Code Review, PoCs and Gallup Talents: How It All Fits Together in a Tech Team

CliftonStrengths tells you what you are good at. It does not tell you why exactly that decides the success of an IT project. See how we put the popular 34-talent test up against the realities of delivering software, code review and communicating with the client.

The test we did not expect

Talents in a technology team come together when we stop treating them as pretty labels and start using them as tools for everyday work. We took the full Gallup 34-talent test, expecting a typical, corporate “personality résumé.” Instead we got something far more useful: a language for naming processes we perform instinctively in the team, but that nobody had been able to describe precisely before.

CliftonStrengths divides the 34 talents into four domains: Strategic Thinking, Relationship Building, Influencing and Executing. In theory, no domain is “better” than the others. In practice, in a team that has to deliver software on time and on budget, it is precisely the proportions between them that decide whether a project actually gets closed out or only looks good at the planning stage.

A visionary who is really an executor

The report showed that one of our colleagues leads with Strategic Thinking (Ideation and Strategic are his top 2). It would have been easy to stop there and pin the “visionary” label on his bio. A label like that looks good in a client presentation, but says little about how someone really works at the computer at nine in the morning in the middle of a sprint.

But when he looked at the full top ten, it turned out that as many as 4 of the 10 talents belong to the Executing domain: Focus, Achiever, Responsibility and Arranger. That is far more than conceptual thinking alone. In other words: the person the whole team would intuitively call “the ideas person” is in fact the one who most effectively turns those ideas into concrete tasks with a deadline.

What does this mean in programming practice and day-to-day delivery?

• Ideation + Strategic + Input - a brainstorm does not end with slides in a presentation that nobody will ultimately implement. The exchange of ideas moves smoothly into a concrete action plan, because the same talent that generates ideas immediately sees the order in which they need to be carried out.

• Empathy + Developer - code review stops being a hunt for bugs. It becomes a substantive conversation about the growth of the code and of the programmer, in which the comment “this needs fixing” turns into the question “what was blocking you here, and how can I help you solve it next time.”

• Focus + Achiever + Responsibility - this is the main reason a Proof of Concept (PoC) closes within the set deadline instead of landing in a drawer labeled “we'll finish it later, when there's time.” Achiever does not let a day count as successful without a ticked-off task, Focus filters what is really important, and Responsibility means nobody has to police it from the outside.

• Arranger - this is the talent that shows most in chaos, not in calm. When sprint priorities change on Thursday afternoon because the client reported an urgent fix, someone with this talent naturally shifts resources, deadlines and people so that nothing falls off the calendar, instead of waiting for a new plan “from above.”

• Communication - the client learns about potential technical risks at the planning stage, before they blow up in production. Instead of an after-the-fact email titled “we have a problem,” they get clear information up front about what could go wrong and what plan B is.

Not just one person - how it fits together across the whole team

The same report showed something else: a team that works well together rarely consists of people with identical talent profiles. People strong in Strategic Thinking run the discovery and architecture planning phase brilliantly, but it is the talents from the Relationship Building and Influencing domains that make the outcomes of that phase reach the rest of the team and the client at all, in a form that persuades rather than merely informs.

None of this is a discovery. These are things we have been doing in the team for a long time - someone always naturally handled the sprint logistics, someone else always smoothed tensions after a difficult demo. The test only named them and showed that good teamwork is a specific arrangement of talents, not a lucky coincidence that is hard to repeat on the next project.

A caveat: the test will not do the hardest work for us

No test replaces the work of actually getting along. CliftonStrengths will not teach anyone empathy if it was not there before, and it will not hold the difficult conversation after a failed sprint for us. It is a tool for naming, not for relieving us of responsibility.

It is also worth making sure the result does not turn into a ready-made excuse or a permanent label. “I don't have the Focus talent” is not an excuse for missing deadlines, just as a high Empathy score does not mean someone will always feel like listening to other people's problems. Talents describe natural tendencies, not limits - and they definitely should not be the only recruitment criterion or the basis for a periodic appraisal.

Have you ever done a test like this in your team? Let us know whether your results matched how you actually work day to day - or whether they surprised you more than you expected.