Many leaders and organisations have come to the simple but powerful realisation that to get the most out of people, you must build on their strengths. And yet, though the strengths-based approach is now conventional wisdom, the tools, and systems inside organisations such as performance appraisals, mandatory training, and succession planning systems, remain stubbornly remedial and almost exclusively focused on measuring skills and knowledge, finding gaps, and attempting to plug them. The conversation is not balanced. It’s unusual to be asked, ‘How might you use your strengths to improve your customer relationships?’ and more usual to be told, ‘You need to improve how you engage with customers. I suggest XYZ training and development.’.
Strengths-based leadership is rooted in positive psychology and assumes that every person has their own specific combination of signature strengths that allows them to perform at their best (and that magnifying these strengths instead of repairing weaknesses helps people to be more productive and proficient. Strengths-based leaders help people to identify, utilise and develop their strengths.
Instead of ignoring weaknesses, strengths-based leaders make weaknesses less relevant by allocating tasks according to employees’ strengths and by stimulating collaboration between team members who have complementary strengths. Academic studies have shown that strengths-based leadership is associated with increased personal well-being, creativity, psychological well-being, performance, reduced burnout and absenteeism.
The strengths approach and the associated processes that we will share in this toolbox are aligned to a process called Appreciative Inquiry. In a nutshell this process is an individual and organisational mindset based on what’s working. It does not avoid challenging conversations but shifts the starting point to thinking about how strengths can be used to ’fix’ things rather than the deficit based problem solving approach.
The short video touches the key theory.
The short video below gives a snapshot of the book Strengths Based Leadership which is a companion text to the Clifton Strengths Finder which you will be completing as part of this programme.
If you like to explore the academic underpinning theory and research, then please download the article below which explores the development of the Strengths Based Approach.
The Journey to a Strengths Based Approach
There is an appreciation that individuals discovering their strengths is not enough. In the IN PRACTICE section of this toolbox you will find more helpful resources and plans to help you to put this thinking into action where you are.