Facilitating Your First CliftonStrengths® Workshop (3 of 4)

It wasn't a personality clash. It was two different ways of thinking.

Part of a four-part series on facilitating your first CliftonStrengths® workshop. Part 1 covered the prep that separates smooth sessions from scrambling. Part 2 covered opening the room and getting quiet people talking in the first 30 minutes. This is Part 3: what actually happens during the workshop itself.

Ever sit in a meeting where someone won't stop talking and someone else won't start? Most people chalk it up to personality. "She's just a talker." "He's just quiet." Case closed, nothing to do about it.

Except that's almost never what's actually happening.

A real aha moment, in real time

In a recent CliftonStrengths® workshop, two participants had exactly this realization. One of them discovered that their Communication® theme meant their thoughts are a jumbled mess until they say them out loud. They think BY talking, mid-sentence, in real time.

The other person needed to process internally first, before they were ready to talk about anything at all.

Same meetings. Same conversations. Two completely different operating systems running underneath the whole time.

Neither one was wrong. Neither one was being difficult. They just found out, in that moment, why some of their conversations had been landing flat, and what to actually do differently going forward.

Why this matters more than the vocabulary

This is the part of a CliftonStrengths® workshop that matters most, and it's also the part that's easiest to get wrong as a facilitator.

It is tempting to spend the day teaching 34 theme names like a vocabulary quiz. Define Communication®. Define Deliberative®. Move on to the next one. But one of the things I love about facilitating this work is that each person is the actual expert on their own themes. Great questions draw out the subtle nuances that turn out to be real game changers, and no slide deck does that on its own.

Preparing helps. Knowing the framework helps. But preparation only gives you head knowledge. A room full of correctly memorized definitions doesn't change what happens in next Tuesday's meeting.

Where the shift actually happens

The shift happens when two specific people, with two specific themes, name what's actually going on between them, out loud, in the room. Not "here's what Communication® means." More like: "oh, THAT'S why you jump in before I've finished thinking."

A facilitator's job isn't just to teach the language, though that's the necessary first step. It's to build the moments where people use that language on each other.

Here's the trap a lot of teams fall into: everyone takes the assessment, everyone gets their results, and that's where it stops. Knowing that a coworker is high in Woo® or Deliberative® becomes a fun fact, no different than knowing Susan from accounting has a cat. Interesting. Forgettable. It keeps CliftonStrengths® at the level of Team Bonding instead of real Team Development.

The takeaway

If your team has already taken the assessment and nothing has actually changed, the assessment isn't the problem. It's that the language hasn't been used yet in daily conversations and real work.

That's the difference between a team that did an activity once and a team that actually develops.

If you're looking for someone to facilitate a CliftonStrengths® or first-time manager workshop for your team, reach out here or find me on LinkedIn and let's talk about what that could look like for you.

This is Part 3 of a four-part series. Part 4, on what participants should do the Monday after a workshop, is coming next.

If your team is planning a CliftonStrengths®, team development, or first-time manager workshop this year, I'd love to hear about it. Reach out here or connect with me on LinkedIn.

More in this series:

Part 1: Facilitating Your First CliftonStrengths® Workshop: The Prep

Part 2: Opening the Room 

Part 3: During the Workshop (you are here)

Part 4: Closing Strong (publishing week of Jul 27)

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