching is a rigorous credential — and one both SPARC founders hold. What distinguishes SPARC's strengths practice is the depth it sits alongside: doctoral-level training, ICF Professional Certified Coach credentialing, and careers spent at the executive level of the very institutions we now serve. We are not trainers who study organizations from the outside. We are active executive coaches and consultants — in the room with presidents, provosts, and foundation leaders every day — who bring that living practice into every team engagement.
Shannon O'Neill, Ph.D., PCC
Co-Founder · Former Dean, Brown University
Shannon brings a direct, warm coaching presence and a feminist lens to leadership development. Her practice is grounded in sustained partnership — coaching leaders inside higher education and nonprofit institutions through consequential transitions, team dynamics, and organizational change.
Mathew Johnson, Ph.D., PCC
Co-Founder · Former Dean, Brown University
Mathew's coaching draws on a sociological frame — attending to power, structure, and identity as forces that shape how leaders lead. His strengths practice is built on the conviction that talent, understood in full institutional and relational context, becomes the foundation for genuine organizational change.
CliftonStrengths is one instrument in a coaching toolkit. Its value is not in the report — it is in what a skilled coach can do with what the report reveals, in the context of your team's particular history, pressures, and developmental edge.
SPARC is the exclusive U.S. partner of the Academy of Executive Coaching — one of the world's leading coach training organizations, holding triple accreditation from ICF, EMCC, and AC.
What a SPARC strengths engagement actually looks like.
A SPARC strengths engagement is not a training event with a debrief at the end. It is a structured developmental experience — designed around your team's specific context, held by credentialed coaches, and built from the beginning with a question that most workshops never ask: what do we do with this when the session is over?
Before anything is built, we invest time in understanding your institution, your team's history, and what you are actually trying to develop. If your team holds prior assessment data — DiSC, Hogan, MBTI, earlier Strengths results — we bring it into the design. Nothing gets set aside.
Each team member completes CliftonStrengths — Top 5 or Full 34, determined in scoping. Results are reviewed individually before the team session so participants arrive with genuine self-awareness, not just a printout.
A full or half-day facilitated session — in person or virtual — where the team's collective talent profile becomes the lens for honest conversation about how the group leads together, where the gaps are, and what the strengths data reveals about dynamics that often go unnamed.
The session surfaces questions. What you do with those questions determines whether the work lasts. Follow-on sessions, extended team development, and individual coaching conversations are available — scoped in partnership with your team leader after the initial engagement.
Not a report. A shared language, a deeper map, and a set of questions worth sitting with.
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A collective strengths profile — understood in the context of how the team actually functions, not just how individuals show up
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A shared language for naming talent, navigating differences, and understanding why the team works the way it does
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Named patterns — strengths the team over-relies on, developmental edges that are currently invisible, and gaps worth attending to
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A coaching relationship that continues past the session — available for follow-on work as questions emerge
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A clear picture of what the next developmental stage looks like — and what it would take to get there
The team session is Stage 1. What it opens is the point.
Most strengths engagements are designed to be self-contained. SPARC's are designed to raise the questions that come next — about individual leaders, about collective leadership identity, about what it would take to build a strengths-based culture that outlasts the workshop. Those questions are not unanswered by accident. They are where the real development begins.
Extended Team & Leader Development
Follow-on team sessions and individual leader development via the Leadership Circle Profile — building on what the strengths work surfaced.
Building Coaching Capacity Inside Your Institution
For institutions ready to sustain development from within — coach training and internal capacity building so the work does not depend on SPARC's continued presence.
Coaching as a Leadership Operating System
The long horizon: establishing coaching as standard practice for all leaders — a culture that holds the development the workshops began.
Your team already has assessment data. We don't set it aside.
Many teams arrive with years of assessment data they have never fully used. There was a DiSC workshop three years ago. A Hogan battery that produced a report no one revisited. An MBTI session from before the last leadership transition. Earlier CliftonStrengths results sitting in someone's inbox.
Most providers ask you to start over — because their model depends on their instrument. SPARC's does not. Our coaches are trained to synthesize across assessment frameworks, bringing whatever your team already holds into a richer, more layered picture of how the group leads together.
This is not a feature. It is a coaching competency — and a fundamentally more respectful way to work with an institution that has already invested in its own development.
Prior knowledge is not wasted here. It is brought into the conversation — and usually, that is where the most interesting discoveries happen.
SPARC coaches synthesize across all major assessment frameworks. If your team holds results from any of these — or others — we bring them into the engagement.
The instrument set is variable and client-determined. If you hold results from an assessment not listed here, bring it — the synthesis approach is not instrument-specific.
SPARC directly administers CliftonStrengths and the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP-360). Both are coaching-led engagements — not self-service assessments. Results are interpreted and developed in the context of a coaching relationship, not delivered as a report.
Most strengths boutiques are instrument-dependent. Their model requires you to take their assessment because that is what they sell. SPARC's approach is assessment-agnostic by design — because institutional leaders deserve a partner whose recommendations are based on what your team needs, not on what generates a licensing fee.
For leader development to take hold at scale, three things have to happen simultaneously.
The team workshop is where the work begins — Stage 1 of a four-stage leader development arc nested inside SPARC's Transformational Performance Model. What makes it transformational rather than transactional is what surrounds it: three simultaneous paths that reinforce each other over time and build institutional capacity that outlasts SPARC's direct involvement.
Comprehensive Leader Development
Begins with collective strengths discovery and shifts toward a strengths-based, growth-mindset-oriented performance culture. The four-stage arc lives here.
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Team strengths discovery — Stage 1
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Extended team development — Stage 2
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Individual leader development via LCP-360 — Stage 3
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Team-based LCP facilitation and leadership team development — Stage 4
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"Leader as coach" training — building coaching capacity within direct reports
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Integration of any prior assessment data — nothing is set aside
Internal Coaching Capacity
If Path 1 is the architecture, ongoing access to high-quality executive coaching is the fuel. One-on-one coaching is most cost-effective when managed internally. SPARC helps institutions build that capacity so the development does not depend on SPARC's continued presence.
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Executive coaching directly provided by SPARC
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AoEC coach training programs — CSC, Tools Certificate, Practitioner Diploma
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Internal coaching infrastructure that the institution owns
Coaching Culture
The sustainability context. Building on the initial strengths-based work, this path establishes coaching as a standard operating system for all leaders — a leadership culture across the organization, not a program that runs for a season.
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Coaching as standard practice for all leaders, not only senior executives
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Organizational maturity progression tracked through SPARC's Transformational Performance Model
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A leadership culture that outlasts SPARC's direct involvement
Every institution is different. We spend significant time in discovery and customization to build what will work — financially and programmatically. We build partnerships with client institutions, not programs for them.
The three paths above are a template, not a prescription. Some institutions begin with a single team workshop and build from there. Others arrive ready for a multi-year engagement across all three paths. The entry point is always a conversation — not a package selection. We scope with you before we propose scope to you. That is how every SPARC partnership begins.
The four-stage development arc — Team Discovery → Extended Team Development → Individual Leader Development → Leadership Team Development — lives inside Path 1 and is fully described on the Executive Leader Development hub page, alongside SPARC's complete approach to leader and team development.
Explore Leader DevelopmentReady to transform your leadership, your team, your organization?
Whether you are considering a single team workshop or thinking about what a sustained developmental partnership could look like for your institution — the next step is the same. A conversation.
If something in this resonates, let's talk. This will be a conversation, not a discovery call.
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University President, Provost, Dean, or Vice Provost commissioning leadership team development
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Foundation or Nonprofit Executive Director investing in senior leadership capacity
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Chief Human Resources Officer or Chief People Officer building a coaching culture at institutional scale
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Any institutional leader whose team has done the assessment — and wants to do the work
Brown University · Tufts University · Rice University · University of Vermont · Vermont State University · Tulane University · The Carnegie Foundation · Bonner Foundation · Catholic Relief Services · The Extension Foundation