It starts with focusing on strengths

Building strong teams isn’t simple. Similar to how we solve business challenges for clients, Evolytics’ approach is: “follow the data.” 

We build teams based on data from Gallup, used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies with access to 35 million employee engagement respondents and 20 million CliftonStrengths assessments spanning 160 countries. According to Gallup, strength-based organizations realize 29% increased profits and 72% lower attrition rates. 

Every employee at Evolytics takes the CliftonStrengths assessment within their first week of employment. Managers meet with new team members to discuss their strengths, and both parties learn how to best put them to good use. We believe this approach propelled us to one of the Fortune Top 25 Best Places to Work, also allowing us to attract and retain the talented individuals who evolve analytics every day for our clients. 

Breaking down data from Gallup’s CliftonStrengths Assessment

The assessment identifies 34 strengths, categorized into four domains: Strategic Thinking, Executing, Relationship Building, and Influencing. 

Strategic Thinking

It’s no surprise that the majority of Evolytics employees have Strategic Thinking strengths. Nearly half of our collective Top Fives cluster in this domain, and 93% of Evolytics team members have at least one strength here. High-performing teams, and our clients, rely on Strategic Thinking team members to absorb and analyze information to improve decision-making. 

The most common strength at Evolytics, Learner, is in this domain. This makes perfect sense considering “Learn” is one of Evolytics’ core values. 

Executing

Members in this domain add value to teams because they turn ideas into reality. We depend on them to make things happen. Our most common Executing strength is Achiever. According to Gallup’s Global Theme Frequency report from 2018, this is the most common strength in the United States. 

Executing is our third most common domain, representing just over 20% of our Top Fives. Two-thirds of our team members have an Executing strength. 

Relationship Building

About 70% of Evolytics team members have a strength in the Relationship Building domain, and 24% of our collective Top Fives cluster here. Relationship Builders at Evolytics are fundamentally important because they unite teams toward a goal and fortify our partnerships with clients. 

Wharton researchers found the perfect collaborative team size is 4.6, alluding that after five team members, we begin to find diminishing returns from each additional team member. Relationship Builders ensure our teams are greater than the sum of their parts and forge meaningful partnerships. 

Influence

Strengths under the Influence domain occur most rarely, making up three of the bottom five frequencies in the United States. This is also the rarest domain at Evolytics. It’s only 9% of our collective Top Fives and just under 40% of team members have an Influence strength.

Teams rely on these strengths for two reasons. Influencers are natural leaders who promote action and ensure all are heard. Also, they help scale our knowledge and reach a broader audience with our expertise, a critical aspect of consulting. 

How we use strengths to build client teams

When designing the perfect client team, we consider a lot of factors. Who has the technical expertise to get the job done? Who is a good culture fit for the organization or would have natural synergy with the stakeholders? Whose industry experience best matches the client’s vertical? Who has the capacity to lead the project? 

Once we determine the perfect client team lead, we build their supporting team, paying close attention to the balance of strengths. For instance, if a team lead is very high in Strategic Thinking strengths, we might pair them with an Activator to help avoid analysis paralysis. We like to ensure every team has each domain covered. 

We also evaluate the specific task at hand. For instance, when we implement a new analytics tool, we need a foundational understanding of the client’s current business goals and MarTech stack. We may need some creative engineering to ensure all the pieces fit together beautifully. We then document the solution, so the client doesn’t lose any essential information during the hand-off. While strengths don’t dictate the ability to complete those tasks, including team members with Input or Context strengths may prove particularly useful. 

Building teams based on strengths aligns team members to roles where they naturally excel and find satisfaction, which enables Evolytics to deliver award-winning client work.

Want to dig into Evolytics’ CliftonStrengths data? 

Data Visualization Manager Jay Farias created a Tableau Public visualization depicting each team’s distribution of strengths.