Shaw Strengths Matrix®

Our Focus

Mission: To empower individuals and organisations with deeper insight into strengths, work preferences and potential, enabling better career and organisational outcomes.

Vision: To make scientifically grounded insight into people’s strengths, work preferences and potential universally accessible, enabling better-informed career and organisational decisions.

The Shaw Strengths Matrix (SSM®) is a psychometrically validated framework that synthesises four leading psychological theories into a model of 12 core Character Strengths, aligned with the O*NET® occupational framework.

SSM® reveals the strengths people naturally bring to work and identifies the roles, work styles and activities where those strengths are most aligned. For individuals, SSM® provides personalised insights into their strengths and potential career fit.

For organisations, SSM® helps leaders identify where current employees are best aligned, supporting talent placement, internal mobility and career development.

Our Team Dynamics solution extends these insights to team performance — helping organisations understand collective strengths, strengthen collaboration and improve change alignment through facilitated workshops. Together, these solutions turn psychometric insight into practical, evidence-based decisions about people, strengths and roles.

Our SSM® Team Dynamics Program brings these insights into action through a structured assessment and facilitated team workshop.

Pain Point use cases

Organisations navigating significant change—such as:

• AI-driven role redesign,
• Mergers and acquisitions,
• Rapid growth,
• Strategic pivots, or
• Supply chain disruptions,

... typically experience one or more of the following pain points:

1. Communication Breakdowns “We have parallel conversations rather than true dialogue”
2. Dysfunctional Team Collaboration “We need more collaboration to reduce silos”
3. Team Friction “Different personality mindsets are causing lack of cohesion”
4. Leadership Team Misalignment “Leadership personalities aren’t aligned on objectives”
5. Unbalanced Teams “Do we have the right personality mix on this team?”
6. Low Engagement “People feel underutilised and undervalued”
7. Role Ambiguity “We need to allocate tasks smarter”
8. Change Resistance “We need our people to better align around change”

SSM Team Dynamics Program

Our SSM Team Dynamics Program addresses the root causes of pain points:

• At work, how people communicate, make decisions, collaborate, and respond to change is shaped by their underlying pattern of character strengths.
• Unlike traditional personality tools, the SSM makes these patterns visible—revealing how each person tends to think, contribute, and engage.
• This gives teams a clear, practical way to understand differences, reduce friction, align roles, navigate change, and work together more effectively.

Market Gap

Traditional personality tools focus on static traits and typically:

• Provide limited clarity on the Signature Strengths of team members.
• Offer limited guidance on leveraging individual Signature Strengths across diverse team contexts.
• Lack a shared language for reframing predictable change-resistant patterns that can emerge either overtly or covertly under transformation pressure.

SSM Proprietary Tools

The SSM Team Dynamics Workshop Program comprises three proprietary tools:

1. SSM® Career Matches: builds self-awareness of Signature Strengths, combines them with RIASEC occupational interests to identify best matched O*NET occupations, and helps people better understand the strengths of others — enhancing team cohesion.
2. SSM® Team Dynamics Workshop: enhances leadership capability through more effective role and task allocation — driving team collaboration, effectiveness, and performance.
3. SSM® Change Alignment Workshop: helps leaders anticipate change-resistant behaviours under pressure and apply targeted reframing — aligning stakeholders on priorities and strengthening change readiness.

Key Benefits & Outcomes

1. Higher performing teams - improved role alignment and task allocation, leveraging O*NET®.
2. Reduced staff turnover – shared language of strengths reduces workplace friction and increases job satisfaction.
3. Leadership development – leveraged strengths knowledge enhances communication and conflict resolution.
4. More effective soft skills recruitment – team strength distributions highlight gaps for recruitment.
5. More successful change initiatives – enables systematic reframing of predictable resistant behaviours.

Caveats

SSM is not:

• A psychological diagnostic instrument.
• A substitute for cognitive ability tests.
• Validated for use as a stand-alone recruitment tool.
• Intended for performance review processes.
• Intended to seek to alter people's Signature Strengths.