CliftonStrengths Coaching

CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder) is Gallup's talent assessment, developed from over 30 years of research studying the world's most successful people. It identifies your unique combination of 34 talent themes — the natural patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that come most easily to you.

The core premise is simple and research-backed: you will grow most in the areas where you are already naturally talented. When you understand your talents and invest in developing them through knowledge and practice, they become genuine strengths — consistent, near-perfect performance in the areas that matter most.

More than 34 million people worldwide have taken the CliftonStrengths assessment, and it is used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies.

The CliftonStrengths assessment presents 177 paired statements. For each pair, you choose which statement best describes you — and you have 20 seconds to respond. This time pressure is intentional: it captures your instinctive reactions rather than overthought answers.

The assessment takes approximately 30–45 minutes and is completed entirely online. Results are available immediately upon completion. You receive a personalized report identifying either your Top 5 signature themes or the complete ranking of all 34 themes, depending on which version you choose.

Both versions use the same assessment — the difference is in the depth of your results.

Top 5 reveals your five most dominant talent themes with a 17-page personalized report. It is a powerful introduction to strengths-based development and gives you immediate language for what you do best. You can always upgrade to the Full 34 later without retaking the assessment.

Full 34 ranks all 34 themes from your strongest to your least dominant, with a comprehensive 43-page report. It provides deep insight into your top 10 themes, reveals potential blind spots in your lesser themes, and is the recommended option for coaching engagements where depth matters.

If you are working with a SPARC coach, we generally recommend the Full 34 — the additional insight into your complete talent profile significantly enriches the coaching conversation.

CliftonStrengths is valuable for leaders and professionals at every level. It is particularly powerful for:

• Senior executives seeking greater self-awareness and leadership clarity
• Emerging leaders defining their leadership identity and approach
• Leaders navigating transitions — new roles, new teams, or new levels of responsibility
• Intact teams wanting a shared language for how they work together
• Organizations building strengths-based cultures focused on engagement and performance

CliftonStrengths is not a diagnostic or remedial tool. It is a development tool for people who want to understand and invest in what makes them naturally effective.

The assessment takes approximately 30–45 minutes to complete. It is done entirely online at your own pace (though each individual question has a 20-second response window). Results are available immediately upon completion.

The assessment is available in more than 20 languages and can be completed on any device with an internet connection.

Your results identify your natural talent themes — the recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that come most instinctively to you. These are not skills you have learned; they are innate tendencies that have been with you most of your life.

Your report describes each theme in detail, explains how it shows up in your daily life and work, and provides specific suggestions for developing each talent into a genuine strength. If you have the Full 34, you also see how your lesser themes may create blind spots or areas where you should seek complementary partnerships.

Gallup organizes the 34 talent themes into four domains that describe how people naturally contribute:

• Executing — How you get things done. These themes describe your drive to turn ideas into reality through discipline, focus, and follow-through.
• Influencing — How you take charge and move others to action. These themes describe your ability to sell ideas, take charge, and speak up.
• Relationship Building — How you connect and build trust. These themes describe your capacity to hold teams together and foster loyalty.
• Strategic Thinking — How you analyze, plan, and create ideas. These themes describe how you absorb information and help teams make better decisions.

Understanding which domains your themes cluster in helps you see not just what you're good at, but how you naturally contribute to your team and organization.

CliftonStrengths results are remarkably stable. Research shows high test-retest reliability — your talent theme rankings remain relatively consistent even over a decade. This is because the assessment measures innate talents, not learned skills or situational behaviors.

That said, your understanding of your themes deepens significantly over time, especially with coaching. You begin to see how your themes interact with each other, how they show up differently in different contexts, and how to manage the potential downsides of overusing a strength.

This is more common than you might think — and it is often where the most interesting coaching conversations begin. Sometimes a theme does not resonate because you have been discouraged from expressing that talent, or because your current role does not call on it. Other times, a theme feels surprising because it operates so naturally that you have never thought of it as distinctive.

A SPARC coach can help you explore any themes that feel unfamiliar and often surfaces "aha moments" that shift your understanding. The results reflect how you naturally respond — which is sometimes different from how you think you respond.

Yes. If you initially take the Top 5 version, you can upgrade to the Full 34 at any time without retaking the assessment. Gallup stores your original responses and simply unlocks the additional theme rankings and expanded report.

This makes the Top 5 a low-commitment entry point. Many leaders start with Top 5 and upgrade to Full 34 once they experience the value and want to go deeper — especially when beginning a coaching engagement.

You do not need a coach to read your report — the Gallup reports are clear and well-written. But there is a meaningful difference between understanding your themes intellectually and knowing how to apply them in your actual leadership context.

A coach helps you see patterns — how your themes interact, where they create powerful combinations, and where they might be working against you. A coach also provides accountability for actually developing your talents into strengths through deliberate practice and application. Most leaders find that the coaching conversation is where the real value of CliftonStrengths comes alive.

At SPARC, we use CliftonStrengths as a catalyst for leadership growth — not as an endpoint. Our three-step process is designed to move you from awareness to action:

• Assess: You complete the CliftonStrengths assessment (Top 5 or Full 34). We handle setup and guide you through the process.
• Explore: A guided coaching session unpacks your results — what your themes reveal, how they interact, and where they show up in your leadership every day.
• Apply: Ongoing coaching develops your talents into genuine strengths and integrates them into how you lead, communicate, and build your team.

For leaders who also complete the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP), we integrate both assessments into a unified development framework — creating one of the most powerful leadership development experiences available.

Absolutely — and team applications are one of the most impactful uses of CliftonStrengths. When every member of a team understands their own strengths and the strengths of their colleagues, the team develops a shared language for how they work together.

SPARC's team engagements include a Team Strengths Grid that maps every member's themes across the four domains, a facilitated workshop to explore complementary strengths and potential gaps, and development recommendations for how the team can leverage its collective talent more effectively.

Research shows that teams who regularly use their strengths outperform teams that don't — with measurable improvements in engagement, productivity, and collaboration.

CliftonStrengths and the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) are complementary, not competing, assessments. They measure different things and together create a more complete picture than either one alone.

CliftonStrengths identifies your natural talent themes — the innate patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that make you uniquely effective. It answers the question: "What am I naturally best at?"

The LCP measures how others experience your leadership across 29 dimensions and reveals the relationship between your Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies. It answers the question: "How is my leadership being perceived, and what underlying patterns are driving it?"

At SPARC, we often combine both assessments for leaders seeking the deepest possible self-awareness. CliftonStrengths reveals your natural wiring; the LCP shows how that wiring is showing up — and where it might be getting in your way.

Anyone can take the CliftonStrengths assessment online and receive a report. The difference at SPARC is what happens after the report arrives.

Our coaches are experienced executive coaches with doctoral-level training in leadership, organizational development, and adult development theory. We do not treat CliftonStrengths as a standalone product — we use it as the foundation for a coaching relationship designed to produce lasting leadership growth.

We also bring the ability to integrate CliftonStrengths with the Leadership Circle Profile and other development frameworks, creating a multi-dimensional picture of your leadership that no single assessment can provide.

SPARC's coaches are Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths coaches with 25+ years of combined experience in executive coaching, leadership assessment, and organizational development. We have worked with more than 300 organizations and 150 individual leaders.

Our coaches hold doctoral degrees and bring deep knowledge of adult development theory, which means every strengths conversation is grounded in a developmental perspective — not just theme descriptions, but how your talents evolve, interact, and express themselves at different stages of leadership maturity.

Yes — and this is one of the most powerful development combinations we offer. When we integrate CliftonStrengths with the Leadership Circle Profile, the result is a leadership development experience that addresses both your natural talent foundation and the way your leadership is being experienced by others.

For example, a leader whose top CliftonStrengths theme is Achiever (Executing domain) might discover through the LCP that their Controlling tendency is high — revealing how a natural drive for results can sometimes crowd out collaboration. This kind of integrated insight is extraordinarily valuable and nearly impossible to achieve with a single assessment.

Ask your SPARC coach about our combined LCP + CliftonStrengths engagements.

The first step is a chemistry call — a brief, no-obligation conversation with a SPARC coach to discuss your goals, answer any remaining questions, and determine the right engagement for you.

From there, we handle everything: assessment setup, report delivery, and scheduling your coaching sessions. Whether you choose Top 5 or Full 34, an individual engagement or a team workshop, the process is designed to be simple and supportive from start to finish.