Coaching practices for Team Strengths Assessment
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Team Strengths Assessment, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’ve quietly filed each person on my team as strong or weak, and then I’m baffled when my "strong" one flounders on something new
- If you asked me to name what I’m actually good at, I’d freeze
- I look around at the people I’ve hired and they all think exactly like me
- My team keeps dropping the ball at the same stage every single project
- Everyone on my team is quietly playing for their own scoreboard
Practices that may help
- Assess readiness task by task, not person by person
Rate competence and commitment for the specific task in front of them, not the person overall.
Situational Leadership, Made Practical - Take the VIA survey and identify your signature strengths
Discover your top five to seven character strengths using the validated VIA survey.
VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical - Build a team whose combined strengths cover all four domains
Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical - Map your team’s genius coverage
Check whether all six activities are covered by someone who finds them energizing.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Align around collective results, not individual status
Teams fail when members prioritize their own visibility or department’s success over the shared goal.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical - Diagnose which safety stage your team is currently in
Before intervening, accurately assess whether the deficit is inclusion, learner, contributor, or challenger safety.
The Four Stages of Psychological Safety - Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
Strengths-based leadership, developed by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie building on Gallup’s decades of manager research, holds that the most effective leaders invest in their own strengths and build teams whose combined strengths cover all four leadership domains — executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. Gallup’s correlational research consistently finds that strength-focused teams report higher engagement and performance, though the causal direction is not fully established. - Connect individual strengths to the broader virtues they serve
Understand which of the six VIA virtues your signature strengths express, and what that reveals about your character.
VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical - Build vulnerability-based trust
Teams that can’t admit weakness, mistakes, or ignorance to each other cannot genuinely collaborate.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical - Performing: step back and protect the conditions
A Performing team needs air cover and resources, not direction.
Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
Related concerns
- Team Strengths Gaps
Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
Build a team whose combined strengths cover all four domains
- Building Team Capability
Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
- Complementary Team Strengths
Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
- How To Assess Team Dysfunction
Teams that check in on how they’re working together catch dysfunction before it compounds.
Use regular team health checks to surface dysfunction early
- Lencioni Team Assessment
Patrick Lencioni’s model describes five compounding failures that undermine teams: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results — each built on the one below. It is a practitioner framework presented as a business fable, not an empirically tested model, but its five dimensions align well with decades of team effectiveness research, making it a useful diagnostic even without controlled-trial support.
- Strengths Assessment Leadership
Strengths-based leadership, developed by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie building on Gallup’s decades of manager research, holds that the most effective leaders invest in their own strengths and build teams whose combined strengths cover all four leadership domains — executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. Gallup’s correlational research consistently finds that strength-focused teams report higher engagement and performance, though the causal direction is not fully established.
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