What Happens When a Team Stops Hiding Its Strengths?

Picture four people sitting around a table covered in playing cards. They are not playing poker. Nobody is bluffing. In fact, what is happening at this table is almost the opposite: people are putting their cards face up and explaining, in their own words, exactly who they are.

That is the moment I find most interesting in a StrongSuits workshop. Not the game mechanics, which are simple enough to explain in two minutes. Not the cards themselves, which are ultimately just a vehicle. The interesting moment is the one that happens when someone picks up a card, Passion, say, or Agreeability, or Pace, and tells the group why that card belongs to them. And then their teammates respond. And something shifts.

It does not always look dramatic from the outside. But something real is happening in that room.

Why Most Teams Underuse Their Strengths

Most teams are quietly suffering from a version of the same problem. The people in the room are capable, experienced, and well-intentioned. They show up, they work hard, they get things done. But they are operating with an incomplete picture of each other.

In professional settings, we have learned to present ourselves through our roles, our outputs, and our credentials. We do not tend to volunteer the fact that planning comes naturally to us, or that we are the person in any group who holds the emotional temperature of the room, or that we are energised by ambiguity in ways that our colleagues find exhausting. These things feel too personal, too intangible, or too easy to get wrong. So we leave them unsaid.

The result is that teams are constantly working around invisible edges, making assumptions about who can handle what, misreading each other's motivations, and leaving genuine capability untapped because nobody has ever named it clearly.

How a Team Strengths Workshop Works

StrongSuits was developed by Dave Corbet, who has worked with over 8,000 senior executives and managers across more than 70 organisations. His starting point was a frustration shared by many coaches and facilitators: existing tools were generating personality labels but not conversations. They produced reports people read once and filed. They did not build the kind of trust and mutual understanding that actually changes how a team works.

StrongSuits takes a different approach. The 52 cards each name a workplace strength, qualities like Rapport, Organisation, Pace, Agreeability, Passion, along with a short description of how that strength shows up in practice and, crucially, how it can be overplayed. The game gives teams a shared language and a playful structure for a conversation they would rarely have otherwise. Originally Dave's creation, the tool is now being developed further by a growing group of international facilitators who are bringing it into new contexts and cultures around the world.

When played with a group, each person selects the five cards that best represent their own strengths, then explains their choices to the team. Teammates can respond with their own observations, whether they recognise those strengths, whether they would add something, whether they see the person differently. The game creates the conditions for that conversation to happen without it feeling like a performance review or a therapy session. It feels, as many participants put it, like getting to know someone properly for the first time. Instead of a static report, the game provides a dynamic way of identifying team strengths through active dialogue and peer feedback.

What I hear in the room

The feedback from participants is remarkably consistent in one respect: nearly everyone is surprised by something. But what surprises them varies.

Some people are surprised by their own reflection. As one participant put it: "It helped me to get out of my usual comfort zone and admit what I am good at." Another described choosing their five cards as a moment of realising what they truly value in collaborative work, something they had not previously put into words.

Others are surprised not by themselves but by their teammates. "What surprised me were the cards of my team members," one person noted. "There were qualities I wouldn't have expected from certain people, and it showed me how important it is not to judge only from the outside, but also to know how others see themselves. That was a real aha moment, because it makes collaboration more transparent and can prevent misunderstandings." Someone else observed that even among people they work with every day, there were still new things to discover: "It was interesting to see how other people assess themselves and which strengths they attribute to themselves."

Several participants named something more uncomfortable: the difficulty of claiming strengths publicly. "I found it quite difficult to say what I am good at," one person wrote honestly. "I think one of the reasons is that I worry about saying something and then having my group disagree with me. I would feel like I had disappointed them." This is not an unusual response. Many people find it easier to list their weaknesses than to advocate for their strengths, particularly in front of colleagues whose opinion matters to them. The game surfaces this dynamic in a way that is manageable, and in doing so, starts to shift it.

What teams discover about themselves collectively

Beyond individual insights, something else becomes visible when a team completes the exercise together: the shape of the team itself.

Some strengths appear repeatedly across the group. This team has no shortage of energy, or structure, or warmth. Other qualities are present in no one's top five. This is not a problem to solve so much as information to work with. A team that can see where it is naturally strong, and where it needs to apply deliberate attention, is in a far better position than one operating on assumptions.

As one participant observed: "I noticed that things that come completely naturally to me, things that feel easy, can look completely different to someone else. My aha moment was realising how helpful it is to name these differences openly. That way you not only understand yourself better, but you can make much more conscious use of the strengths of the others."

Another put it simply: "Strengths are natural qualities that some people possess so readily that it is surprising others don't have them. It made me think about why not everyone has the same strengths and how important it is to value diversity within a team."

This is, in essence, what StrongSuits is designed to surface. Not a ranked list of who is best at what, but a richer, more honest picture of what each person genuinely brings, and a team culture where those contributions can be named, valued, and used well.

Why Leaders and HR Invest in Team Strengths Workshops

Psychological safety, the condition in which people feel safe to bring their full capability to the group and to raise concerns honestly, is consistently identified in the research as one of the most important factors in team performance. It is also one of the hardest to build through direct instruction. You cannot mandate trust. You can, however, create the conditions in which it grows.

StrongSuits is designed to do exactly that. The playfulness is not decorative, it is functional. When people are engaged and enjoying themselves, their defences lower. The card format gives everyone equal standing in the conversation. The structure means nobody has to volunteer vulnerability unprompted; the game carries them there naturally.

What happens when a team stops hiding its strengths is this: they acquire a shared language for qualities that usually go unnamed. That language turns out to be surprisingly useful. It makes feedback more specific and more generous. It gives people a way to appreciate each other that goes beyond "good job." And once a team is comfortable talking about strengths, it becomes possible to go further, to look honestly at where those same strengths are being overplayed, and what that costs the team. StrongSuits opens that conversation in a way that feels safe enough to be honest.