A hands-on approach to evaluating skills

Skills assessments feel awkward although they should be a great team building exercise. They consist of the following parts: a questionnaire, a classification part, a team discussion and ending with a group activity. After these four steps, the group should understand how their skills fit together and complement each other so that there is more team adhesion and they can tackle more efficiently future challenges as a team and in that way increase the team cohesion. In this blog post I will make a few adjustments to the skills assessment exercise that hopefully let you either ask for a change in the team building activity or let you otherwise appreciate a team building exercise more. 


Refresher Four Domains of CliftonStrengths.

The skills of people can be split up into four domains based on the Clifton Strengthsfinder: Executing (E), Influencing (I), Relationship (R) and Strategic (S). Each person has a unique combination of these skills. But it is important to note that each person has strengths that stretch across all these domains and that for each of these domains they have one skill that is the strongest. 

For example if you each day want to get at least something done, you are an achiever and that is part of the Executing domain. If you always want to be the best in something, then this is your top influencing strength. If you can easily relate to how people feel, then that is your top relationship strength. Finally if you always want to learn something new, your top strategic strength is learner. Because these strengths are ranked you can also see that for each domain there are also strengths that will end up at the bottom. But these are not the ones we focus on in this exercise. 


Your skills are the best version of you

When people use their skills optimally, they can be the best version of themselves and that is when they thrive and are having fun. Therefore it is important that you can evaluate somebody’s skill in the environment that they feel the most comfortable in. This means that people who have the majority of their skills in the influencer domain or the relationship domain, are thriving when they can work together with others. However people who have the majority of their skills in executing or strategic might thrive more in a quiet environment where they can focus on building prototypes or products. The reason why this matters is that depending on the setting a different skill might be coming out on top from the various domains. For example, somebody who has their major strengths in executing and strategic thinking and therefore prefers a more quiet environment as optimal environment, might actually look like somebody with as top strength competition when you would test their strengths in a group setting but when you test their strength in a relaxed setting their top strength might actually be an achiever.


Proposing two skills ranking strategies based on a case study

We use the strengths assessment of somebody who had done in 2018 the CliftonStrengths assessment on a relaxing Saturday morning and the top five skills were: Achiever (E), Learner (S), Input (S), Deliberative (E) and Arranger (E). If you would get the overview of the top 5 skills report at that moment, you would say that this person only thrives in a quiet environment because they don’t have any top skills in the influencing and relationship building domain. 

When they actually bought the version that has the ranking of all their strengths, they noticed that competition was actually ranked as skill number six. This actually also showed at another moment when the same person was doing a Clifton strengths assessment in a workplace setting and in that competition was actually ranked as their top strength. Therefore we propose that in our skills assessment we are not only going to look at the top 5 strengths but we also would like to look for the top three skills in each of the four domains. Therefore what we are looking for through this assessment is finding something like the following. 




In this way you see that this person has actually three skills: self-assurance, analytical and individualisation which are still coming up as top strength although they are in the navigate report for the Strenghtsfinder. The reason why this matters is that depending on the work setting you might not need the strongest influencing skills in certain work settings but influencer skills that are more complementary to the rest of their peers. 

Skills testing strategy: learning adult coloring

Because the majority of the skills of this person were in the executing and the strategic domain we switched the strategy for the skills assessment. We checked whether we could actually evaluate the skills in a more relaxed environment and were also checking whether we could as an extra benefit let this person learn a new hobby to relax. In this case we choose adult coloring. A hobby that has increased in popularity since the pandemic.

Baseline

The person hadn’t coloured any more since high school, therefore the coloring skills could certainly still approve. Although you can still see that the person is an achiever, because they try to finish the majority of their drawings. She is deliberative because she carefully chose the fields in the mandala that she would be coloring, and that the result still looked kind of finished if she wouldn’t reach the end of the drawing. Also for example it was still important that she made a choice for matching colors even before she had a lot of knowledge about color theory. 



Progress that shows more clearly the various skills

Thanks to their self-assurance skills, combined with the strategic skills input, learner and the analytical mind. They already ended up with some beautiful drawings. Thanks to the achiever mindset they were also able to color complete drawings and use many different coloring materials. The competition mindset could be seen in the way that the person wanted to color as many drawings as fast as possible. But it was important to use the majority of the time beautiful matching colors that belongs to the harmony skill. 

How does this apply to somebody else? 

The next time you need to do a skill exercise with a lot of questions, just try to think a bit more about the end goal, that might help out a bit more. On the other hand as a leader you would like to do your skills exercise a little bit differently, maybe look first at the combination of your people in your group and check how they love to do their job. Maybe it might just be fun to have a big puzzle as a project or maybe they really want to try a more group related activity or they want to do something hybrid. It is mainly important that you can assess the skills of the people you work with in the environment that they thrive the best.

Coloring books and reference