Stronger Agency Sales: Driving Revenue Growth with Your Top 5 CliftonStrengths
Harness your innate sales talent and go beyond just hitting targets to strategically dominate the sales landscape by unleashing the power of your Top 5 CliftonStrengths.
As the Director of Sales in a competitive marketing agency, you are the spearhead of growth, the closer of deals, and the energizing force that propels the entire business forward. You thrive on the thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of a win, and the tangible impact of seeing your efforts translate into revenue and expansion. Your world is one of targets, strategy, and unwavering drive. But in the high-stakes game of agency sales, how do you sustain that momentum and inspire your team to consistently overdeliver?
The secret weapon in your arsenal is a profound understanding of your Top 5 CliftonStrengths. For a results-oriented leader like you, knowing your innate talents isn’t just insightful; it’s a strategic imperative. It allows you to refine your sales approach, build a high-octane sales team, and collaborate more powerfully with other agency leaders, ensuring that the promises you make are promises the agency can keep. Being strategic with your unique CliftonStrengths is about channeling your natural drive into even more potent, sustainable success.
(Remember, CliftonStrengths reveal your inherent patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior – your most natural pathways to success, distinct from skills you’ve acquired.)
Your Strengths in the Arena: Dominating the Sales Landscape
Your unique blend of CliftonStrengths dictates how you approach the art and science of sales, from prospecting to closing. Here’s a few ways CliftonStrengths manifests for agency sales professionals:
The Goal Gladiator (e.g., Achiever, Competition, Focus): If themes like Achiever, Competition, or Focus burn brightly within you, you are inherently wired to pursue and conquer goals. You don’t just aim for targets; you relentlessly drive towards them, energized by the challenge and the taste of victory. This innate drive is infectious, setting a powerful pace for your entire sales operation.
The Master Persuader (e.g., Woo, Self-Assurance, Command): Strengths such as Woo, Self-Assurance, or Command equip you to confidently engage prospects, build quick rapport, and steer conversations towards a decisive close. You articulate the agency's value proposition with conviction and expertly navigate objections with an assuredness that inspires trust and action.
The Opportunity Architect (e.g., Strategic, Ideation): If you possess strengths like Strategic or Ideation, your sales approach transcends the transactional. You’re adept at seeing the bigger picture, crafting tailored solutions that address deep client needs, and identifying untapped market segments or innovative service bundles. This foresight allows you to upsell and cross-sell with panache.
Understanding these innate drivers allows you to play to your advantages, refining your personal sales strategy and leading your team by powerful example.
Every Strength Can Do Anything
Explore all the Clifton Strengths and how they can drive excellence in no matter what role you fill.
Power Alliances: Multiplying Sales Impact with Accounts & Operations
While you spearhead the acquisition of new business, the long-term success and profitability of those deals rely heavily on the capabilities of your colleagues in Account Management and Operations.
Partnering with Accounts for Lasting Revenue & Referrals: Our Director of Accounts, who excels at cultivating deep client loyalty (as detailed here), can be your greatest ally. Their insights into client satisfaction and emerging needs, often driven by strengths like Relator or Developer, can provide warm leads for upselling or cross-selling. Furthermore, strong account management ensures high client retention, making your job of hitting overall revenue targets more achievable by securing the base.
Ensuring Sales Promises are Operational Realities (with Operations): The Director of Operations, with their mastery of process and efficiency (discover their strengths-based methods here), ensures that the exciting deals you close can actually be delivered to the promised standard and timeline. Your Focus might drive you to close deals swiftly, but their Analytical or Restorative strengths help build the reliable systems that prevent those victories from becoming "operational burnout" for the delivery teams. This synergy is fundamental to building a trustworthy agency brand.
When Sales, Account Management, and Operations are aligned through an understanding of each other's strengths and goals, the agency doesn’t just win clients; it keeps them and serves them profitably. This directly addresses the challenge of "overextending resources" during growth phases.
Igniting Your Sales Team: Building a Culture of High Performance
Your leadership is pivotal in shaping a sales team that is not just skilled, but also motivated, resilient, and aligned.
Coaching for Peak Performance: By understanding your own strengths, you develop a keener eye for the diverse talents within your sales team. You can tailor your coaching, assign leads to the reps best wired to handle them (e.g., the natural networker for referrals, the tenacious researcher for cold outreach), and create an environment where everyone can contribute their best.
Fueling a Winning, Yet Supportive, Sales Culture: A strengths like Competition can inspire a high-energy sales floor. Balancing this with an appreciation for collaborative strengths (perhaps by recognizing team assists or shared wins) creates an environment that’s both driven and supportive. This insight is central to programs like the Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator, which helps build this "implementation roadmap" for a balanced and powerful team culture.
Sales as the Agency's Growth Catalyst: Fueling Future Success
The revenue your team generates is the fuel for the entire agency. It enables investment in talent, technology, and innovation across all departments.
Driving Strategic Growth & ROI: When you lead from your strengths, you’re not just hitting monthly numbers; you’re strategically shaping the agency's future. The quality of clients you attract and the profitability of the deals you close directly impact the agency's capacity for strategic investments and long-term success. A strengths-based sales approach inherently focuses on better qualification and fit, improving the ROI on every sales and marketing dollar spent.
Energizing the Entire Agency: Sales wins create a palpable buzz throughout the agency. They validate the hard work of every department and create a sense of excitement and forward momentum. Your strengths-driven triumphs become a powerful current that lifts all boats.
The Vanguard of Agency Prosperity
As Director of Sales, your innate drive and strategic acumen are critical to your agency's vitality and growth. By harnessing the power of your Top 5 CliftonStrengths, you elevate your leadership, forge an indomitable sales team, and forge powerful alliances with your fellow leaders, ensuring every win is a win for the entire agency.
See how your strengths-powered sales engine integrates with the rest of your agency's leadership: Read about the approaches of your Director of Accounts, Director of Operations, and Senior Agency Leadership.
Ready to build an agency where the synergy of collective strengths leads to unprecedented growth and market leadership? The Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator provides the expert facilitation and strategic framework.
FAQs on CliftonStrengths
Where can I learn more about cliftonstrengths?
Who Can I speak to to learn how CliftonStrengths Can Help My Agency?
Book a free consultation with our experts here.
What CliftonStrengths Programs Does Learn to Scale Offer?
Our introductory Team Strengths Accelerator is the starting point for agencies looking to apply their strengths in practical ways. Learn more about the Team Strengths Accelerator here.
Our menu of standard and custom training programs can easily integrate your CliftonStrengths results into that specific training offering. Learn more about our training offerings here.
If I want to simply take the CliftonStrengths Assessment, where do I go?
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is a 30-45 minute multiple-choice quiz facilitated by the Gallup organization. You can purchase your own individual access code on their store here.
Note: The Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator program includes up to ten access codes.
Stronger Agency Operations: Building Operational Excellence with Your Top 5 CliftonStrengths
Unleash your natural talents to stop just managing your agency's operations and start architecting them for flawless, peak performance.
Stronger Agency Operations: Building Operational Excellence with Your Top 5 CliftonStrengths
As Director of Operations in a fast-moving marketing agency, you are the master strategist behind the scenes, the one who ensures the brilliant ideas and ambitious campaigns actually see the light of day, flawlessly. While others focus on client charm or the thrill of the sale, your domain is the agency's engine room. You wrestle with "workflow optimization," strive to "increase agency efficiency," and are constantly on the lookout for ways to eliminate the "bottlenecks" that can plague a growing business. Your satisfaction comes from a perfectly executed project, a system that sings, and a team that operates like a well-oiled machine.
But even the most skilled operational leader faces challenges. It may look like "scaling pains" that stretch old processes to their breaking point, or "project delays” that are an embarassing result of miscommunication. How can you amplify your natural talent for order and problem-solving to build an even more resilient and efficient agency? The answer lies in the strategic application of your Top 5 CliftonStrengths. Understanding your strengths is like discovering a more powerful set of blueprints for success. It’s about leveraging your core genius to not just manage operations, but to truly architect them for peak performance.
(Quick definition: CliftonStrengths identify your most natural and potent patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior – your inherent talents that serve as your unique operational command center.)
Your Strengths as the Master Blueprint: Designing Flawless Agency Systems
Your CliftonStrengths are the tools you use to build strong, efficient systems for your agency's marketing projects. Here’s a few examples of how different CliftonStrengths can manifest for an operations-heavy role:
The Process Perfecter (e.g., Restorative, Analytical, Discipline): If themes like Restorative, Analytical, or Discipline are dominant for you, you possess an exceptional ability to diagnose system weaknesses, dissect complex problems, and implement meticulously structured solutions. You don’t just patch holes; you re-engineer processes to prevent future "operational burnout" and ensure consistent quality, a critical factor when trying to "streamline agency processes."
The Guardian of Order (e.g., Consistency, Responsibility): Strengths such as Consistency or Responsibility drive your commitment to fairness, predictability, and unwavering follow-through. You build the clear guidelines and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that ensure every project, from a small social campaign to a major brand launch, adheres to the agency’s quality standards and timelines. This creates stability amidst the creative buzz.
The Strategic Optimizer (e.g., Deliberative, Optimizer): Leading with Deliberative or Optimizer means you’re perpetually assessing how to elevate good systems to greatness. You’re not content with "good enough." Instead, you meticulously evaluate risks, anticipate potential "workflow roadblocks," and identify opportunities for continuous improvement, ensuring your agency’s operational infrastructure is not just keeping up, but staying ahead.
No matter what combination of strengths you possess (and they change over time, too!), playing to your strong suits empowers you to transform strategic objectives into flawlessly executed realities, ensuring your agency consistently delivers on its promises.
Every Strength Can Do Anything
Explore all the Clifton Strengths and how they can drive excellence in no matter what role you fill.
Engineering Peak Performance: Aligning with Accounts and Sales
The efficiency of your operations directly impacts – and is impacted by – your colleagues in Account Management and Sales. A strengths-based understanding fosters more productive, less siloed collaboration.
Streamlining for Client Success (with Accounts): Our Director of Accounts, as you may have explored here, excels in navigating client relationships, likely leveraging strengths such as Empathy or Adaptability. Your operational strengths, perhaps a robust Analytical approach or your Discipline in process, provide the essential framework to ensure their client promises are not just met, but exceeded efficiently. You help translate the often fluid nature of client requests into structured, manageable projects, mitigating "scope creep" before it impacts the bottom line.
Building a Scalable Sales Funnel (with Sales): The Director of Sales is focused on driving growth, perhaps powered by strengths like Achiever or Competition (see their perspective here). Your role is to ensure the operational capacity can seamlessly absorb this new business. By collaborating with a shared understanding of strengths, you can design client onboarding processes and project workflows that are both efficient for your team and responsive to the promises made during the sales cycle. This is key to avoiding the "feast-famine" cycle some agencies experience.
When operations, accounts, and sales are aligned through a mutual appreciation of diverse strengths, the agency operates with a powerful, unified rhythm, reducing "internal friction" and improving overall "team performance."
Architecting Your Operations Dream Team
Your leadership within the operations department – encompassing project managers, traffic coordinators, tech support, and more – is crucial for setting the standard for precision and reliability.
Precision-Guided Mentorship: Recognizing your teams’ individual strengths allows you to assign tasks that play to their natural talents—some might excel at detailed quality control, others at big-picture process mapping.
Fostering a Culture of Solution-Seekers: By championing your own strengths, you cultivate a culture where team members are empowered to identify inefficiencies and proactively suggest improvements. This shared ownership is a hallmark of high-performing teams and a key outcome of strengths-based initiatives like the Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator, which focuses on creating "actionable implementation roadmaps" for lasting change.
Operations: The Unseen Engine of Agency Profitability and Growth
While your work might often be behind the curtain, the operational excellence you engineer is absolutely fundamental to your agency's ability to grow profitably, satisfy clients, and maintain a healthy work environment.
Designing for Scalability: Meticulously designed and documented processes are the backbone that allows your agency to scale without imploding. This is essential for any agency serious about scaling.
Maximizing Profitability Through Efficiency: Every refined workflow, every automated task, every error caught before it becomes a costly redo – these operational wins translate directly into improved margins and a healthier bottom line. Your strengths are, in essence, profit drivers.
When your agency's operational engine is running on all cylinders, the entire organization benefits from reduced stress, increased capacity, and the ability to consistently deliver exceptional work.
The Master Builder of Agency Success
As Director of Operations, your talents for order, systemization, and relentless improvement are the invisible scaffolding that supports your agency's every success. By embracing your Top 5 CliftonStrengths, you move beyond managing daily tasks into strategically architecting the operational heart of your agency, ensuring it’s built for today’s demands and tomorrow’s growth.
Discover how your operational strengths create synergy with other agency leaders: Read about the approaches of our Director of Accounts (Stronger Agency Account Management), our Director of Sales (Stronger Agency Sales), and Senior Agency Leadership (Stronger Agency Leadership).
Ready to learn how to build an agency where every team member, not just leadership, operates from their strengths? The Team Strengths Accelerator from Learn to Scale provides the blueprint and expert facilitation.
FAQs on CliftonStrengths
Where can I learn more about cliftonstrengths?
Who Can I speak to to learn how CliftonStrengths Can Help My Agency?
Book a free consultation with our experts here.
What CliftonStrengths Programs Does Learn to Scale Offer?
Our introductory Team Strengths Accelerator is the starting point for agencies looking to apply their strengths in practical ways. Learn more about the Team Strengths Accelerator here.
Our menu of standard and custom training programs can easily integrate your CliftonStrengths results into that specific training offering. Learn more about our training offerings here.
If I want to simply take the CliftonStrengths Assessment, where do I go?
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is a 30-45 minute multiple-choice quiz facilitated by the Gallup organization. You can purchase your own individual access code on their store here.
Note: The Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator program includes up to ten access codes.
Stronger Agency Account Management: Using Your Top 5 Strengths to Master Agency Account Leadership
For the Director of Accounts focused on the critical job of client retention, learn how to transform your natural relational talents into your most powerful strategic advantage.
Stronger Agency Account Management: Using Your Top 5 Strengths to Master Agency Account Leadership
As the Director of Accounts in a thriving marketing agency, you are the conductor of client harmony, the weaver of lasting partnerships. Your days are a whirlwind of emails, calls, strategic counsel, and expectation management. You possess an almost intuitive ability to connect with clients, understand their unspoken needs, and guide them toward success. Yet, even for a natural people person, the pressure to maintain stellar client satisfaction, prevent churn, and lead a high-performing account team can feel immense, especially when facing "communication breakdowns" or the challenge of managing scope creep.
What if you could elevate your innate relational gifts to an even higher level of strategic impact? The key isn't to reinvent yourself, but to deeply understand and intentionally leverage your natural strengths. The CliftonStrengths Assessment is one way to define those strengths.
For a leader whose success hinges on the art of connection, knowing yourself at a deeper level is transformative. It helps you pinpoint the source of your client management magic, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics with greater ease, and inspire your team to deliver exceptional service that turns clients into lifelong advocates.
(Quick recap: CliftonStrengths highlight your inherent talents – your most natural and effective ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, which are foundational to your unique leadership style.)
Your Strengths in Full Display: Forging Unbreakable Client Bonds
Your role is deeply intertwined with your ability to build and maintain strong, positive relationships. Understanding your Top 5 CliftonStrengths reveals the unique ways you naturally excel at this, allowing you to be even more intentional.
The Empathy Advantage (e.g., Empathy, Developer): If themes like Empathy or Developer are at your core, you don’t just hear your clients; you feel with them. You're genuinely invested in their success and can anticipate their anxieties and aspirations. This allows you to proactively address concerns, offer tailored solutions, and build a profound level of trust that directly combats "client retention issues."
The Master Communicator (e.g., Communication, Woo): Strengths like Communication or Woo enable you to articulate complex marketing strategies with engaging clarity and to win over even the most skeptical stakeholders. You can transform a routine update into an inspiring vision for the future, ensuring clients feel both understood and excited. This is crucial when navigating "misaligned client expectations."
The Relationship Architect (e.g., Relator, Positivity): With dominant Relator talents, you build deep, authentic connections that go beyond mere professional courtesy. Clients see you as a trusted partner. Couple this with Positivity, and you become a beacon of optimism, adept at maintaining morale and steering relationships through inevitable challenges, keeping them strong and forward-moving.
By consciously deploying these talents, you can turn potential client friction into opportunities for stronger partnership and navigate the "endless feedback loops" with grace and effectiveness.
Every Strength Can Do Anything
Explore all the Clifton Strengths and how they can drive excellence in no matter what role you fill.
Orchestrating Harmony: Syncing with Operations and Sales for Client Delight
Your success in delighting clients is a team sport, heavily reliant on seamless collaboration with other vital agency leaders, particularly the Director of Operations and the Director of Sales.
Smoothing the Path with Operations: Our Director of Operations, as you may have seen here, is likely driven by strengths such as Analytical or Restorative, focusing on efficient processes that ensure flawless execution. Your relational strengths, perhaps Adaptability or Harmony, can be invaluable in translating evolving client needs into actionable, clear requests that fit their structured systems. You act as the crucial empathetic bridge, ensuring client desires don’t become operational headaches, a common source of "internal misalignment & conflict."
Partnering with Sales for Seamless Handoffs & Growth: The Director of Sales, on the other hand, is the agency's growth engine, probably powered by strengths like Achiever or Focus (read about their strengths-driven strategies here). Your deep understanding of existing client satisfaction and emerging needs (perhaps gleaned through your Individualization talent) can feed crucial intelligence back to the sales team, highlighting opportunities for organic growth with current clients or providing powerful testimonials that attract new ones. This ensures a smoother transition from prospect to happy, long-term partner.
When agency leaders operate with an awareness of their own and others' strengths, it minimizes "work silos" and cultivates a leadership synergy that clients can feel.
Nurturing Your Account Team: A Hothouse for Strengths
Your leadership is instrumental in developing an account team that consistently delivers excellence and embodies the agency's commitment to client success.
Insightful Mentorship: Knowing your own strengths sharpens your ability to recognize and cultivate the diverse talents within your account team. You can assign clients and projects not just based on workload, but on which team member's natural talents align best with the client's personality and project demands. This proactive approach is key to preventing "talent burnout" and improving "team performance."
Building a Culture of Trust and Collaboration: When your team members feel their unique contributions are understood and valued—a core tenet of a strengths-based approach—it fosters a more open, supportive, and collaborative internal culture. This positive dynamic radiates outward, enhancing every client interaction. Embedding this ethos agency-wide is precisely what comprehensive programs like the Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator aim to achieve, moving beyond just assessment to "actionable development plans."
Client Success as an Agency Superpower: Your Strategic Impact
The quality of your client relationships and the satisfaction levels you maintain are not just departmental metrics; they are critical indicators of the entire agency's health and future prospects.
Leading with your strengths enables you to manage these vital relationships with greater authenticity and impact. It allows you to strategically invest your energy where it yields the greatest return – in building client loyalty, identifying growth opportunities, and ensuring your agency is perceived not just as a vendor, but as an indispensable partner. This directly contributes to a more stable revenue stream and a stellar market reputation.
The Art of Lasting Client Partnerships: Perfected by Your Strengths
As a Director of Accounts, your innate ability to connect, understand, and advocate for your clients is your superpower. By consciously identifying, understanding, and applying your Top 5 CliftonStrengths, you elevate these talents into a strategic leadership advantage. You become more than a manager; you become a true "Client Whisperer," fostering relationships that fuel your agency's growth and solidify its success.
Interested in how your colleagues in Operations and Sales leverage their distinct strengths? Explore their unique perspectives here: Stronger Agency Operations and Stronger Agency Sales.
Ready to explore how a unified, strengths-based strategy can transform client service and internal collaboration across your entire agency? The Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator offers a facilitated journey to unlock this collective potential.
FAQs on CliftonStrengths
Where can I learn more about cliftonstrengths?
Who Can I speak to to learn how CliftonStrengths Can Help My Agency?
Book a free consultation with our experts here.
What CliftonStrengths Programs Does Learn to Scale Offer?
Our introductory Team Strengths Accelerator is the starting point for agencies looking to apply their strengths in practical ways. Learn more about the Team Strengths Accelerator here.
Our menu of standard and custom training programs can easily integrate your CliftonStrengths results into that specific training offering. Learn more about our training offerings here.
If I want to simply take the CliftonStrengths Assessment, where do I go?
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is a 30-45 minute multiple-choice quiz facilitated by the Gallup organization. You can purchase your own individual access code on their store here.
Note: The Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator program includes up to ten access codes.
Stronger Agency Leadership: How Your Top 5 CliftonStrengths Solve Agency Leadership Puzzles
If you're a brilliant practitioner struggling with the shift to powerful leader, learn how your innate talents—not another new system—are the true key to solving your agency's biggest team and growth challenges.
Stronger Agency Leadership: How Your Top 5 CliftonStrengths Solve Agency Leadership Puzzles
You’re a visionary, a risk-taker, a master of your marketing craft. You’ve poured your heart into building your agency, often navigating the "feast or famine" cycle and the relentless pressure to innovate. But as your agency grows, do you find yourself wrestling with new challenges – a "founder's dilemma" where your role shifts from doing the work to leading others who do the work? Perhaps you're facing communication breakdowns that lead to project delays, or struggling with how to retain top talent in a demanding industry. These are common growing pains for small marketing agencies.
Many agency owners and senior leaders are "accidental managers" – brilliant practitioners who now face the complex art of leadership, often without extensive formal training. If the weight of team performance, scaling operations, and fostering a positive culture feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. The good news? A powerful key to unlocking your next level of leadership effectiveness, and solving these persistent agency puzzles, lies within understanding your innate talents. Discovering and applying your Top 5 CliftonStrengths isn't just a self-improvement exercise; it’s a foundational strategy for transforming how you lead, inspiring your team, and scaling your agency with renewed clarity and confidence.
(A quick primer: CliftonStrengths identify your naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior – your inherent talents, distinct from your learned skills. Think of them as your unique leadership DNA.)
1. Your Strengths as a Leadership Compass: Navigating the Fog of Growth
As an agency leader, you’re constantly making high-stakes decisions. Knowing your Top 5 CliftonStrengths is like having a reliable compass, especially when the path forward seems foggy due to scaling pains or internal team friction.
Clarity Amidst Chaos: Understanding your dominant talents illuminates your natural leadership style. If Strategic is a top theme, you instinctively cut through clutter to see future possibilities, invaluable for guiding your agency’s vision when facing market shifts or internal scaling challenges. If Relator is prominent, you build deep, genuine connections, which is crucial for fostering loyalty and navigating the "backchannel conversations" that can undermine agency culture.
Authentic Decision-Making: This self-awareness helps you lead from your core, reducing that "winging it" feeling many leaders experience. It allows you to tackle problems like "ineffective meetings" or "poor communication" with approaches that feel natural and sustainable for you.
Understanding Your Unique Impact: Recognizing your strengths also clarifies how your leadership approach is perceived. A leader with strong Command might make swift decisions – a huge asset when deadlines loom. Yet, without awareness, this could inadvertently sideline team input, a critical insight when addressing "leadership and management gaps".
This journey of self-discovery is vital. It provides a framework for understanding your unique leverage in solving problems, from "challenges scaling marketing agency team" to improving overall team performance.
2. From Expert Doer to Empowered Leader: The Art of Strengths-Based Delegation
One of the toughest transitions for agency founders is shifting from being the primary expert doer to an empowering leader. This is where the "founder's dilemma" often hits hard. Your strengths provide the key to making this shift successfully.
Focus Your Brilliance: Instead of stretching yourself thin trying to oversee every detail (a recipe for burnout), you can consciously lean into activities that energize you and utilize your core talents.
Delegate with Precision: Understanding your strengths also illuminates tasks that drain you or where others on your team might naturally excel. This transforms delegation from a hopeful hand-off into a strategic deployment of talent. This is crucial for addressing "talent retention issues" – people thrive when they can use their strengths.
Cultivate Psychological Safety: When you lead from your authentic strengths, you model vulnerability and create an environment where others feel safe to contribute their unique talents. This is essential for fostering the creativity that marketing agencies depend on.
3. Seeing Your Team Through a New Lens: Unlocking Collective Genius
The true power of CliftonStrengths unfolds when you begin to see not only your own talents but also those of your team.
Beyond Job Titles: You move past looking at skills and experience alone to recognizing the unique ways each person is wired to contribute. This helps you tackle "teamwork & collaboration deficits" by understanding why certain team members approach tasks differently.
Building Complementary Partnerships: This insight allows you to assemble project teams or assign responsibilities in a way that maximizes strengths, mitigates weaknesses, and reduces "internal misalignment & conflict".
Targeted Mentorship & Development: You can guide your team members’ growth by helping them identify and apply their own strengths, leading to higher engagement, better performance, and increased job satisfaction – directly impacting "employee engagement ideas for small agencies" and addressing the pain of "talent retention and burnout".
A comprehensive approach, like our Team Strengths Accelerator, helps embed this understanding across your entire agency, turning individual talents into a collective force. This program is more than an assessment; it offers an "actionable implementation roadmap" and "expert facilitation" to ensure lasting change.
4. Leading with Intent: Crafting a Resilient and Thriving Agency
Leadership in a fast-paced agency is a continuous journey of growth and adaptation. Understanding your Top 5 CliftonStrengths is a pivotal first step in evolving from an "accidental manager" into an intentional, impactful leader.
This knowledge helps you:
Build a Stronger Culture: Address issues like "toxic agency culture" by fostering an environment of appreciation for diverse talents.
Improve Communication: Equip yourself and your team to have more effective conversations, reducing misunderstandings.
Scale Sustainably: Make more informed decisions about team structure, roles, and responsibilities as your agency grows.
Your ability to lead effectively, leveraging your authentic strengths, is the ultimate multiplier for your agency’s success, helping you build a business that is not only profitable but also a genuinely great place to work.
The Journey to Stronger Leadership Starts Within
Uncovering and applying your Top 5 CliftonStrengths is a profound investment in your leadership and your agency's future. It equips you to lead with greater confidence, foster a high-performing team culture, and navigate the complexities of agency growth with a clear, authentic vision.
Ready to explore how your unique strengths can transform your leadership and tackle pressing agency challenges? This is just the beginning! Dive deeper into how understanding and applying strengths can revolutionize your team dynamics and business outcomes.
Explore our resources on strengths-based leadership, starting with our overview of Clifton Strengths for leaders on our blog.
Curious about how a strengths-based approach, complete with an actionable roadmap and sustained support, can be systematically embedded within your agency's DNA? The Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator is designed specifically to help marketing agencies like yours unlock this potential. Click here to learn more or schedule a chat with our experts.
FAQs on CliftonStrengths
Where can I learn more about cliftonstrengths?
Who Can I speak to to learn how CliftonStrengths Can Help My Agency?
Book a free consultation with our experts here.
What CliftonStrengths Programs Does Learn to Scale Offer?
Our introductory Team Strengths Accelerator is the starting point for agencies looking to apply their strengths in practical ways. Learn more about the Team Strengths Accelerator here.
Our menu of standard and custom training programs can easily integrate your CliftonStrengths results into that specific training offering. Learn more about our training offerings here.
If I want to simply take the CliftonStrengths Assessment, where do I go?
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is a 30-45 minute multiple-choice quiz facilitated by the Gallup organization. You can purchase your own individual access code on their store here.
Note: The Learn to Scale Team Strengths Accelerator program includes up to ten access codes.
3 Key Elements for An Executive Offsite
An executive offsite that doesn’t include these three fundamental components is going to be a waste of time, at best.
Key Questions And How To Answer Them About Running An Executive Offsite
Your executive offsite can't afford to fail. Statistics show that 61% of senior executives struggle to execute their strategy, and 44% have experienced failed strategic initiatives.
This is what a doomed offsite looks like:
They wander from topic to topic without a clear focus
New ideas don’t get generated and good decisions don’t get made
Interpersonal conflict (or fear of conflict) cause teams to avoid tough- but necessary- conversations
The offsite ultimately doesn’t grow the business
Teams often organize an executive offsite for their leaders. This allows them to focus on the bigger picture and prioritize long-term strategies. It also provides an opportunity to solve large problems.
A well-structured and efficient offsite can provide clarity on core issues. It can also boost confidence in the strategies to address them. Additionally, it can set motivating targets to help the business advance.
Small teams, large teams, and everyone in between benefits by having a time and space to zoom out of the day-to-day and reset, but few teams have the expertise to organize an effective offsite.
They miss the basics.
There are three components to a killer executive offsite and they’re easy to implement, even for a team conducting their first offsite.
But, if you want an offsite that's highly effective, there is a key..
The key is to have one unified mission guiding all the components. This mission provides a frame for the experience and dials up the synergy between all three elements.
Here are a few examples of a singular overarching mission:
As a shorthand, a simple offsite mission will contain a single verb and a single noun.
Develop a talent strategy for the upcoming year
Improve our leadership team’s day-to-day effectiveness and trust
Navigate the big change that’s happening soon
Once you’ve identified your big-picture mission, it’s time to start with the first of the three components: Offsite Structure.
“How will we run this offsite?”
Offsite Structure
Part of the offsite magic is that it’s different from day-to-day work. If your leadership team stays in the same chairs, with the same schedule of meetings, with the same work output expectations, it’s hard to disentangle and zoom out.
In order for leaders to think differently, they need to work differently.
We recommend starting with thinking through Offsite Structure because it’s usually the most tangible and familiar to first-time offsite planners.
When people enter a new headspace, they can be more innovative, make new connections, talk about conflict in a new way, and change how they think and behave. As an offsite organizer, you can curate the experience to provide the room for those positive outcomes to happen.
Some simple ways to break from the day-to-day work:
Go to a new physical location
Bring the team together for a longer period of time than a typical meeting
Bring in a facilitator to change how the experience is managed
Talk about topics that aren’t often discussed
Remove expectations to produce work/manage work while at the offsite
These design factors help create the headspace for leaders to step into, but it also requires that leaders are equipped to step into this new headspace. Beyond the logistical elements for an offsite, there needs to be the ingredient most teams miss when making big decisions: the data.
2. “How can we be accurate throughout this offsite?”
Offsite Data
Have you ever been in a meeting where a lot of hypotheses to a problem were suggested but later discovered that there was no evidence to support any of them?
Offsites are notorious for chasing shadows.
Since leadership teams are removed from the front lines of customers and individual contributors, their natural data set of experiences are outdated or filtered by middle management. Decisions by executives are highly at risk of being myopic, based on false pretenses, and out-of-touch with the staff and customers.
Leaders who are aware of these risks equip themselves with the best facts and perspectives before making high-impact decisions:
Provide a report of relevant data points for participants to read before the offsite takes place
Invite an archetypal customer or employee to present directly to the leadership team
Start the offsite with a simple show-and-tell from each leader containing their division’s data that is relevant to the overarching mission
Plan for the offsite’s output to be reviewed by a panel of customers/employees and then amended with their feedback
The data and evidence like those listed above helps guide strategic decisions as well as justify the outcomes, generating far more buy-in from employees and customers.
While offsite design and preparedness are the first two failure points for teams running offsites, the final component to an effective offsite is usually the easiest to identify but the hardest to do well.
3. “How do we make sure this offsite ultimately works?”
Offsite Mandate
The cost of an executive offsite is nothing to sneeze at - leadership time, travel and expenses, facilitators, etc. - but the cost of bad outcomes from an offsite can kill a business.
It’s easy to imagine an avalanche that’s caused by a leadership team that doesn’t trust each other, bases decisions on a flawed understanding of the bigger picture, plays politics for their own self-interest, and fails to produce anything useful out of an offsite.
It’s also easy to imagine the potential of a leadership team that makes the best decisions possible to catapult a business to the next level with clear calls-to-action and a unified narrative from all participants.
Researchers found that most executive strategies deliver only 63% of their potential financial performance, and more than one-third of the surveyed executives placed the figure at less than 50%.
You can’t afford for this offsite to fail and you shouldn’t accept for it to fall short.
There are two related pieces to this final critical component to executive offsites: a mindset and an outcome.
Just like how logistics need to be intentionally designed to curate space for a killer offsite, the mindset carried by participants needs to be intentionally framed as well. Without setting the mindset beforehand, participants may come in with the wrong expectations or are unwilling to commit to the decisions that need to be made.
A well-communicated mindset should be sourced from the overarching mission but humanizes and makes it relevant to the participants:
MISSION - Develop a talent strategy for the upcoming year
MINDSET - “This offsite will set a new direction for our business”
MISSION - Improve our leadership team’s day-to-day effectiveness and trust
MINDSET - “We need to better communicate and collaborate as a team”
MISSION -Navigate the big change that’s happening soon
MINDSET - “If we don’t have a plan for this upcoming problem, our business may not survive it”
If there is a CEO or designated leader for the executive team, this expectation needs to be clearly communicated and endorsed by that individual. If the top person isn’t fully on-board with what needs to happen as a leadership team, it’s unlikely the rest of the business will follow suit.
The other half of an offsite’s mandate is a clear outcome that the offsite is due to produce. It’s an answer to the question asked at any well-run meeting, “Now what?”
Target outcomes don’t always have to be a decision, but they tend to be the mirror of the initial mindset expectation:
MISSION - Develop a talent strategy for the upcoming year
MINDSET - “This offsite will set a new direction for our business”
OUTCOME - A clear and singular set of priorities to guide our business’s talent strategy
MISSION - Improve our leadership team’s day-to-day effectiveness and trust
MINDSET - “We need to better communicate and collaborate as a team”
OUTCOME - A firm break from how we communicated and collaborated as a team with clear guidelines around our potential points of conflict going forward
MISSION - Navigate the big change that’s happening soon
MINDSET - “If we don’t have a plan for this upcoming problem, our business may not survive it”
OUTCOME - A strategic and tactical plan for handling an upcoming business threat
These two halves- a transparent mindset and a target outcome- can be the X-factor that changes your benign offsite into a transformational offsite.
A Better Executive Offsite
To recap, the ingredients for a high-quality executive offsite must include:
An intentional departure from day-to-day work by curating a logistical space- physical and temporal- for your offsite
Equipping participants with data and evidence to make accurate decisions
A clear expectation of why the team is conducting an offsite and what will happen because of it
Underneath all of that is a singular mission to guide the momentum of your well-planned and run offsite.
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Three Blind Spots, See How They Run (Your Business)
Everyone has blind spots. Ironically, the people with the most blind spots think they have none.
How Leaders Unintentionally Lie To Themselves
As we've been conducting business assessments, we've started to observe some common blind spots. Every entrepreneur we've worked with- and let's be real, every human ever- has blind spots.
It's normal. It's the nature of having a brain that loves to recognize and identify patterns, even when there aren't actually patterns there. Our brains skip over gaps and make connections-that-couldn't-actually-happen because that's what brains love to do.
Here's three blind spots that we've seen (and you probably have in some degree):
"If I close five sales this quarter, I'll have big money."
How long does it take to close a sale? How big is a typical sale? Have you closed three sales in a quarter before? Is this a time of the year that your market typically buys? How many leads will it take to make five sales?
This blind spot can appear when you develop a logical statement (If This, Then That) and imagine that the world will actually follow that logic.
It's all the assumptions bundled in the IF that's ripe for blind spots. Unpacking assumptions will uncover blind spots.
"I can use the free version for now."
Time is an expensive and invisible cost. It seems like the easy resource to spend when other resources such as financial or human capital are in short supply.
If you spend time frivolously, it's no better than spending money frivolously.
The blind spot manifests when you are unaware that you are spending time, rather than making a financial investment OR choosing not to do that thing at all.
"I'm waiting to make a decision."
We all can recognize the tradeoffs around making a decision. There are also tradeoffs to not making a decision.
When you delay making a choice, it could be because of an emotional blind spot: you might fearful of regretting your choice.
This manifests when you look at a decision through a scarcity mindset (what will my pain be?) rather than an abundance mindset (what opportunities will this present?).
If you're waiting to choose, ask the Five Whys to understand if it because of fear (scarcity) or that the opportunity isn't compelling enough (abundance). And if you can't Five Why yourself to an answer, then ask: Are you not choosing to choose because the status quo is better than the possible upside from the choice?
Everyone has blind spots. Ironically, the people with the most blind spots think they have none.
It's how we constantly reflect, evolve, and grow through our blind spots that defines and allows us to find success.
If you think your blind spots are holding back your business, we'd love to chat with you to see if we can quickly spotlight some of your blind spots and provide recommendations to address them.
From Googling to Experting: Don’t Let Imposter Syndrome Win
What moment sticks out for you when you felt completely unprepared and undeserving of your current situation? Learn from Rachel Kohn, a recruiting manager at Alyce and seasoned pro in imposter syndrome, on how she battled the nerves of not feeling good enough at her work, while simultaneously growing her experience in strategic recruitment.
Working Through Imposter Syndrome In HR: A One-on-One Interview with Rachel Kohn at Alyce
Rachel Kohn is a recruiting rockstar, but she did not always see herself that way.
I sat down with Rachel (on Zoom, of course - how long have we been in this pandemic??), after a particularly hectic week of school projects, essays, and conversations about jobs post-graduation. Don’t get me wrong, I know I am only a junior in college, and everyone says that I have “time.” But you get it! The idea of not knowing where you will be after graduation is scary, and invites the good ol’ uninvited, inevitable imposter syndrome. You know, that fear of not being good enough to apply for a job, or perform excellent work anywhere. I kept trying to finish my assignments that week, but I kept getting clouded by the fears of what comes next, and if I’ll even be qualified to do anything by the end of next year. You may have experienced these jolts of uncertainty as well, and if so, let me validate you and say yes, they’re no fun.
So boy was I glad to have spoken with Rachel at the end of that week. She shared her story of how she got to where she is today, with hard work and talent, but not without imposter syndrome and failure along the way.
Rachel, the current Manager of Recruiting and Onboarding at Alyce, always knew she wanted to go into recruiting, starting in college as a tour guide and VP of Recruitment in her sorority. She loved the process of getting people excited about her university or organization, and by extension, this joy became her career.
After graduating college, Rachel dipped her toes into teaching, Higher Ed Admissions work, and eventually a career in Talent Acquisition in education/non-profits. Her main role was the Director of Talent Recruitment for Charter schools in Boston, until she landed herself an opportunity at the Bowdoin Group in 2017, up until February of this year when she transitioned to Alyce.
Rachel recalls her first day at the Bowdoin Group, an executive strategic recruiting company, coming from a career in recruiting in strictly education and non-profit settings. Rachel was immediately assigned to attend a meeting with a client, a software company at the Prudential Center. Rachel had no experience in the software industry, but she knew she could recruit. At that first meeting, Rachel sat quietly as her coworker (who ultimately became Rachel’s main mentor throughout her entire time at the Bowdoin Group) did the talking to the group of executives. She took furious notes on her laptop and wrote down any software-related words that she did not recognize or understand, in order to Google them later and familiarize herself with the technical topics and terms. She felt that all-too-familiar jolt of imposter syndrome: Rachel immediately jumped into something that she did not know she would be great at, and that was nerve-wracking.
Rachel is not alone in these feelings, which is very clear, considering that I just outed myself as a seasoned pro in imposter syndrome. I often feel like I hold myself back when something seems out of reach for me (and I get very overwhelmed when these feelings stop me from dealing with my actual, present responsibilities, like getting assignments done and enjoying college). But as I spoke to Rachel, I saw how the risk she took in entering that meeting required the confidence and recognition in her past experience, even if it did not directly correlate with recruitment at a software company.
While Rachel had not spent four years prior to her first day at Bowdoin coding and understanding the software world, she had spent her entire career on talent acquisition, and spotting out top talent based on roles needed at different schools and organizations. Rachel had already filled her toolkit with knowledge to recognize what leadership roles are required to revamp a company and understand why roles matter at any stage of the business.
This reframing of past knowledge and skills completely blew my mind. I have always heard of transferable skills, and I often preach this phrase to people who I advise in my college job. I say, “Oh, you have transferable skills! That will totally make you marketable.” But why don’t I actually believe it myself? I shoot potential job ideas down because I’m afraid I won’t be qualified for them, rather than seeing how my past experiences have actually helped me develop the exact skills to be qualified for these roles.
Rachel reminded me that while I may not have the direct experience, lingo, or vocabulary for a specific job or position, I do have the skills and talent necessary to become an invaluable resource. Rachel went home after her first day at Bowdoin and Googled those software terms, but she had the experience to learn how to become the expert for the different companies she recruited for.
Rachel’s story comes back full circle as she transitioned to Alyce, after nearly four years at the Bowdoin Group. Rachel was looking for a new position where she would see the long-term impact of her work in-house, rather than a client-facing consulting path. One day, Rachel found herself interviewing the CEO of Alyce for the Bowdoin Group’s podcast, and was struck by the values of the company. She saw the value of Alyce’s personalization of corporate gifts through sustainability, the power of choice, and the ability to donate the value of the gift to charity. She saw that long-term, results-driven work she had been craving. Rachel applied for the managerial role of recruiting and onboarding at Alyce, and started in February of 2021.
Oh, and remember when I said that Rachel’s first nerve-wracking meeting at the Bowdoin Group was with a software company? Well, guess what: Alyce is a software company.
Rachel now works as the leading recruiter for a software-based team, using language and lingo she had to Google four years prior on her first day. It was her imposter syndrome that indirectly led her to her dream role.
The potential (and inevitability) of failure will always be there, and that’s not a bad thing, I’m learning. An exciting and fulfilling life is all about trying things, failing at them, and then trying again. “Failing forward,” as Rachel puts it.
Imposter syndrome arises when we’re being challenged, but growth occurs when we beat our own insecurities through the results we put out. Rachel is a prime example of this: at the time at which we spoke, she had already hired and onboarded fourteen new people to Alyce since starting her new role, all within the first three months of working there. Trying to pick the right people who fit in with the team, while learning the ropes of the company oneself may feel daunting, but Rachel knows she’s an expert at recruiting, and knows she cares about Alyce and the longevity of the company. Self-doubt can creep up all it wants, but Rachel is proud of her experiences and skills which have made her qualified to rock at her role.
Her experience has proven her talent, and she will never let imposter syndrome win.
The next time I talk to any of my friends about applying for jobs or feeling unqualified for a position, I need to go into that conversation with Rachel’s attitude. Learn along the way and exude confidence, because that’s what everyone else is doing anyway. As long as I find the companies and communities that bring me purpose, excitement, and joy (even if most of the time), then I can overcome the feelings of imposter syndrome while I build my years of work experience.
If you would like to connect with Rachel, you can find her on LinkedIn.