Ice Breaker Idea: What to Do With Your Team's CliftonStrengths Results

A lot of teams do the CliftonStrengths assessment, get their reports, have one debrief session, and then never think about it again.

That's a missed opportunity.

Especially if you have an upcoming company kick-off, department dinner, or company summit already on the calendar.

Because here's the thing: the results you already have sitting in everyone's inbox are actually perfect raw material for a no prep ice breaker idea that gets people genuinely talking.

Quick clarification before we go further, because people mix this up all the time: CliftonStrengths is not a personality assessment. It is a talent assessment.

Gallup defines talent as a naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. The assessment measures your talents across 34 talent themes and ranks them from 1 to 34.

Themes like Responsibility, Ideation, Relator, Arranger, and Restorative. Each one describes a real pattern in the way someone naturally thinks and works.

The important thing to understand is this: there is no talent or combination of talents that is better or worse than any other. The whole point is self-awareness. Understanding your makeup so you can lean into what you naturally do well.

I have done CliftonStrengths debrief sessions with over 100 teams. Not everyone walks in with unadulterated enthusiasm, but even the most skeptical participants come away feeling like they got something real out of it.

Part of why it lands is because the conversation is entirely about what you are good at. There is no performance component. No one is being evaluated.

Another reason it works is the team grid. When you can see the collective results of your whole team, you start to understand who to lean on for strengths you do not naturally have. And that is genuinely useful day to day.

It also helps with communication. When you understand how a teammate is wired, you understand a little better how they think, how they like to work, and how to approach them. That kind of awareness changes things.

Here is where the no prep ice breaker idea comes in.

If your team has already done CliftonStrengths, the hard work is done. You have the data. All you have to do is build the conversation around it.

Jam Bingo is a way to incentivize people to get out of their bubble and get to know their colleagues, especially with a large group of 100+ people. It takes surface-level talk into meaningful conversations.

The idea is simple: use CliftonStrengths themes as the prompts.

Here are a few examples of how you could frame the prompts for a team that has done CliftonStrengths:

• Find someone whose top 5 includes Ideation. Ask them about an idea they have been sitting on.
• Find someone with Responsibility in their top 5. Ask them how they decide what to say yes to.
• Find someone with Relator as a top strength. Ask them about a working relationship that really clicked.
• Find someone whose top theme is an Executing theme. Ask them how they stay focused when things get messy.
• Find someone with Arranger in their top 5. Ask them how they approach a project with a lot of moving parts.

Every single one of those is a real conversation. Not small talk. Not 'what department are you in.' Actual insight into how someone thinks and what they are good at.

A department dinner is one of the best settings for this. People are relaxed. They are not in meeting mode. And there is usually that awkward 20 to 30 minutes before dinner actually starts where everyone is standing around not quite knowing what to do.

That window is exactly what Jam Bingo is built for. Run it during the pre-dinner mingling period and by the time people sit down, they have already had three or four real conversations with teammates they do not usually talk to.

The dinner itself gets better because of it. The table conversations are warmer. People are more open. The whole night feels more like a team and less like a group of coworkers who happened to show up to the same restaurant.

There is real value in having insight into your own makeup. But there is a risk too: using assessment results to put people in boxes.

The goal of bringing CliftonStrengths into a social setting like this is connection, not categorization. The prompts should spark curiosity about the person, not reduce them to their top theme.

Done right, it starts conversations that would not have happened otherwise. And that is the whole point.

If your team has already done CliftonStrengths, you are ready to go. Gather the results, write 8 to 12 prompts based on themes that show up most often across your team, and drop them into Jam Bingo.

The setup takes about five minutes. The conversations it starts can last years.

Looking for more no prep ice breaker idea templates you can use as a starting point? Browse ice breakers for work.