The Strengths Engineering series explores innovative uses of Gallup CliftonStrengths by global organizations and individuals relying on strengths to succeed in business and life.
It’s not often that the roofing business lends itself to talk of culture. The work is physical, seasonal and unforgiving of error. Yet Transcona Roofing, a midsized Canadian firm, did what few in the trades attempt: It redesigned its organizational culture by focusing on what people do best. Not with slogans or surface-level perks, but with intentionally reframing the daily habits that shape how its people make decisions, solve problems, and work together.
The premise was straightforward: If leaders understand how people naturally think and work best, they can design roles and routines that improve employee performance. At Transcona, that idea produced measurable change. Employee engagement rose from 80% to 97%, while gross margin grew by 25%. The method was deliberate: Management applied the science of human strengths with the precision of a construction project.
Starting With the Managers
When owner Rich Marchetti set out to make Transcona a preferred workplace and contractor, he began with leadership development. He partnered with Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach Wendy Hofford to introduce CliftonStrengths as a practical system for managing and coaching, not a personality activity.
Hofford started with the leadership team. Each manager mapped their natural patterns of decision-making and motivation, then learned to describe and use those patterns with intent. Only after that work did they begin coaching others. “It spread one person at a time,” Hofford says.
What emerged was a new operating model constructed around how people naturally perform. Over time, strengths shifted from a training topic to a daily habit, reshaping daily people management practices. Every Tuesday, Hofford hosts open sessions dubbed “Transcona Tuesday,” where employees bring real work issues to the table, from stalled handoffs to communication breakdowns and team friction. The conversations use strengths to resolve problems and improve how work moves through the organization.
In one session, an employee with high Activator talents described frustration with a cautious colleague who leads with Deliberative. Instead of treating the tension as a personal conflict, the pair recognized it as a difference in pace and risk tolerance. Wendy worked with them to agree on how to best work together going forward. Moments like these became routine.
Strengths gradually became a shared language. They appeared on ID badges, in team briefings and during onboarding. Culture became explicit, predictable and manageable, not informal or assumed.
The Right People in the Right Roles
The approach also changed how Transcona defined “fit.” One dispatcher, known for a short temper, discovered that Responsibility and Empathy dominated his strengths profile. Sending teams to work with customers rather than providing them with excellent service directly drained him. When the company moved him into a quality assurance role, he excelled.
Another employee, long labeled “difficult,” turned out to be high in Includer but was isolated in a solo role. Moving him into cross-functional projects gave him a chance to use his expertise in a new way with more opportunities to work directly with partners. These intentional shifts in role design did not lower standards. They clarified expectations and aligned work with how people operate best. Efficiency improved, as did wellbeing.
Living Strengths Every Day
Many leaders treat culture like the weather — something to be endured, whether fair or foul, but outside their control. Transcona treats it like infrastructure: something to build, maintain and inspect. By incorporating strengths into management routines, the company created a strengths system that connects individual thinking and communication styles with organizational purpose. Hofford describes it as “making strengths accessible so they become part of who people are.”
Transcona Roofing shows that strengths engineering — the disciplined, strategic design of human systems — can turn a roofing contractor into a case study in modern organizational architecture.
Have a story like this to share? We’re looking for organizations and individuals using CliftonStrengths in new ways to solve real challenges. Contact Strengths_Engineering@Gallup.com with your suggestions.
