Strength-Based Leadership
What is Strength-Based Leadership?
Strength-based leadership is the skill of focusing on people’s strengths to motivate them, engage them and ultimately get better performance (1). The key to strength-based leadership is understanding your own strengths and how they bring you energy, as well as understanding your people’s strengths and using that knowledge to increase their performance. This can be used in organizations, teams and families. The underlying premise is that using your strengths is the super highway to success, while focusing on developmental needs is slow, painstaking work that makes little progress (2).
The foundation and science behind strength-based leadership is that positive emotions drive engagement and performance (3). We all perform better when we feel better. We are better able to learn, more open, more creative, and can better achieve flow, or being in the zone of optimal performance. Another hallmark of creating a positive culture is being able to manage “results only”, rather than time or office presence. Understanding the psychological functions that drive performance are key to being an effective leader. Read on to learn more about creating a positive culture, how to motivate and engage employees, how to give effective feedback with strengths, and how strength use drives performance. These techniques work in a variety of settings, not just organizations.
Creating a Positive Culture as a Leader
Whether you are aware of it or not, as a leader, you are responsible for the culture of your team. Organizational culture is defined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values and ways of interacting that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization (4). This environment is either viewed by members as either positive where they feel welcome, comfortable, engaged and as valuable contributors, or as generally negative. When the culture is negative, the members feel a preponderance of negative emotions that can arise from fear, shame, anger or guilt. They do not feel psychologically safe. It may not be easy to know if you are fostering a negative culture, because employees do not typically show their true feelings when there is a power differential, but may report stress and anxiety about their interactions with you.
Some leaders believe that fear and competition are good, but research has shown it is not optimal for our best performance (5). Fear and negative emotions decrease our ability to use resources and be creative, as well as hinder our health. In addition, collaboration is critical to knowledge sharing which creates a learning organization. Negative emotions narrow our thinking and acting. Positive emotions broaden our thinking and build resources.
Negative emotions can even breed bias and cause us to rely on stereotypes, rather than being curious and searching for accurate information. If you are a leader looking to promote an inclusive environment, then positive emotions and belongingness are your friends. If you are looking to build a learning team or organization where information is shared, then you will also want to make sure you are generating positive emotions and a positive culture.
This does not mean that you or your team has positive emotions 100% of the time. That is just not possible. It doesn’t mean that you ignore or even praise poor performance. There are a wide range of emotions that happen in work and teams, but does the ratio of positive to negative emotions range from 3:1 to 5:1? This is your target. Positive emotions are not just about being happy. They can range from feeling connected, heard and understood, being in awe, feeling content, being in flow, feeling absorbed by your work, and not surprisingly, using your strengths. One of the easiest ways to increase positive emotions in your team is to focus on people’s strengths and help them find ways to use their strengths.
How to Motivate and Engage Employees
Having a deep understanding of what your team’s strengths are and giving individual attention to fostering these strengths will also help motivate and engage your employees. It shows individualized attention and recognition for who they are and what they are good at, which is better than any reward and recognition program from HR. Likewise, understanding what strengths they do not possess and removing them from work that requires non-strengths is key to increasing performance.
This was modeled for me by an important leader who sat me down, pointed out my strengths and then told me how she was going to reorganize my work to fit with my strengths. She delegated some of her work that was a good fit with my skill set and removed work I found draining. By realizing what was not my strength and remove those tasks, she was able to truly engage me and build trust. It was an extraordinary feeling! She then encouraged me to replicate this with my direct reports. I experienced their joy from my recognition of their strengths as well as the removal of work they didn’t enjoy. I was able to shift work around in a manner that used everyone’s strengths, rather than making everyone do the same exact tasks. It was uplifting for me as a leader and motivating for everyone.
One of the key mechanisms for leaders to understand is that the use of strengths brings energy (6). We typically have five or so top strengths. When we use one of those strengths, it brings us energy and we find ourselves naturally engaged in the task at hand. We can even lose a sense of time which is known as “flow”. You can begin to do an “energy audit” on your day and notice how your energy will ebb and flow with the use of your strengths. In my own day, I purposely schedule tasks that use my strengths directly after events that can drain my energy. Being aware of your strengths and how you use them is key to understanding your energy. Understanding other’s strengths is key to your ability to motivate and engage them, which will lead to better performance (7).
Once you understand everyone’s strengths and you have the work aligned with their strengths, it is time to learn to give feedback with strengths. Whatever your strength may be, it needs to be balanced. This means you use the appropriate level for the given task. One of the key principles of Via Character strengths (here for free) or StrengthsFinder (here for $60) is that developmental needs aren’t necessarily a missing skill but can often be an overused strength. Strengths can be a double-edged sword, using too little or too much can be problematic (6).
Your work as the leader is to coach each member to use the right balance of their strengths. This has been referred to as “dialing up” or “dialing down” your strengths (6). Telling someone to dial back a strength and dial up another strength is much more motivating than, “You need to increase your teamwork skills”. Often, I am able to find a strength to tie into a specific skill they need to develop.
Strengths can also be a great way to build culture and a shared language. This company developed their own company specific strengths and used them in their performance appraisal, their everyday language and had them posted on each employee’s desk. Gallup, the owner of StrengthsFinder, puts each person’s strengths in their email signatures.
How to Give Effective Feedback with Strengths
How to Increase Employee Performance
If you still don’t believe strengths will motivate and engage your team, the data on performance might sway you. Strength use and support of strengths leads to engagement and indirectly to performance (1). Business units that report higher levels of engagement have shown higher customer satisfaction, productivity, profit, and lower employee turnover and accidents (7). Use of strengths can even contribute to well-being over time (8). Strength based interventions have been shown to have an effect on personal resources and performance in employees and this effect was stronger for younger employees and longer interventions (9).
To summarize, strength-based leadership can help you develop a positive and magnetic culture through increasing engagement, performance, and the ability to give better feedback. Strength-based leadership can also increase retention while reducing turnover. Leaders are the front line in whether employees stay or go. Positive leaders recruit and keep talented workforces. Conversely, rapid turnover is a sign that there may be a leadership issue that could benefit from strength-based leadership training.
References
1. Mubashar, T., & Harzer, C. (2023). It takes two to tango: Linking signature strengths use and organizational support for strengths use with organizational outcomes. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12455
2. Buckingham, M., & Coffman, C. (1999). First, break all the rules: what the world's greatest managers do differently. New York, NY., Simon & Schuster.
3. Fredrickson, B. L., Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden thought-action repertoires: Evidence for the broaden-and-build model. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 313-332
4. Schein, E. H. (1990). Organizational culture. American Psychologist, 45 (2), 109–119. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.45.2.109
5. Barsade S. G., Gibson D. E. (2007) 'Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations? ', Academy of Management Perspectives 21: 36–59.
Barsade S. G., Ramarajan L., Westen D. (2009) 'Implicit Affect in Organizations', Research in Organizational Behaviour 29: 135–62.
6. McQuaid, M., & Lawn, E. (2014). Your Strengths Blueprint: How to be Engaged, Energized and Happy at Work. Michelle McQuaid.
7. Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-Unit-Level Relationship Between Employee Satisfaction, Employee Engagement, and Business Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(2), 268–279. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.2.268
8. Wood, A.M., Linley, P.A., Maltby, J., Kashdan, T.B. & Hurling, R. (2011). Using Personal and Psychological Strengths Lead to Increases in Well-Being Over Time: A Longitudinal Study and the Development of the Strengths Use Questionnaire. Personality and Individual Differences, 50 (1), 15-19
9. Virga, D., Rusu, A., Pap, Z., Maricuțoiu, L., & Tisu, L. (2022). Effectiveness of strengths use interventions in organizations: A pre‐registered meta‐analysis of controlled trials. Applied Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12451