Questions worth asking before you commission a team engagement.

The most fundamental difference is that SPARC's engagement is not a workshop. It is a coaching relationship that uses CliftonStrengths as a developmental instrument.

A standard Gallup workshop delivers assessment results, explains the themes, and facilitates a group conversation — typically in a single day. The experience is often valuable in the moment. What it rarely produces is sustained behavioral change, because insight without a sustained coaching relationship is not development.

At SPARC, both founders hold Gallup certification alongside ICF Professional Certified Coach credentials and doctoral-level training. The team session is the beginning of the work, not the end. We design the engagement around your institution's specific context, integrate any prior assessment data your team already holds, and build in the follow-on structures that give insights somewhere to go.

It is designed for senior leadership teams. The Tier 2 engagement — Strengths in Practice — is built specifically for provost cabinets, executive teams, and foundation leadership groups where the dynamics are complex, the stakes are high, and a standard facilitated session would feel thin.

Senior leadership teams typically arrive with years of shared history — both the productive kind and the kind that has calcified into patterns that are difficult to name. The strengths profile gives the team a language and a mirror for those patterns that is harder to dismiss than feedback or observation alone. Because it is grounded in data each person has already claimed as their own, it tends to open conversations that would otherwise be difficult to initiate.

The pre-session consultation with the team leader is standard at this tier. We invest time in understanding the team's history and what the leader is actually trying to shift before we design anything.

No. This is one of the most meaningful differences between SPARC and most providers in the strengths market.

Most boutique strengths firms are instrument-dependent — their model requires you to take their assessment because that is what they sell. SPARC's model is built around a coaching relationship, not a product license. 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.

If your team holds prior DiSC results, Hogan data, 360 feedback reports, earlier CliftonStrengths results, or MBTI profiles — none of it is set aside. It is brought into the design of the engagement as prior knowledge worth building on.

This is standard practice in every SPARC engagement, not an add-on. We consider it a basic form of respect for institutions that have already invested in their own development.

The Tier 1 engagement — Strengths Discovery — is structured around a full or half-day session, with a pre-session discovery conversation beforehand and follow-on options afterward. From initial scoping conversation to session delivery, most engagements run three to six weeks depending on scheduling.

The Tier 2 engagement — Strengths in Practice — typically runs longer due to the extended pre-session consultation and custom design process. Most senior leadership team engagements span six to ten weeks from first conversation to session delivery, with follow-on work extending the engagement further depending on what the team wants to do with what they discover.

The Tier 3 institutional deployment — Strengths at Scale — is scoped entirely in partnership and varies significantly by institution. Some multi-team rollouts run over a full academic or fiscal year.

For institutions that engage SPARC over time, the work typically develops across three simultaneous paths — not sequential stages, but reinforcing streams that build on each other.

Path 1 — Comprehensive Leader Development: The strengths team workshop is Stage 1 of a four-stage arc. Stage 2 is extended team development. Stage 3 is individual leader development via the Leadership Circle Profile and executive coaching. Stage 4 is leadership team development — bringing the team's collective LCP results into a facilitated conversation about how they lead together. The arc can take one to three years depending on the institution's pace and investment.

Path 2 — Internal Coaching Capacity: For institutions that want to build lasting development capacity rather than sustained dependency on an external firm, SPARC offers access to AoEC coach training programs — the Coaching Skills Certificate, Tools Certificate, and Practitioner Diploma. This is how institutions build the internal infrastructure to sustain coaching culture without requiring SPARC's ongoing presence.

Path 3 — Coaching Culture: The long horizon. Establishing coaching as a standard leadership operating system — not a program that runs for a year, but a culture that holds the development the earlier work began.

Every multi-year partnership is scoped in discovery. No two institutions arrive at the same place or move at the same pace. The three paths above are a template, not a prescription.

CliftonStrengths is Gallup's talent assessment, built from decades of research into the patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that produce consistent, high-quality performance. It identifies 34 talent themes — the natural tendencies that come most instinctively to a person — and ranks them from most to least dominant.

What it measures is innate talent, not learned skill or current performance. A person's CliftonStrengths profile reflects how they are naturally wired — which is why the results are remarkably stable over time and why they tend to resonate as a self-portrait rather than feel like a test outcome.

What it does not measure: leadership effectiveness, current performance, psychological health, or interpersonal dynamics. For those dimensions, the Leadership Circle Profile is the more appropriate instrument. CliftonStrengths and LCP are complementary — they answer different questions and together create a more complete developmental picture than either one alone.

For a team engagement, we generally recommend the Full 34. Here is why.

The Top 5 gives each person their most dominant themes and is a powerful starting point. For a team session, however, the collective profile — mapping the team's themes across all 34 and across the four leadership domains — is where the most useful team-level insights emerge. That analysis requires the Full 34 for each member.

The Full 34 also surfaces each person's lesser themes, which is where team-level blind spots often live. A team whose top themes cluster heavily in Strategic Thinking and Executing, for example, may have limited natural capacity in Relationship Building — and that gap is invisible if you only see the Top 5.

The Top 5 is the right choice when budget is a constraint or when the team is new to strengths work and wants a lower-stakes entry point. It can always be upgraded to Full 34 later without retaking the assessment.

Yes — and we encourage it. If your team has taken CliftonStrengths before, even years ago, we can work with those results rather than requiring everyone to retake. Gallup results are stable enough that prior data is still meaningful, especially for the purposes of a team session.

If the data is old enough that individuals have changed roles significantly, or if the team composition has shifted, a fresh assessment may be worthwhile — but that is a conversation to have in scoping, not an automatic requirement.

Prior DiSC, Hogan, MBTI, Enneagram, 360, or LCP data is also welcome. Our coaches will review what you have and integrate it into the session design.

Both SPARC founders — Shannon O'Neill, Ph.D., PCC and Mathew Johnson, Ph.D., PCC — hold the following credentials relevant to CliftonStrengths work:

Gallup Certified CliftonStrengths Coach — a rigorous credential that requires demonstrated competence in strengths-based coaching, not simply completion of a facilitation course.

ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) — one of the highest credentialing levels issued by the International Coaching Federation, requiring substantial verified coaching hours and demonstrated competency against a professional standard.

AoEC Advanced Practitioners Diploma — through SPARC's partnership with the Academy of Executive Coaching, one of the world's leading coach training organizations holding triple accreditation from ICF, EMCC, and AC.

Doctoral credentials — both founders hold Ph.D.s and are former Deans at Brown University, bringing institutional fluency that most coaching firms cannot replicate.

They are also active practitioners — in the room with presidents, provosts, and foundation executives every day. The credential stack is not historical; it is current and actively applied.

A Gallup-certified facilitator is trained to deliver the CliftonStrengths workshop — to explain the themes, facilitate the debrief, and guide a group conversation about collective strengths. That is a real and valuable credential.

What SPARC's coaches bring is the Gallup certification sitting inside a much larger coaching practice. The difference shows up most clearly in what happens when the data surfaces something complex — a leadership team whose dominant themes are in tension with each other, an executive whose top themes are in direct conflict with the demands of their role, or a team that has been stuck in patterns that the strengths profile suddenly makes visible.

A facilitator can name what the data shows. A credentialed executive coach can hold the developmental conversation that follows — the one that actually produces change. That is the distinction SPARC's credential stack is designed to make possible.

This is the question most vendors in the strengths market cannot answer well — because their model ends when the workshop does.

At SPARC, the team session is Stage 1 of a developmental arc that can extend as far as the institution wants to take it. Immediately after the session, team members typically leave with questions they did not have before — about their own leadership, about the team's collective edges, and about what it would take to go deeper. We make those conversations available.

Follow-on options include: additional team sessions focused on applying the strengths language to specific team challenges; individual coaching for team members who want to develop their own profile more deeply; leadership development via the LCP-360 for leaders who are ready to look at how their strengths show up in the way others experience them; and extended institutional engagement across all three paths — comprehensive leader development, internal coaching capacity, and coaching culture.

None of this is automatic or required. What happens after is always scoped in partnership.

Every SPARC engagement begins with a scoping conversation — not a pitch, not a standard intake form. We invest time in learning your institution: its history, its leadership team composition, what you have tried before, what worked and what did not, and what you are actually trying to build.

If your team holds prior assessment data, we review it before proposing anything. If the team has been through a significant transition — new members, a merger, a leadership change — that context shapes the design. If there are dynamics the team leader wants to address that a standard workshop would not surface, we build toward those.

What we propose is built for your institution. The pricing and tiers on the packages page give you a framework, but the actual scope is always determined in conversation. We do not scope from a webpage and we do not propose before we have listened.

CliftonStrengths and the Leadership Circle Profile are complementary instruments at different stages of the same developmental arc — not competing alternatives.

CliftonStrengths answers the question: what is this person naturally best at? It surfaces talent at the individual and team level. The LCP answers the question: how is this leader's leadership being experienced by others, and what internal patterns are driving it? It measures how others perceive the leader across 29 dimensions and reveals the relationship between creative competencies and reactive tendencies.

In SPARC's four-stage development arc, CliftonStrengths anchors Stage 1 — Team Discovery. The LCP anchors Stage 3 — Individual Leader Development. A leader who has gone deep with their strengths profile and then encounters their LCP results often experiences a powerful integration: the LCP shows how the strengths (and the overuse of strengths) are landing in the room. That combination produces insights that neither instrument generates alone.

The team strengths engagement is the most natural entry point for coaching culture development — because it introduces the entire team to coaching-based language, peer development, and the practice of naming what is normally invisible.

For institutions with a longer horizon, SPARC's three-path model is designed specifically for this question. Path 1 builds the architecture — comprehensive leader development across teams and individual leaders. Path 2 builds the fuel — internal coaching capacity through AoEC programs so the institution can sustain development from within. Path 3 is the destination — coaching as a standard operating system for all leaders, a culture that outlasts any single program or external engagement.

The coaching culture does not arrive as a discrete deliverable. It develops over time as the combined effect of the architecture, the internal capacity, and the organizational maturity that results from sustained, skilled practice. SPARC's Transformational Performance Model tracks that progression — from individual awareness through team practice to institution-wide coaching culture.

"Leader as coach" training develops the coaching capacity of leaders within their own organizations — specifically their ability to coach their direct reports rather than manage them through direction and advice alone.

It is part of Path 1 — Comprehensive Leader Development — and typically follows the individual leader development stage. A leader who has done deep work on their own development through LCP coaching and strengths is naturally positioned to bring coaching-based practices to how they develop their own team. The "leader as coach" training makes that practical: it gives leaders a framework, practiced skills, and supervision for applying coaching approaches in their day-to-day leadership.

It is most valuable for leaders who manage other leaders — deans with department chairs, vice presidents with directors, program officers with team leads. The impact compounds: each leader who develops coaching capacity multiplies the reach of the development investment without multiplying the cost.

Through SPARC's partnership with the Academy of Executive Coaching — the exclusive U.S. relationship with one of the world's leading coach training organizations — institutions can access rigorous, accredited coach training for their own staff and leaders.

The AoEC's programs range from the Coaching Skills Certificate (a foundational program for leaders who want to integrate coaching skills into their practice) through the Tools Certificate and Practitioner Diploma (a professional-level qualification for those seeking a full coaching credential). All programs carry triple accreditation from ICF, EMCC, and AC — a distinction held by fewer than 1% of coaching training organizations globally.

When an institution invests in AoEC training for its own staff, it builds coaching capacity that it owns. The development does not leave when SPARC does. That institutional infrastructure — coaches trained to a professional standard, available to leaders within the organization — is what makes coaching culture sustainable rather than dependent on external provision.

In practice, a coaching culture in a higher education or nonprofit institution is one where coaching conversations are the norm rather than the exception — where leaders at all levels routinely ask questions rather than issue directives, where professional development is understood as ongoing and relational rather than episodic and programmatic, and where the institution has the internal capacity to sustain that practice without requiring external support.

It shows up in how onboarding is structured, in how supervision conversations are conducted, in how conflict is navigated, and in how leadership transitions are managed. It does not look like a coaching program — it looks like a different kind of leadership culture.

Getting there typically takes three to five years of sustained, intentional investment across all three paths: building the architecture, developing the internal capacity, and reinforcing the cultural norms that make coaching practice standard. SPARC's Transformational Performance Model tracks that progression through an Institutional Maturity Ladder — from initial awareness through integrated practice to organization-wide culture. The team strengths engagement is how most institutions begin that journey.