Growth Agency

A fast-growing digital agency had built a talented nine-person team quickly. Everyone was capable and committed but as the team had grown from a small founding group, something had shifted. Work was being duplicated, projects were falling through the gaps, and a handful of strong personalities were beginning to dominate team discussions in ways that left others disengaged.

The agency director had tried a team away day the previous year. It had been enjoyable but had not changed anything. What was needed was not a better away day. It was a proper understanding of how the team actually worked.

The problem was not motivation or talent. The team had both. Nobody had ever properly mapped how each person worked best, what they were best at, and how those individual strengths either complemented or clashed with those around them.

Without that understanding, the team was managing itself by instinct. Some instincts were good. Others were creating the friction, duplication, and disengagement the director had noticed. The estimated time lost to duplicated work and unclear ownership was running at around four to five hours per person per week across the team.

KCL ran a full CliftonStrengths programme across all nine members of the agency team over six weeks. The programme had four components.

Every team member completed the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment, which identifies a person’s top five strengths from 34 possible themes. Melanie ran individual debrief sessions with each person, working through what their strengths profile meant in practice: where they naturally added the most value and where they might need support from others.

The team then came together for a full-day workshop. Melanie mapped the collective strengths across the team, showing where they were strong as a group, where there were gaps, and how the natural tensions between certain profiles had been playing out day to day. For the first time, the team could see their dynamics clearly.

A separate session with the director covered how to manage and develop each team member to their individual strengths rather than applying a single approach to everyone. A 30-day follow-up session was included to embed the learning and check on progress.

Within the first month following the programme, the director reported a clear improvement in how the team was dividing and owning work. Projects were being picked up by the people best suited to them. Duplication reduced noticeably. Two team members who had been in persistent low-level conflict gained a clear understanding of why they approached work so differently, which significantly reduced the friction between them.

The director estimated the time recovered from reduced duplication and clearer ownership represented a meaningful productivity improvement across the team. The strengths language had become part of how the team talked about their work.

The Gallup research behind CliftonStrengths is drawn from a study of 1.2 million employees across 45 countries. Teams that receive strengths-based feedback show 8.9% greater profitability, 12.5% higher productivity, and up to 72% lower staff attrition. This is not a soft intervention. For a nine-person agency team, a 12.5% productivity improvement represents the equivalent of more than half a day of extra output per person per week.