The Hidden Cost of Not Knowing Your People
Most managers are working harder than they need to, not because they lack skill, but because they are missing important data.
Every time a manager sits down with a team member to understand what drives them, what holds them back, what they need to thrive, they are starting from scratch. They ask questions. They observe. They make assumptions. They test those assumptions. They revise. And slowly, over months and sometimes years, they begin to develop a picture of the person in front of them.
This process is not wrong. But it is expensive. And in most organisations, it is happening informally, inconsistently, and far too slowly to make a real difference.
CliftonStrengths changes this entirely. And when a manager learns to use it as a coaching tool, the impact is transformative.
As a practitioner who have been training many leaders and managers to embody the coaching mindset and coaching skills, here are two reasons why I make this claim.
Reason 1: CliftonStrengths gives you a map of the person before the conversation even begins
In ontological coaching, there is a foundational concept called the observer. Every person observes the world through a unique lens, shaped by their history, their values, their recurring patterns of thought and emotion. Two people can sit in the same meeting, witness the same event, and walk away with completely different interpretations of what happened. Neither is wrong. They are simply different observers.
The challenge for any manager is this: you cannot coach what you cannot see. And understanding another person's observer - how they think, what they need, what triggers them, what energises them. This takes a great deal of time and intentionality to uncover.
CliftonStrengths accelerates this profoundly.
The 34 CliftonStrengths themes are not labels. They are a detailed map of a person's motivations, needs, emotional triggers, communication preferences, decision-making patterns, and blind spots.
An example: when a manager understands that a team member with the Harmony theme has a deep psychological aversion to conflict, he or she understands that the team member might say “Yes” to a decision not out of agreement but out of a compromise. When their inner world is genuinely disrupted when they detect conflicts, they can go quiet quickly. Knowing these details allow a manager to quickly check-in and make specific interventions when needed. A manager can also use this data specifically to have intentional developmental conversations with the team member.
This is the shift CliftonStrengths makes possible: from assumptions to insight. From generic questions to precise ones.
A manager who knows their team member's CliftonStrengths profile can walk into a conversation with a working hypothesis of what matters most to that person. What energises them. Where they are most likely to overextend. How they are likely to respond under pressure. What language will land, and what will fall flat.
The time this saves is significant. By a conservative estimate, a manager can easily save 15 to 20 hours of exploratory conversations, the kind that would otherwise be spent slowly piecing together an understanding of the person across months of interactions. CliftonStrengths compresses that learning curve and allows the manager to begin coaching at depth far sooner.
Reason 2: When work reviews are seen to be more job centric, adding CliftonStrengths to these conversations can make them more human-centric.
Here is the quiet problem with most performance conversations, work reviews, and developmental discussions: they mostly revolved around the job, not the person.
The agenda for work reviews are typically job-centric.
- What are the KPIs and are the performance targets met?
- What does the role require and does the job holder have clarity?
- What job competencies need to be developed?
- Where are the areas of improvements?
These are legitimate and necessary questions. And the way work reviews are structured often make people perceive that these conversations often focus entirely on the doing - the outputs, the behaviours, the deliverables.
What gets lost is the being.
In ontological coaching, we make a fundamental distinction between what a person does and who a person is being. Doings are the actions and results that are visible. Being is the inner state, the mood, the identity, the self-assessment, from which all action flows. A person can perform the same action from a place of confidence or from a place of fear, and the quality and sustainability of the result will be entirely different.
Most of the work conversations operate entirely at the level of doings. They diagnose what went wrong and prescribe what needs to change. They rarely ask the deeper question: who is this person being, and is that the root of what we are seeing in their performance?
CliftonStrengths has the power of restoring this balance (at least in my opinion).
When a manager brings CliftonStrengths into a work review, the conversation is no longer only about what was delivered. It becomes about who the person is, how their natural talents are showing up, and whether those talents are being channelled toward results or creating friction.
A performance gap that looked like a skill deficit often turns out to be a strength overused. A person with Responsibility burning out because they cannot say no. A person with Learner feeling disengaged because they have not been doing the same job repeatedly and have lost interest.
This reframe is not soft. It is precise. And it opens up a quality of conversation that job-centric reviews simply cannot reach.
When a team member feels seen as a person, not just evaluated as a performer, there is a stronger chance that trust deepens. Engagement also rises when the conversation becomes generative rather than transactional. And the development that follows is sustainable because it is rooted in who the person actually is, not a generic competency framework designed for a role.
What this looks like in practice
There is no need for ICF-level coaching skills. Managers don’t have to be CliftonStrengths certified. It is a fair concern that many might have and it is exactly what my Strengths-Based Coaching Skills programme is designed to address.
The tools and frameworks used in these conversations are practical, structured, and immediately applicable. They do not require years of coaching training. They require a manager who is willing to show up differently, with better questions, a strengths lens, and a simple framework to guide the conversation. A middle manager could pick a tool up and use it in a work review the following week, without needing a sophisticated coaching background or prior training.
The invitation
The gap in most organisations is not CliftonStrengths data.
Organizations require their managers to have the ability to use that data in conversations that actually develop people and genuinely unlock their team's potential.
Organizations now need to do that at scale and have all their managers becoming trained.
The Strengths-Based Coaching Skills program is designed to bridge these two gaps.
If you are ready to build this capability within your organisation, explore Strengths-Based Coaching Skills for Leaders or reach out to me directly.
Continue Reading — The CliftonStrengths Series:
Ready to take the CliftonStrengths assessment or explore your team’s results with a Gallup Platinum Certified Coach? Connect with me here.
Written by Victor Seet
Activator • Communication • Strategic • Self-Assurance • Command
Victor is an accredited ICF Advanced Certified Team Coach (ACTC) and Professional Certified Coach (PCC) based in Singapore. He is also a Newfield Certified Ontological Coach and CliftonStrengths Coach. Victor facilitates teams to leverage their collective strengths, get clear on ways of engagement and ways of working to strengthen team and interpersonal dynamics. Victor specializes in integrating strengths-based and ontological approach into his team coaching and leadership workshops. Victor is Director of Coaching and Leadership Development at StrengthsTransform™
