Theme Table Overview

The Theme Table is the hub of Cascade which contains all the people and their CliftonStrengths themes. Use it as your central store for the details of everyone. You can mix people from different organisations, departments, teams and social circles. Put them all in the Theme table, in any order, so you can select them in the Team Grid. Use the Team Grid to create your teams or groups of people for the other reports.

Start with the Import Themes button to pull in the names and themes from a prepared file. This can be from one of the Gallup portals or a previous version of Cascade.

See Entering Themes for more information.

Theme Table

The three sections of the Theme Table have different colour backgrounds for clarity.

Names and Themes – Green Section

Here you enter the names for the people and their themes. The Email and Date columns are optional. Some of the Gallup export files include these columns, which is why they are present.

It is best to import the themes from a file or use the drop-down lists. The reports in Cascade look for an exact match of the theme name in order to display the theme information. A blank space at the end of a word or the hyphen missing in Self-Assurance will affect the reports.

Names & Theme Count – Pink Section

There are automatic calculations for the Full Name and the Count of themes. Names in red indicate there is a duplicate, such as Jack Potts in the image above. Normally there are 5 or 34 themes, so if there are one or two missing, the count of themes goes red. See the example with Olive Branch.

When ‘Duplicate’ appears in the Count column it shows that the same theme is mentioned twice for one person. It doesn’t say which theme is repeated, you will need to scan along the row.

Selection Criteria – Blue Section

The four columns on the left (A – D) are categories for your clients or staff. You can rename the headings at the top and use these columns however you wish.

Depending on your client base or staff structure, you may want to use the columns for the Organisation, Location, Department, Team, Management Level, Cohort, Workshop, Family or any other factor. In an organisation, you could have one column reserved for Status where you identify people who have left or are away on Maternity or sick leave.

Reset Formatting

After entering themes to the Theme Table, click on the Reset Formatting button. It tidies up all the formatting of the page for consistency and replaces any formulae which may have got overwritten. Where you have a Language Pack installed, it will translate any themes in French, Spanish or German into English.

Deleting a Row

To remove someone from the Theme Table, the best way is to highlight their name and themes, then hit the Delete button. It is not possible to delete an entire row, you just need to delete the contents of the row.

After deleting the contents of a row, use the blue AZ sort buttons to move the empty row to the bottom.

Watch a 30 second clip on how to delete a row in the Theme Table. Jump to the 3m50s point

Sorting and Blank Rows

When entering people into the Theme Table, it is best not to leave any blank rows. Cascade counts the number of people in the Theme Table which sets the size for the Team Grid. When it finds a blank row, it assumes that is the end of the list so some people may not be visible in the Team Grid.

Use the AZ sort buttons to sort the people into a helpful order and push the blank rows to the bottom.

Menu Button

Use the Menu or Team Grid buttons to navigate to those pages. This is better than using the tabs at the bottom as they will pop up reminders if the Refresh Page needs to be run on the Team Grid.

Dominant Theme Count

It is possible to note the number of themes a person considers to be their dominant range. These are the themes which are always present for the person. Normally this is around 10 where it can be a few more or less. When the reports use the number of dominant themes, if there is no number available, they will use 10.

Role and Contribution

Two other columns on the extreme right of the Theme Table page are Role and Contribution. These relate to the Team Roles page where you can enter information for each person to show in the Roles report.

You can either leave the Role and Contribution columns blank and have the team work on the content together. Alternatively, if you know their roles and contributions, you can enter them into the Theme Table to populate the Team Roles report.

Bonus Feature

When printing name labels or lanyards in Cascade, it is possible to include a team name on the label. This is helpful in workshops where you want to divide the participants into teams. Alternatively, in an organisation, you may want to show the person’s department.

In the Selection Criteria above, use column D for the team, department or any other aspect. On the Labels page under the Label Format, select Yes for Add Team Name. This will include the name of the team in the footer of the label. The Team page also shows column D on the Team Grid so you can see who is on each team.

This feature is only available with the Bonus Pack.