CHAPTER SIX ENGAGING STRENGTHS

INTRODUCTION

Think of a time or circumstance when you were performing at the peak of your abilities. Now, step back and try to explain why you were so effective in that situation. What was it about you or the way you presented yourself that made you feel good? What did you do that worked so well? Why did others respond to you the way they did? The answers to each of these questions are related to your strengths—the central theme of this chapter.

Every one of us has identifiable leadership strengths, areas in which we excel or thrive. But we often fail to recognize these strengths. As a result, many times our strengths are used ineffectively or not at all. The same is true for the strengths of our coworkers and followers; sometimes their strengths are known, but often they go untapped. The challenge we face as leaders is to identify our own strengths as well as the strengths of others and then use these to make our organizations and followers more efficient, productive, and satisfied.

Identifying individual strengths is a unique challenge because people often feel hesitant and inhibited about acknowledging positive aspects of themselves. In the American culture, expressing positive self-attributes is often seen as boastful or self-serving. In fact, focusing on self is disdained in many cultures, while showing humility and being self-deprecating is seen as virtuous. In this chapter, you will be asked to set aside your inhibitions about identifying your own strengths in an effort to better understand the inextricable role these strengths play in leading and working with others.

Our goal in this chapter is to explore how understanding strengths can make one a better leader. First, we will explain the concept by defining strengths and describing the historical background of strengths-based leadership. We will examine how to identify strengths, followed by a description of different measures that can be used to assess your strengths. The final section of the chapter will look at the concept of strengths-based leadership in practice, including specific strategies that leaders can employ to use strengths to become more effective leaders.

STRENGTHS-BASED LEADERSHIP EXPLAINED

Before discussing the development and principles of strengths leadership, we need to clarify what is meant by strengths. A strength is an attribute or quality of an individual that accounts for successful performance. It is the characteristic, or series of characteristics, we demonstrate when our performance is at its best.

Strengths researchers (Buckingham & Clifton, 2001; Rath, 2007) suggest that strengths are the ability to consistently demonstrate exceptional work. Similarly, Linley (2008) defines strength as a preexisting capacity that is authentic and energizing and enables peak performance.

A strength is an applied trait. As mentioned in Chapter 2, traits are characteristics of people that are often inherited; in the case of strengths, these traits are being engaged at their highest level. For example, sociability is considered a leadership trait, but for someone who is very good at establishing and maintaining social relationships, someone we might call a “people person,” that trait is a strength.

A strength is also different from a skill. As discussed in Chapter 5, skills are learned competencies; everyone can be taught skills. Strengths are expressions of a preexisting capacity and are unique to each person. A skill can become a strength, however. For example, a person can learn time management and organization, and with application and practice that allows them to become very good at this skill, it can become a strength.

Simply put, strengths are positive features of ourselves that make us effective and help us flourish. For example, Antonio was born with a talent for drawing and design. He worked as a construction laborer for years while he attended a university to study architecture. As a result, when Antonio became an architect, his experiences in building made his design skills stronger because he more fully understood the concepts of actual construction. His clients often comment that one of his strengths is his “construction-friendly” designs.

Historical Background

Studying leadership from the perspective of strengths is a new area of study, which came to the forefront in the late 1990s as a result of two overlapping research developments. First, researchers at Gallup initiated a massive study that included interviews of over 2 million people to describe what’s right with people—that is, their talents and what they are good at—rather than what’s wrong with people (Rath, 2007).

Second, academic research scholars began to question the exclusive focus in psychology on the disease model of human problems and started to study mentally and physically healthy people and what accounted for their well-being. From this work, a new field called positive psychology emerged (Peterson & Seligman, 2003). Each of these two developments helped to explain the rising popularity of strengths-based leadership.

Gallup

Best known as a public opinion research organization that conducts political polling, Gallup also conducts research in other areas of the social sciences. For nearly 40 years, the study of people’s strengths has been a major research focus at Gallup. This work was spearheaded by the late Donald O. Clifton, under whose leadership millions of people were interviewed regarding their performance and human strengths. Based on these interview data, Gallup researchers designed and published the StrengthsFinder profile, an online assessment of people’s talents and potential strengths. This profile was subsequently titled the Clifton StrengthsFinder in honor of its chief designer and in 2007 became StrengthsFinder 2.0. As of this writing, the profile is known as CliftonStrengths. Later in the chapter, we will discuss more extensively CliftonStrengths and the specific talent-based strengths it measures.

CliftonStrengths is one of the most widely used self-assessment questionnaires in the world and has been completed by more than 10 million people to date. This assessment has been adopted by many universities and organizations to help individuals identify their strengths, become more engaged, and improve their performance. While Gallup has not published a theory about strengths, the widely accepted use of CliftonStrengths has elevated strengths as a key variable in discussions of factors that account for effective leadership development and performance.

Positive Psychology

At the same time Gallup’s CliftonStrengths profile was growing in popularity, a major change was occurring in the discipline of psychology. Researchers were challenging the discipline to expand its focus on not only what is wrong with people and their weaknesses, but also what is right with people and their positive attributes. This expanded focus, which was initiated by Martin Seligman in an address to the American Psychological Association in 1998 (see Fowler, Seligman, & Kocher, 1999), soon became the field of positive psychology. Since its inception a decade ago, positive psychology has grown exponentially and developed into a credible and important area of psychological research.

Specifically, positive psychology can be defined as “the scientific study of what makes life most worth living” (Peterson, 2009, p. xxiii). Rather than study the frailties and flaws of individuals (the disease model), positive psychology focuses on individuals’ strengths and the factors that allow them to thrive (Fredrickson, 2001; Seligman, 2002; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). It addresses people’s positive experiences, such as their happiness and joy; people’s positive traits, such as their characteristics and talents; and people’s positive institutions, such as families, schools, and businesses that influence them (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003).

Most prominently, positive psychology is devoted to the study of people’s positive characteristics—their strengths. This makes it invaluable for understanding strengths-based leadership. Positive psychology launched the analysis of people’s strengths into the mainstream of scientific research (Linley, 2008). Concepts and theories from the field of positive psychology directly relate to learning how strengths-based leadership works.

Identifying and Measuring Strengths

As indicated in the historical background, most of the research on strengths has been done by scholars connected with Gallup and scholars studying positive psychology. This body of research has produced multiple ways of identifying strengths and a wide-ranging list of individual strengths. This section explores the way strengths have been identified by three major groups: (1) Gallup, (2) VIA Institute on Character, and (3) Centre of Applied Positive Psychology in the United Kingdom. Although there is much overlap in their work, each research group provides a unique perspective on identifying and measuring individual

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