Edited by Gabriele Bammer.
For team dynamics to work effectively, what is the range of contributions that needs to be covered by different team members? How can diversity in skills relevant to team functioning be effectively recognised and harnessed? Here the focus is not on the actual task the team is trying to accomplish, but rather the dynamics of working together and the different contributions or roles required for effective team functioning.
A number of proprietary products (i.e., products owned by companies that need to be purchased to be used) have been developed to help teams assess the strengths and weaknesses of individual team members in contributing to effective team performance. The focus in this Editor’s Addition is to use one such product, CliftonStrengths®, to highlight one set of understandings about what key team dynamics are. Information available on the CliftonStrengths® website is used in abbreviated form and without the summary terms used to encapsulate each team and personal attribute.
The CliftonStrengths® assessment highlights four areas key to building a successful team:
- making things happen
- taking charge, speaking up and making sure others are heard
- building strong relationships that hold a team together and make it greater than the sum of its parts
- absorbing and analyzing information that informs better decisions.
These descriptions and those below are abbreviated from CliftonStrengths® (2018), although much of the wording is verbatim or close to it.
For each of these areas, there are particular ways in which team members can contribute to achieving the goal, with 34 specific team member contributions being identified.
Team members can help with making things happen, if they can contribute any of the following:
- prioritising a direction, following-through and making corrections to stay on track
- working hard with stamina
- taking psychological ownership of what they say they will do
- providing a defined purpose through their unchanging core values
- creating order through routine and structure
- organizing, complemented by flexibility, for maximum productivity
- taking serious care in making decisions by anticipating obstacles
- treating people the same, with stable routines and clear rules and procedures
- being adept at dealing with problems.
Team members can help with taking charge, speaking up and making sure others are heard, if they can contribute any of the following:
- wanting to make a big impact
- stimulating personal and group excellence
- measuring progress against the performance of others
- turning thoughts into action to make things happen
- being confident in their ability to take risks and having certainty in decisions taken
- putting thoughts into words and communicating and presenting well
- loving the challenge of meeting new people and making connections
- having presence, with the ability to take control and make decisions.
Team members can help with building strong relationships that hold a team together and make it greater than the sum of its parts, if they if they can contribute any of the following:
- being intrigued by the unique qualities of each person and able to figure out how different people can work together productively
- being contagiously enthusiastic
- recognizing and cultivating potential in others
- enjoying close working relationships with others
- looking for meaning and links, rather than coincidences
- sensing other people’s feelings by imagining themselves in others’ lives or situations
- looking for consensus and areas of agreement
- going with the flow and taking things as they come
- being aware of those who feel left out and making an effort to include them.
Team members can help with absorbing and analysing information that informs better decisions, if they can contribute any of the following:
- being inspired by the future and what could be
- creating alternative ways to proceed
- desiring to learn and continuously improve
- searching for reasons and causes, assessing all possible factors
- being intellectually active
- being fascinated by ideas and able to find connections between disparate phenomena
- accumulating and archiving information, ideas and more
- enjoying thinking about the past and looking at history to understand the present.
Individual team member assessments
The CliftonStrengths® assessment aims to increase the self-awareness of individual team members, encouraging them to develop their strengths and find ways of compensating for weaknesses or “blind spots.” For example, someone who wants to make a big impact needs to make sure that their contribution to the team is not marred by:
- a perception that they are overly concerned about their own reputation and success; instead they need to earn the respect of others through their actions and contributions
- masking their vulnerability or coming across as overly controlled, as this can make it difficult for others to know how to provide support; instead it helps if they value making others feel important by letting them know when help is needed.
Editor’s note: 1. How assessments can improve team functioning
Understanding how individual attributes can contribute to effective team functioning can be useful in three ways:
- It can help team leaders reflect on what they do well and figure out how to involve others in areas where they are relatively weak.
- It can help match the tasks that team members are asked to undertake to their strengths. It can also ensure that each team member’s contribution is properly recognised and rewarded, including paying attention to less glamorous roles such as implementing routines and structure, finding ways to include those left out, and note taking and archiving.
- By understanding both strengths and blind spots, it can help in understanding and managing points of friction in a team.
Editor’s note: 2. Other tools for assessing team roles
In addition to CliftonStrengths®, there are at least 4 other tools for assessing team roles, namely:
- Belbin team roles, described in the i2Insights primer on understanding diversity; this identifies nine behaviours
- DiSC®, which provides an assessment of four main personality profiles: (D)ominance, (i)nfluence, (S)teadiness and (C)onscientiousness (see: https://www.discprofile.com/)
- FourSight, based on four “thinking preferences”, namely clarify (understand the problem), ideate (identify the possibilities), develop (work out the perfect solution) and implement (jump into action) (see: https://www.foursightonline.com/).
- TIPping Point profile™, which helps individuals understand how their personality drives their ways of working in groups and teams, and which involves ten roles and two factors of effectiveness (further details are not provided; see https://www.talentsage.com/our-tools/the-tipping-point-profile-report-tool/).
Addition made on May 7, 2025: This i2Insights contribution is in no way intended as an endorsement of CliftonStrengths® or any other tool for assessing team roles. Because these are proprietary products, it is not possible for their validity to be independently assessed. Nevertheless, they are widely used and it does not make sense to ignore them. As this blog post aims to show, they also provide insights into ways of thinking about teamwork and team roles.
Concluding questions
How have you figured out the best ways for you to contribute to teamwork? Do you have effective strategies for identifying and overcoming your blind spots? If you are a team leader, how have you capitalised on the strengths in the team and managed the inevitable frictions? Have you found any of the available proprietary tools to be useful?
To find out more:
CliftonStrengths® website, see: https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx (accessed 5/5/25)
CliftonStrengths® (2018) Your CliftonStrengths 34 results. See “view sample” available at https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253676/how-cliftonstrengths-works.aspx (accessed 5/5/25)
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
A description of “Editor’s additions” is available in https://i2insights.org/index/integration-and-implementation-sciences-vocabulary/. This editor’s addition was produced by Gabriele Bammer using the references above.
Gabriele Bammer PhD is Professor of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at The Australian National University in Canberra. i2S provides theory and methods for tackling complex societal and environmental problems, especially for developing a more comprehensive understanding in order to generate fresh insights and ideas for action, supporting improved policy and practice responses by government, business and civil society, and effective interactions between disciplinary and stakeholder experts. She is the inaugural President of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD-Alliance).
When I directed a leadership program for academic environmental researchers, the facilitators used a learning style profile assessment. What I observed is that the profiles ended up being ranked. Participants who were visionary/big picture thinkers seemed to think they were the “best”. After it happened three years in a row, I asked the facilitators to stop using the assessment since it defeated the purpose of pointing out how different styles are needed to make a group productive.
I do feel that it is important to discover how different roles are needed within teams but also how we can learn to take on different actions within a group when needed. At times it is important to offer suggestions and equally important to support other people’s suggestions.
Thanks Margaret – those are really helpful insights.
Clifton Strength Finder is great. Its been years since I’ve re-done my assessment. I’ve heard of Belbin team roles and it looks similarly useful.
At our institute we had the DiSC assessment (paid and facilitated), and I love to know my colleagues Myers Briggs or Enneagram to know how they like to work and their thinking process (these are usually free). These tools are great to characterize the team in terms of personality tests. Another good one I learned through a Team Science Training event was Conflict Styles assessment. I brought it back to my research group and we had a good conversation.
Honestly a tool like Strength Finder or Belbin team roles give you some concrete idea of where you may have a gap in your team or where one can develop. Thanks for reminding me of Strength Finder!
Thanks for your comment. It’s a nice illustration of the power of realising that people are different and better understanding how others are different from oneself. I do wonder though if these tools can lead to stereotyping of others based on how they test on one of these tools- has that been your experience?
The Myers-Briggs test is a useful discussion point – on the one hand, its validity has been questioned, on the other, people continue to find it useful.
It would also be great to hear more about how you have used these tools in relation to gaps in teams.
I think personality tests can create stereotypes and also can be good at breaking stereotypes. One example is when someone uses your personality as a way to get you to do their work: “you like organizing things, could you take this on for this project”. And just because one person in the group excels in one task, it is not their responsibility to do it for everybody or nor is it a pass to avoid a task.
On the other hand, these personality designations could help break a bias. For example, lots of people in my group thought of me as an extrovert based on my work personality. They were shocked to learn that my results were nearly 90% introverted. Introverted gets equated with being a bad communicator, quiet, shy; yet communication is a learned skill that improves with practice.
So far, we have not used these for identifying gaps. But, I can see how a team roles model can be useful in that way.
The University of Illinois uses Clifton Strengths as one of the foundations of their IT Leadership Workshop (https://publish.illinois.edu/itleaders/about-itlw/) I have been through that training and what we learned from our Clifton Strengths Report provided invaluable insight.
It would be great if you would elaborate on what makes it invaluable. Is it the self-insight or the realisation that others are different or something else?