By Spencer Chalifour

Working as part of a team requires not just understanding yourself but the people you’re working with. The Effective Team Dynamics Initiative (ETDI) at Georgia Tech provides guidance on how to accomplish both these tasks. The guiding method ETDI uses for understanding team dynamics is the CliftonStrengths test. If you haven’t explored how Gallup CliftonStrengths can assist you, we provide more detail in our introduction to effective team dynamics.

CliftonStrengths is exceptionally beneficial for faculty and students, especially anyone new to teaching or working in teams at the college level. Tutors can also benefit from implementing CliftonStrengths in their sessions. In this article, we examine a few tutoring strategies rooted in ETDI’s implementation of the CliftonStrengths assessment for use in one-on-one tutoring, peer tutoring, and group tutoring.

Strategies and Activities for One-on-One Tutoring

Individual student tutoring can be incredibly rewarding, but it also comes with unique challenges. Unlike in the classroom, where instructors can get to know students over several weeks, tutors often must establish rapport within a few minutes. Tutors also don’t always get the opportunity to check back in with students to see their progress.

However, tutoring also comes with several benefits not seen in the classroom. Tutors can work one-on-one with students for more extended periods than is often possible for a classroom instructor. This closer working relationship allows tutors to understand the needs of individual students  better and customize their approach to fit each student’s particular way of approaching an assignment.

With these challenges and opportunities in mind, here are some potential activities tutors can implement to approach one-on-one tutoring more effectively with CliftonStrengths.

Use a Card Game to Understand CliftonStrengths Themes

Tutors should understand not only their own top strengths according to the CliftonStrengths assessment but also how they implement these strengths in different situations. You can clarify how you use your strengths by identifying how you respond to different scenarios. Consider statements like:

• When I am interacting with faculty, I use _____ theme
• When I am motivating students, I use _____ theme
• When I am building relationships with others, I use _____ theme

Once you’ve determined how you implement your strengths, you will be better equipped to utilize them in everyday situations you face as a tutor.

One helpful activity for understanding and implementing the CliftonStrengths theme uses cards with different situations where you can apply themes, like the ones listed above. These cards are used by ETDI workshop leaders, so please feel free to contact us if you’d like to schedule a workshop where we can run this activity.

Customize Feedback to Student Strengths

If you’re working with a student who already knows their CliftonStrengths, such as a student who has gone through an ETDI first year seminar curriculum set, then you can use their top strengths to determine how you advise them. Say, for example, you’re tutoring a student concerned with academic success, and they have woo as one of their top strengths. You could recommend that the student use woo to assemble a study group. An ETDI workshop can allow you to practice providing strengths-based assistance to students.

Strategies and Activities for Peer Tutoring

While one-on-one tutoring has benefits, peer tutoring can also be implemented to help students assist each other. Because peer tutoring involves students working with other students, peer tutors can better understand what their mentees are going through. Also, students are sometimes more willing to open up to their peers than to instructors or older tutors. Here are some strategies for using CliftonStrengths in peer tutoring, whether you’re running a peer tutoring session or are a peer tutor yourself.

Use the Peer Feedback/Teamwork Reflection Guide

If students are already working in groups on a project, consider implementing a reflection activity after they have completed a task as a team. For instance, you could assign a discussion post or a preparatory task for a larger project, such as a proposal or brainstorming session. Have students fill out the peer feedback/teamwork reflection sheet, and ask them to reflect on their answers. Use this reflection time to have students build an action plan to work more effectively as a team in the future.

Use Peer Support Questions

Consider using this activity as an expansion of the above activity. You can also use it separately as a guide to facilitate peer support for a particular assignment or project. Have students answer questions together like:

• What are the goals of this assignment?
• What is your argument or purpose? How can you make the argument or purpose visible and persuasive?
• Who is the intended audience? How will the intended audience affect the choices you make?

Strategies and Activities for Group Tutoring

Because the CliftonStrengths assessment focuses on working in a team, consider how you can best assist students as a group in addition to helping individual students. When assisting a group of students, such as a team working collaboratively on a class project, consider the following strategies.

Develop a Team Action Plan

Teams work best when each member understands the needs of all other members. With this in mind, consider advising a team to fill out the team action plan handout. This handout allows team members to establish what they resent in a group and enables their peers to respond with specific solutions. Tutors can also adapt the team action plan activity for instructors by reviewing a student team’s action plan or providing an example handout to help groups get started.

Conduct a Diverse Perspectives Activity

Teams also work best when members’ diversity is recognized and integrated into group dynamics. Tutors can adapt the diversity of knowledge, experiences, and strengths activity for instructors by reviewing the diversity, self-awareness, and teamwork handout with groups of students working as a team. Consider guiding student groups on identifying and discussing what they know about each other first, and then help them create a team plan or contract based on their diverse strengths.

Contact ETDI for More Team Activities

These are just some of the many resources available to tutors through ETDI at Georgia Tech. To get in touch to learn more about how you can use CliftonStrengths to improve your tutoring or schedule a workshop where we can run practice sessions of some of these activities, as well as many others, please contact us here.

By Mike Lehman

Title: Using CliftonStengths in the Classroom and Group Activities

Often, we focus on weaknesses during self-assessment. Whether you’re receiving feedback from your instructors, peers, or supervisors, assessment is largely based on what you lack rather than on the strengths and unique traits you offer.

Georgia Tech’s Effective Team Dynamics Initiative (ETDI) uses Gallup’s CliftonStrengths Assessment to teach students, faculty, and staff methods to use their strengths to work effectively in a team. ETDI is founded on the belief that knowing your strengths makes you more effective and efficient in your life, groups, the workplace, and the classroom.

For students, implementing CliftonStrengths when organizing teams and the work that follows allows for more successful and complete projects. Many people are drawn to certain activities but not others. It’s important to understand your unique traits and how to harness them. Doing so creates a unique edge that leads to success through understanding individual talents.

For faculty, it’s essential to understand how to apply CliftonStrengths to group activities and teamwork. Faculty members can start by understanding how to effectively incorporate the CliftonStrengths Assessment into the organization of small activities and group projects.

In this article, we’ll go over different group activities you can use to apply CliftonStrengths in the classroom.

Why do the CliftonStrengths Matter?

There are many common misconceptions about the CliftonStrengths Assessment, including the most frequent misunderstanding: CliftonStrengths is a personality test. Instead, the CliftonStrengths Assessment uses results from paired statements to highlight your five key strengths.

The assessment aims to help individuals apply their self-understanding to their daily activities effectively. Recognizing your strengths allows you to better engage with others and their strengths and make your teams more effective.

CliftonStrengths Domains and Themes

Results from the CliftonStrengths Assessment are broken down into four domains, with 34 themes within these categories. The domains include:

• Strategic thinking
• Relationship building
• Influencing
• Executing

For example, people with dominant themes in the executing domain know how to make things happen and implement ideas into tangible results. Influencers help their team reach a larger audience and can see things from a global point of view. Strategic thinkers analyze information to understand how a project can have a long-term impact, while Relationship builders hold teams together.

Within the four domains, there are 34 themes. CliftonStrengths uses these themes to identify talents and strengths that are unique to you. For example, one of the most common themes is an Achiever. If you are an Achiever, you are motivated and determined to accomplish something with your time. To form an effective team, Achievers are commonly paired with Learners. If you are a Learner, you have a joy of learning and want to improve constantly and continuously.

Another common example is the Woo theme. Woo, or winning others over, encapsulates people who enjoy connecting with others and meeting new people.

Why should I Know my CliftonStrengths?

Understanding your CliftonStrengths Assessment is important because it allows you to leverage your strengths in different contexts. Groups can have more effective team dynamics if each person knows and understands their strengths. The CliftonStrengths Assessment can be applied in small group activities within the classroom.

Using Group Activities to Apply CliftonStrengths in the Classroom

The university classroom, especially in the first and second years, largely revolves around group projects, small group assignments, and discussions. Using the CliftonStrengths in the classroom promotes a positive learning environment. Instructors can create customized assignments and activities focused on self-reflection and show students how to resolve conflict in their teams. Georgia Tech’s ETDI offers curriculum sets and individual and group activities.

Below are two group activities to apply CliftonStrengths in the classroom.

Strengths-Based Ice Breaker Activity

After taking the CliftonStrengths Assessment, instructors can have students claim their strengths. This activity has three learning goals:

• To develop a common language to discuss skills and strengths in the team
• To understand different ways individuals can contribute to and influence the team
• To build communication practices

Individually, students highlight the terms and phrases that stick out to them in their strengths report.

Following the individual activity, the instructor can break the class into teams so students can share their top strengths and discuss how they can benefit the team. The group activity allows students to introduce themselves to others, evaluate what they do best, and recognize their own and others’ unique traits. It also teaches them how their strengths can interact with the strengths of their team members.

Strengths-Based Team Building

When completing tasks as a team, it is important to understand team roles. To organize team roles, we need to consider how individual roles enable inclusive and innovative approaches to project challenges.

One such activity that promotes team building in ETDI’s curriculum set involves students completing tasks that focus on collaboration, contribution, and compromise. The activity explores the importance of team dynamics and the different roles that students are attracted to.

The activity requires an open space and a timer. It centers on the instructor giving ‘non-answers’ to questions, such as ‘whatever you think is best.’ The general framework of the group activity is:

• Ask students to organize themselves by major (2 minutes)
• Ask the students to re-organize themselves into a line by last name (3 minutes)
• Ask the students to re-organize themselves into a line based on birthdate without speaking (4 minutes)
• Ask the students to re-organize themselves in a line based on where they were born, from east to west, without speaking. For this part, students can use props (5 minutes)

After completing the activity, the class can discuss what they learned about their strengths through the exercise. Students can notice their preferred roles and the roles they naturally avoid. In this way, students can create a narrative that focuses on how they view themselves in a team and share it with others.

The next ETDI blog post will focus specifically on activities to use one-on-one with a tutor.

What Resources Does the ETDI Provide for Faculty?

ETDI offers curriculum sets for undergraduate and graduate students. The undergraduate curriculum set includes activities for first-year seminars and senior design. The graduate curriculum provides several modules, including:

• Innovation and Productivity in Teams
• Diversity, Identities, Contributions and Values
• Effective Communication
• Leveraging and Managing Conflict

Georgia Tech’s ETDI organizes workshops, courses, and other events to enhance team dynamics. Please contact us to set up a free workshop or have ETDI help you use group activities in your classroom.

By Spencer Chalifour

People often underestimate the importance of self-knowledge when it comes to creating effective team dynamics. To collaborate successfully, you must first understand your personal strengths and how they fit with your team members’ abilities. The first step to uncovering these strengths, as recommended by the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative (ETDI) at Georgia Tech, is taking the CliftonStrengths Assessment.

The 30-minute CliftonStrengths Assessment consists of 177 paired statements that you will rate based on how strongly each describes you. The assessment then calibrates your answers based on 34 general areas or “themes” and ranks them based on how closely each applies to you. The top listed themes in your results are your strengths.

Some people will immediately recognize themselves in the results, but others have a more ambivalent reaction. You might wonder, “Is this really me?” “Should I take this again?” “Did I skew my results?”

If you’re in this second group, there’s no need to worry. In this article, we’ll go over some common misconceptions about the CliftonStrengths Assessment so you can best understand your results and apply them successfully.

Is the CliftonStrengths Assessment a Personality Test?

Many people think CliftonStrengths is a personality test due to its surface-level similarities to popular personality tests like the Myers-Briggs or DiSC. Maybe you’ve done one of these tests before or killed time with a Buzzfeed personality quiz like “Which Type of Bread Are You?”

Unlike these examples, CliftonStrengths is not a personality test. Personality tests often psychologically classify people using a five-factor model that includes: [1]

• Openness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Neuroticism

By contrast, CliftonStrengths is a performance-based assessment rooted in years of research from Gallup. The goal of CliftonSrengths is not to indicate personality traits but to maximize your potential based on your natural strengths.

How to Discover and Understand Your CliftonStrengths Results

When you finish the CliftonStrengths assessment, you’ll see all 34 themes listed in order of how closely they apply to the answers you gave. The top five will be highlighted as your most powerful natural talents. You’ll also notice that each theme is color-coded. These colors relate to the four categories, or domains, that CliftonStrengths uses to organize your results:

• Strategic thinking (green)
• Relationship building (blue)
• Influencing (orange)
• Executing (purple)

You may have themes from all four domains in your top five results, but it’s also common for one or two to predominate.

Your assessment results will then provide a thorough overview of your top five CliftonStrengths. These explanations will include sections like “How you can thrive,” “Why your significance is unique,” and “Watch out for blind spots.” Each section has two goals:

• To provide suggestions regarding what you tend to do well
• To highlight how your strengths can cause you to perceive other team members or tasks in a subjective way

You want to be aware of your strengths, but you also don’t want to be so invested in those strengths that you neglect to consider how other people might approach a problem.

ETDI uses CliftonStrengths as part of our undergraduate curriculum. For students, don’t think that you need to follow these recommendations to a T. Adapt the words in your report to your own needs. Approach your results with thoughtfulness and consider how you have worked in teams before. What went right, and what could have gone better?

Say, for example, that you’re an achiever. You probably have a strong drive to complete projects due to an innate ability to self-motivate or a strong work ethic. In either case, being an achiever could have allowed past group projects to go well because you could motivate your teammates. Or the teamwork may have gone poorly because you got too frustrated when others couldn’t meet your drive.

Understanding how your strengths have helped or harmed you in the past can help you navigate future projects more effectively.

Should I Just Focus on My Top 5 Strengths?

No! While your top five strengths are obviously important, don’t neglect your other results. Be sure to examine all ten of your top results by reading the descriptions, reflecting on your experiences, using these strengths in your everyday work, and remaining aware of your potential blind spots. You can also examine more of your strengths after your top ten if you’d like, but this step likely isn’t necessary to fully maximize your potential.

What if I Had No Relationship Building Strengths in my Top 5?

It’s not uncommon to have no strengths from a particular domain in your top five. However, some students might become worried or feel like they’re deficient in some way if one of the four colors doesn’t appear in their results. For example, a student who doesn’t see any relationship-building strengths in their top five might ask, “Am I not good at working in groups at all? Will I be a lone wolf forever?”

Don’t go howling at the moon yet! While someone with predominantly relationship-building strengths will be naturally skilled at bringing people together, this doesn’t mean that other domains lack team-strengthening qualities. For example, if one of your strengths is input (domain: strategic thinking), you might approach relationships as things you can collect to draw from later. If one of your strengths is woo (domain: influencing), you are adept at winning people over, which your team can then use to help make connections with others.

If I Re-Take the Assessment, Will I Get Different Results?

You might have re-taken self-assessments in the past and received different results. Perhaps you were a Hufflepuff five years ago, but now you’re a Ravenclaw. As a result, you may often wonder how accurate your CliftonStrengths results will be five or ten years in the future.

While it’s true that we continue to experience what’s known as neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to continue to change) into our 20s, CliftonStrengths results won’t change much after age 25.[2] Undergraduate students might be troubled by this statistic, but there probably won’t be much change if you re-take the assessment. While it is highly unlikely you’ll get the exact same order as the first time, there is a very strong chance your top five themes will still appear in your top 8 to 12 results the second time.

What Strengths Do I Need to Become a Good Leader?

Some students might be particularly focused on trying to get a specific set of results to achieve a certain goal. Becoming a strong leader is a common objective, but students might also be curious about the strengths they “need” to succeed in a particular field or job. However, having specific strengths isn’t necessary to become a capable leader or pursue a certain career.

Instead of worrying about your results, you should focus on understanding and maximizing your existing strengths. It’s true that there are some strengths that appear more frequently than others. The most common CliftonStrengths include:[3]

• Achiever
• Responsibility
• Learner
• Relator
• Strategic

The least common are: [4]

• Command
• Self-assurance
• Significance
• Discipline
• Context

Whatever your results, embrace what makes you unique! Understanding and highlighting what you bring to the table will help you stand out.

Learn How To Maximize Your Potential With CliftonStrengths

If you want to maximize your potential by using CliftonStrengths, please contact us to set up a free workshop. An experienced team dynamics facilitator can help students, faculty and administrators understand their results. You can also email us to learn more about how you can best understand and implement the CliftonStrengths test.

[1] https://leadthroughstrengths.com/strengths-personality-test/

[2] https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/249935/strengths-change-answering-big-question.aspx

[3] https://high5test.com/strengthsfinder-cliftonstrengths-themes-list/

[4] https://twitter.com/CliftonStrength/status/551815424154021888?lang=en#

By Spencer Chalifour

Like any skill, working effectively in a team requires careful practice, experience, and self-assessment to master. However, unlike other skills, it is often assumed that everyone innately knows how to work in a team. We’ve all had the experience of a teacher or supervisor placing us in teams with other students or employees—who are often complete strangers—and expecting us to “figure out” how to work together.

Georgia Tech’s Effective Team Dynamics Initiative (ETDI) provides students, faculty, and staff with research-driven training and methods to improve how they work in teams. This article offers a brief introduction to ETDI and explores how you can use this initiative to improve your team.

What Are Effective Team Dynamics?

Understanding how to best work in a team is a multi-step process that requires self-reflection and contemplating how you interact with the world around you. Determining effective dynamics can be complex, but ETDI has simplified this process by focusing on the following three questions:

Who Am I?

Before working in a team, you first need to understand what you offer. What makes you unique? What special skills or interests do you have? How do you use your skills and interests to approach projects and problems? Once you have a strong foundation in understanding yourself, you will then be more adept at understanding others.

How Do I Team?

When you work with other people, you should be aware of the ways in which you interact with others. How do you recognize the unique skills and interests of people around you? How can you best understand the diversity of your team? Increasing your awareness of the people you’re working with will enable you to bring your best self to the team.

How Do We Team?

Now that you have a better understanding of yourself, you should get to know the people you’re working with. Consider how every member of your team can work interdependently. How will each contributor mutually rely on the others so that all of you can take advantage of your unique skills and abilities?

Once these three questions are addressed, your team dynamics will be established, and you’ll have a stronger foundation for completing collaborative work.

How Will Understanding Team Dynamics Help Me?

Whether you’re an experienced team leader or a student new to working in groups, everyone can benefit from understanding team dynamics. By better comprehending how a team works, teams can increase engagement among their members and experience much better performance. Studies have shown that greater engagement among employees leads to 41% lower absenteeism, 17% higher productivity, and 21% higher profitability.[1]

Clifton Strengths

At Georgia Tech, understanding ETD is rooted in the Clifton Strengths Analysis. Clifton Strengths, also known as the Gallup Strengths Assessment, was created by Don Clifton based on a simple viewpoint: What would happen if we helped people succeed by examining what they’re best at rather than what their weaknesses are? By focusing on team members’ strengths, Clifton Strengths allows teams to reach higher levels of excellence.

This approach is backed by research. For example, a speed-reading study conducted by the Nebraska School Study Council found that when students were taught speedreading methods, average readers increased their words per minute reading rate by 66%.However, exceptional readers increased their reading rate from around 300 words per minute to 2,900![2]

The Clifton Strength Assessment measures talents in 34 general areas or “themes.” Participants can develop these talents into individual strengths The assessment also gives team members a common language to identify what makes them unique and discuss how they can work together most effectively.

ETD Success Stories

Many members of the Georgia Tech community have benefitted from taking the strengths finder assessment and applying its findings to their work. For example, undergraduate students have used their strength assessment results to work in online teams more efficiently. Additionally, effective team dynamics have been successfully implemented at the graduate level via the team science curriculum. Utilizing strengths assessment has also benefitted faculty collaboration.

What Resources Does the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative Provide?

The Effective Team Dynamics Initiative at Georgia Tech offers several resources for students (both undergraduate and graduate), faculty, and staff. These resources range from student curricula to sample activities faculty can implement in their teaching.

Student Team Dynamics

There are two main curriculum sets for undergraduate students at Georgia Tech. The First-Year Seminar set includes a series of Gallup strengths finding activities for students followed by an in-class session designed to help students understand their results. This curriculum set aims to develop students’ knowledge and self-awareness of interpersonal skills, often in preparation for a short-term team project.

The Senior Design set also includes a series of Gallup strengths finding activities, two in-class sessions, and team homework activities. These additional elements will assist more advanced students in implementing their strengths assessment findings in more complex team projects.

ETDI also offers a curriculum for graduate students that consists of four modules focused on:

• Increasing innovation and productivity
• Understanding team diversity
• Creating effective communication
• Leveraging and managing conflict.

Effective Dynamics for Faculty and Staff

In addition to student resources, ETDI offers several resources for faculty and staff. The ETD Faculty Tool Kit includes a booklet and set of cards that instructors can use in their classes for a variety of team-building activities. The ETDI website also includes a series of short activities organized by purpose that faculty and staff can implement to assist teams and increase efficiency.

How Do I Get Started Learning Effective Dynamics at Georgia Tech?

There are many ways ETDI can help you recognize your strengths and increase your understanding of how you work best in a team. We’ll also teach you proven strategies to you improve the productivity and effectiveness of your teams. No one should feel like they need to “just figure out” how to create strong teamwork, and ETDI is here to assist you in navigating the skills that go into understanding team dynamics.

Please contact us to set up a workshop where an experienced team dynamics facilitator can assist your course or explain effective dynamics at a departmental or organizational event. You can also email us to learn more about how effective team dynamics can help you take your collaborations to the next level.

[1] https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/278225/how-to-improve-teamwork.aspx

[2] https://media.gallup.com/documents/whitepaper–investinginstrengths.pdf