Coaching practices for Team Strengths Gaps

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Team Strengths Gaps, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I look around at the people I’ve hired and they all think exactly like me
• 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
• My team keeps dropping the ball at the same stage every single project
• On my team nobody will admit they’re stuck or wrong or don’t know something
• Everyone on my team is quietly playing for their own scoreboard

Practices that may help

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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)
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. Invest more development effort in your strengths than in your weaknesses
   Move from average to excellent in your strength areas rather than from poor to average in your weak ones.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
8. Explore before you prescribe: diagnose why the gap happened
   The solution to a missed commitment depends entirely on what caused the miss — and you usually don’t know until you ask.
   Crucial Accountability: Holding People to Commitments That Matter
9. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders
   The same people perform differently under different leadership — so start with the leadership.
   Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
10. 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.

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.