Workplace tool
CliftonStrengths
CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder)
Ranks 34 talent themes in your personal order. Excellent at generating useful language about what you are good at, and structurally unable to compare you to anyone else.
Why that grade: Gallup publishes substantial technical documentation and the instrument is carefully built, but its forced-choice design produces within-person rankings that cannot be compared between people, and independent validation is limited.
- Cost
- $24.99 for the top five themes, $59.99 for all 34
- Time
- 30-35 min
- Items
- 177
- Published
- 1999
One hundred and seventy-seven paired statements, timed at twenty seconds each, which is why the sitting is close to thirty minutes.
Publisher
GallupOrigin
Donald O. Clifton and Gallup
What you get free: None. Access codes are also bundled with some Gallup books.
The verdict
The best vocabulary-generating instrument for career conversations, with one hard constraint: the scores are relative to yourself and cannot be used to compare people. Buy the full 34 or skip it.
Strengths
- The 34-theme vocabulary is unusually precise. There is a real difference between Achiever and Maximizer, and having words for it changes how people describe their own work.
- Deliberately asymmetric: it reports what you are good at and refuses to enumerate weaknesses, which makes it far easier to run inside a real team.
- Gallup publishes genuine technical documentation, which puts it ahead of most commercial competitors.
- A ranked list of 34 is far higher resolution than a four-way or sixteen-way sort.
Limitations
- Ipsative scoring means your results cannot be compared with a colleague’s. A shared top theme does not mean you have equal amounts of it.
- For the same reason it must never be used for hiring or selection, a point Gallup itself makes.
- Refusing to report weaknesses is a design choice with a cost: the instrument is silent about the thing that is actually derailing someone.
- Independent peer-reviewed validation is thin relative to the size of the commercial ecosystem around it.
- The paid tiers are structured so that the genuinely useful full ranking costs more than twice the entry price.
The ipsative problem, and why it matters more than it sounds
CliftonStrengths asks you to choose between paired statements under time pressure. That produces a ranking of your themes against each other, which is exactly the right design for the question "where should this person spend their energy" and exactly the wrong design for "which of these two candidates is more analytical".
The practical rule follows directly. Inside your own head, the ranking is informative. Across two people, it is meaningless, because you have no idea what absolute level either ranking sits at. Someone whose top theme is Empathy may be less empathetic in absolute terms than someone for whom it ranks twentieth.
Top five or all 34
The top five report is the cheaper product and the less useful one. Most of the value in the full ranking is at the bottom, where you find out which themes you have essentially none of. That is the information that explains why a particular kind of work has always felt like wading through mud.
If the budget only stretches to one purchase, the full 34 is the one worth making. The top five tells you things you probably already suspected.
What it reports back
Results are expressed as ranked themes.
- Executing
- Themes about making things happen: Achiever, Discipline, Focus, Responsibility, and others.
- Influencing
- Themes about reaching a wider audience: Command, Communication, Woo, Maximizer, and others.
- Relationship Building
- Themes about holding a team together: Empathy, Harmony, Includer, Relator, and others.
- Strategic Thinking
- Themes about absorbing and analysing information: Analytical, Futuristic, Ideation, Learner, and others.
The evidence, with sources
Nothing in this section is stated without an attribution. Where a figure varies by version or sample, the range is given rather than the most flattering number.
Reliability
Gallup’s technical report documents test-retest correlations for the themes across intervals of several months that fall in a moderate to good range, with variation between themes.
technical manualAsplund, Lopez, Hodges & Harter, The Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 Technical Report, Gallup
Validity
The instrument is ipsative: you rank statements against each other, so a theme appearing in your top five means it beat your other themes, not that you have more of it than other people do. Ipsative scores are not valid for between-person comparison or selection.
peer reviewedBaron (1996), Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 69(1), 49-56Strengths-based development interventions show small to moderate positive effects on wellbeing and engagement, which supports the practice built around the instrument more strongly than it supports the instrument’s structure.
meta analysisGhielen, van Woerkom & Christina Meyers (2018), Journal of Positive Psychology, 13(6), 573-585
Who it actually fits
- Career development conversations and one-to-ones
- Teams mapping who should own what
- Individuals who find deficit-focused feedback paralysing
Not a diagnosis