Some years ago, before he was a best‐selling author, Tal was an undergraduate at Harvard, where every student was required to take a writing course. His first writing class, with an instructor we'll call Hilda, was miserable. When he went to her office to discuss his first paper, she lit into him, zeroing in on his weaknesses: “You write in a childish voice,” she said. “Your writing is unfocused and lacks clarity. We're going to work on these issues this semester.” It sounded like a threat.

And boy, did they work on those issues. Hilda's focus on Tal's shortcomings was relentless. Her intentions were good, but Tal hated the class. It was a meat grinder, a series of remedial exercises offering no clue that he might have anything to offer as a writer. More than anything, it was a course in discouragement. Tal worked hard that semester, but his writing improved only a little.

For his second writing class there was a new instructor, Maxine. When they met to go over his first paper—a paper no different from the many he'd written the previous semester—Tal was surprised by her question: “Where,” she asked, “is your voice? You're so passionate and engaged in class. You're knowledgeable and widely read. In our discussions you bring in so many ideas, from so many different fields. But you bring none of that richness into your writing.”

Rather than order Tal to go back and fix his mistakes, Maxine gave him a new set of instructions for the next essay: “I want to hear your voice. I want your passion and your knowledge.” This, Tal now recognizes, was where his writing career began. By focusing on his strengths, Maxine made it possible for him to take the first steps to becoming a published and acclaimed author.

It's important to point out that Tal never disagreed with Hilda's assessment. He simply preferred Maxine's view, which presented him the opportunity to grow. Where Hilda saw childishness, Maxine saw unrefined passion; where Hilda saw a jumble of ideas, Maxine saw a breadth of knowledge, a good memory, and an ability to make surprising associations. Throughout his second semester, Tal worked with Maxine to make his writing voice more like his classroom voice—passionate and polished—and to express his array of knowledge coherently.

After Tal's first semester, writing was a chore he hoped he'd never have to do again. After his second semester, he couldn't stop writing. He's now published eight books (including this one), and he's at work on several more. Writing is his purpose and his pleasure—and he never would have known it had Maxine not identified his strengths, and insisted that he work to improve them. This is the difference a strengths‐based approach can make.

Likewise, Angus's career trajectory has led him increasingly toward the strengths he loves to use to develop people's leadership skills. When he first joined McKinsey, his goal was to lead his clients to success and get elected as a partner—and when he finally achieved the goal of partnership, he was elated; it was the culmination of years of hard work. After a few years, however, Angus began to feel burned out, exhausted both mentally and physically. His relationships with family members were suffering. He was losing enthusiasm for his clients, for his team members, and for the work overall.

Something had to change. To stay at his job, Angus knew he would have to make it more a reflection of himself—of the things he was good at and cared about. What he liked most, and was best at, was working with people and developing their potential. So he began spending more time coaching individual team members, teaching younger people how to build their own relationships with colleagues and coworkers and how to develop their own leadership potential. Over time he found he was able to hand over work he found draining—logistics and detail‐oriented tasks—to people with a knack for and interest in such things.

The more he worked from his strengths, Angus found, the more his colleagues and clients valued his contributions—and the more he found himself in roles where his focus was sharing knowledge and developing teams and leaders.

Angus's path to this role wasn't triggered by a sudden epiphany; it was an incremental journey that began when he did a little bit of mentoring and coaching as a young associate. Over time, as he received validation—internally and externally—this work became a more significant part of what he did. Eventually it became the defining attribute of his career.

Both Tal's and Angus's early experiences, then, disproved the first myth mentioned in Chapter 3: Good leaders focus on eliminating or overcoming their weaknesses. They knew, intuitively, that it was false—and together they continued to encounter evidence that proved it so.

The Tragedy of the Damage Control Mind‐Set

“The same man cannot well be skilled in everything; each has his special excellence.”

—Euripides

Gallup Inc., an organization most Americans recognize for its public opinion polls, has evolved into one of the world's largest management consulting firms, with expertise in measuring and understanding human behavior. Gallup is a world leader in applying the strengths‐based approach.

One Gallup poll asked people in dozens of countries, “Which would help you be more successful in your life—knowing what your weaknesses are and attempting to improve your weaknesses, or knowing what your strengths are and attempting to build on your strengths?” In every country, including the United States, respondents who chose to focus on their strengths were a minority.¹ Interestingly, those for whom strengths was more important were more successful.

Gallup's Q¹² survey is a set of 12 simple questions widely used throughout the world, among organizations of all sizes and from all sectors, to help predict employees' motivation and engagement at work. Each question is aimed at a key indicator of business success. When the organization reviewed responses to one Q¹² question—“At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”—it discovered this strengths‐focused minority was far more successful: Those who strongly agreed were 38 percent more likely to be working in a highly productive business unit and 44 percent more likely to be working in a unit that had high customer satisfaction ratings.

Gallup went on to prove a cause and effect relationship between the strengths‐based approach and success: Its consultants taught managers to help employees identify and develop those strengths, and output and job satisfaction increased significantly as a result.

Unfortunately, Gallup results indicate that only about 20 percent of people surveyed globally believe their strengths are being used every day²—and the higher up you go on the organizational ladder, the less likely you are to find people who use their strengths. For most of us, there's a lot of room for improvement.

In the 1980s, Gallup shifted from polling to more structured psychological interviewing. This new era was led by Donald Clifton, the man the American Psychological Association recognized as the father of strengths‐based psychology. As a graduate student in the 1950s, Clifton realized the field of psychology had focused almost exclusively on problems and pathologies. He dedicated his life to studying human success and began crafting the assessments that helped match people and work environments. It was Clifton, more than any other, who discovered that the key to success was whether people were able to leverage their natural strengths in their careers.

In their 2001 best seller Now, Discover Your Strengths, Clifton and coauthor Marcus Buckingham wrote: “The real tragedy of life is not that each of us doesn't have enough strengths, it's that we fail to use the ones we have.”³

We think this really is tragic: so much unrealized human potential, all because so many people are focused on the things they—and other people—don't do well. The time we spend in remediation would be so much better spent stoking the fires already flickering within us.

In “Managing Oneself,” Peter Drucker said it best: “It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve from first‐rate performance to excellence.”⁴ It's much easier to develop existing strengths than to work on weaknesses—and the payoff is dramatically better.

In their 2012 book, How to Be Exceptional, John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, Robert H. Sherwin, Jr., and Barbara A. Steel recounted a study that affirmed Drucker's observation: Their firm studied 360‐degree feedback assessments—multirater evaluations of specific leadership competencies—of more than 24,600 leaders. The firm found that no matter how much effort the leaders spent on correcting weaknesses, their efforts would lift them only to the midpoint on the overall measure of effectiveness. Even those who consistently ranked as good at a majority of the competencies didn't climb into the top half of the bell curve—but when leaders excelled (were at or above the ninetieth percentile) at three to five of the listed competencies, they were likely to be ranked as one of the organization's top‐tier leaders.⁵

Further research by Zenger and Folkman confirmed that those working on strengths achieved roughly twice the gain in overall leadership ratings as those working on weaknesses—and that those gains extended to other competencies. Working on weaknesses had no such effect.⁶

Many of the great leaders and performers of our time have shown an intuitive understanding of the principles Zenger, Folkman, and others demonstrated. The late Anita Roddick, founder and for many years CEO of The Body Shop, is widely regarded as one of the most innovative, visionary, and influential British business leaders of all time. But by her own admission, Roddick wasn't much of a businessperson; in fact she was weak in many of the skills critical for day‐to‐day management of a company, such as financial management and administration. She didn't spend much time trying to improve in these areas. Through her magnetism and idealism, she attracted people who were good at these things and shared her vision of a sustainable, ethical cosmetics business. Their supplementary abilities freed her to focus on her strength: sharing her ideas with the rest of the world.

Throughout his 20‐year career, soccer star David Beckham, who retired in 2013, was twice runner‐up for the International Federation of Association Football World Player of the Year, and in 2004 was named by the International Federation of Association Football as one of the world's 100 greatest living players. But Beckham admits he began with more weaknesses than most international players, and even after he'd become arguably the most famous player in the world, plenty of critics wanted to focus on what he couldn't do. The great George Best, who played for Manchester United in the 1960s and 1970s, offered this assessment: “He can't kick with his left foot, he can't head a ball, he can't tackle and he doesn't score many goals. Apart from that he's all right.”⁷

Beckham was slower than most offensive players, and he became great by focusing on technique. He had great positioning skills—he often beat defenders because he was simply in a better spot—and an excellent shot, a powerful cross, and crisp, accurate passes. He'll long be remembered as one of the game's great free‐kick specialists, as millions of kids around the world try to bend it like Beckham and duplicate his spectacular form. Beckham reportedly spent hours practicing these free kicks, long after other players had left practice.

Imagine what would have happened had Roddick, instead of focusing on her vision of human rights, justice, and environmental sustainability, had tried to master spreadsheets, or to train retail employees. Imagine Beckham's career if he'd spent hours trying to run faster, or to master the left‐footed cross. It seems unlikely that very many people would recognize their names today.

As Clifton and Buckingham wrote: “The point…is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development…damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.”⁸ That's the tragedy of damage control: Before you've even started to work, it dramatically lowers the ceiling for your performance. It forces you to shoot for competence, rather than greatness.

But as Clifton and Buckingham point out, avoiding failure is a necessary baseline. Zenger and Folkman agree that when a weakness becomes what they call a “fatal flaw,” it has to be addressed: “As more leaders shift their development to this strengths‐based approach,” they wrote in 2013, “we still advise them to work on a major weakness when it is so apparent that it has a devastatingly negative impact on their effectiveness. The good news is that since they are starting from such a low base, they can show dramatic gains in overcoming a potential fatal flaw.”⁹ The strengths‐based approach doesn't imply that you should avoid dealing with your weaknesses; it asserts that you should shift the balance of your efforts toward developing your strengths. A manager with great interpersonal skills, like Roddick, has to know enough about administration that she could at least find her way around financial statements and understand the possibilities—and limits—of her vision. A socially awkward manager in the high‐tech sector with great programming skills has to develop some competency in dealing with other people so that his or her interactions don't get in the way of achieving the company's goals. Beckham didn't ignore his shortcomings—his lack of speed or left‐footed skill—but he worked to keep himself in top physical shape, to get the most out of these limitations.

How do you know how much effort is sufficient for managing your weaknesses? There isn't an easy or precise answer, unfortunately. A good rule of thumb is that you should invest enough effort in your weaknesses so that they don't hold you back and divert energy from building on your strengths.

Passion Strengths and Performance Strengths: Discovering Your Peak Potential Zone

A problem for many of us in traditional work environments is that our jobs aren't defined by our strengths—rather, what we do is defined by the job. As a result, not only do we not have opportunities to use our strengths, but also sometimes our strengths have atrophied to the point where we're not really aware of what they are anymore. Consequently, many people's strengths lie undiscovered and unexplored, and unearthing them is the first step toward flourishing.

In figuring out the best way to apply your talents in the workplace, it's important to recognize and distinguish between two types of strengths: performance strengths and passion strengths.

Performance strengths are simply the things you're already good at, or that you have the greatest potential to become good at. If you're not sure what these are, you can shake them loose with a few simple questions:

• What are my strengths?
• What are my natural talents?
• What are the activities that seem most natural when I do them?
• What do I tend to do well in the work I do now, and what have I been most successful doing in the past?
• What kinds of tasks do I find easiest to learn, either at work or elsewhere?

Are you good with numbers? Language? Planning and strategic thinking? Are you effective in front of people, or are you better behind the scenes? Your performance strengths are the skills and abilities that enable and give you the potential to succeed. When you exercise your performance strengths, you feel as though you are doing precisely what you should be doing.

By passion strengths, we mean the things that light a fire under you, that drive you to use your talents. The questions that will reveal this to you are simply:

• What gives me strength?
• What excites and energizes me?
• What do I love to do, and what did I love doing in the past?
• What are my passions, either at work or in other domains?

Does mapping out a strategic plan for a workgroup give you a feeling of excitement and anticipation—are you eager to see how your ideas play out? Does listening intently to another person give you a sense of connection and shared purpose? Do you find working with numbers fascinating? Are you passionate about speaking to a large audience, or do you feel happiest when you're in small, intimate groups? When you exercise your passion strengths, you feel as though you are doing precisely what you want to be doing.

We've all had days when we wake up and dread going to work, because we know we're going to be doing something that drains us—say, when the annual inventory rolls around and we know we'll be in the warehouse with everyone else, trudging from shelf to shelf. Tasks such as these are often unavoidable—but they wouldn't be quite so debilitating if we were able, more often, to get up and work on the things that energize us, that make us think: Wow! I would be so inspired, so much happier at work, if I could do more of that.

In 2003, Jim Citrin and Richard Smith, partners at the executive research firm Spencer Stuart, reported on a study they'd done through in‐depth interviews and surveys of 2,000 executives. Only about 9 percent of respondents felt they were in jobs where they did what they were good at, and felt passionate about their work. However, when asked to describe an extraordinary executive they knew, most of the survey respondents named a person who was both highly competent and passionate about his or her work. In other words, these extraordinary individuals brought together their performance and passion strengths.

It's important to recognize the implications of Citrin and Smith's research, which they discussed at greater length in their book, The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: First, to achieve our full potential, we need to focus on both strengths and passions, and second, the vast majority of us don't, even at the executive level.¹⁰ There's a lot of untapped potential.

Unlocking this potential is one of the primary goals of our 10X approach. We guide people in examining and comparing their performance strengths and passion strengths—and most important, in discovering where the two overlap, in what we call the Peak Potential Zone, as shown in Figure 4.1.

To find the “sweet spot” where your performance and passion strengths meet is to find where you're most likely to fulfill your potential for success and well‐being. To use an extreme example: If you were 7 feet tall and had the uncanny gift of remarkable hand–eye coordination (a performance strength in basketball), but didn't really enjoy sports or care much about the game of basketball, becoming a great player would be unlikely, no matter how much coaches and teams pursued you and urged you to capitalize on your talents. On the other hand, if you loved the game of basketball to distraction, and would spend every spare moment in the gym if you could, your fire and dedication would never take you to the highest levels if you simply didn't have much of a game.

One of Tal's greatest passions is music—classical music, songs from the 1960s and 1970s, and much of today's popular music. Listening to it fuels and strengthens him; when he puts on his headphones and closes his eyes, it's as if he's transported to another world. He's unable to imagine his life without music.

But Tal doesn't have much of a game, musically. He can't sing. He can't play an instrument well. For his sake, and for the sake of everyone around him, he didn't choose a career in music. Music for him is a passion strength but not a performance strength.

Tal is good at research—it's a performance strength. He's good at designing behavioral studies, conducting them, and writing up the results afterward—and as good as he is, he'd be even better if he invested more time and effort in the field. But he simply doesn't enjoy it. Just thinking about collecting and analyzing data, and then synthesizing it in an academic paper, is exhausting. He had the potential to launch a distinguished career in research after he earned his PhD—but it wasn't a passion strength for him, and he decided to apply his talents elsewhere.

Then there's teaching. Tal's good at it and it energizes him like almost nothing else in his life. He travels constantly around the world, from city to city, and this travel often disrupts his sleep schedule. He often arrives for an engagement feeling exhausted—but as soon as he is in front of an audience and begins to talk, he swells with energy and excitement to share his ideas and knowledge with the group.

When passion and talent feed each other like this, they result in a drive to excel, to become great at what you're good at. Tal often watches his presentations on video, to look for ways to learn and grow, and he knows—and others have told him—that he's getting better and better. When he's teaching, Tal is in his Peak Potential Zone. It's where he feels he's bringing his best self to the world and doing what he should be doing and wants to be doing.

Discovering your Peak Potential Zone is potentially life altering, but it takes a certain amount of discipline and maturity. You might be a gifted musician, and you might love to play the guitar. Does it mean you should quit your job and start booking gigs? Probably not. Such epiphanies, in which people make an abrupt career change and become fabulously successful, make for entertaining and inspiring stories (most of them fictional)—but human lives are complex and usually require a subtler approach. Most of us will benefit differently, and more incrementally, by trying to find our Peak Potential Zone. It's a process that offers insight and awareness, that awakens us to opportunities for developing our talents and pursuing the things we feel most passionate about.

The Mastery Experience: Building Self‐Confidence

Exercising skills in your Peak Potential Zone can be addictive—in a positive sense. Once you bring passion to your work, you'll find yourself wanting to do more. Karen Stefanyszyn, head of leadership and culture for Aviva, a multinational insurance company, has built her leadership training on the strengths‐based approach—which she compares to “letting the genie out of the bottle—it won't go back in. Once you have realized the things you're good at and you love to do…it's impossible to go back to a life where you're not doing that. And who would ever want to?”

Just as your passions and strengths can constantly feed and rekindle each other to create success, a lack of awareness or appreciation of your strengths—a lack of self‐confidence—can feed the self‐fulfilling prophecy of failure and drudgery, which can further lower your self‐confidence.

Let's use an example that, although hypothetical, probably sounds familiar: When Alice, a 10‐year‐old math whiz who loved playing with numbers, entered kindergarten, it was clear to her teachers that she wouldn't need much help with math. But Alice's language skills were just okay. She didn't make a lot of grammatical or spelling errors, but because she didn't enjoy writing, her assignments were often flat, achieving the bare minimum. She was also a reluctant reader, though she scored around the average on comprehension tests.

Most schools would probably focus more time and resources on Alice's mediocre language skills, and the result would probably be a modest improvement in her reading and writing. But the ceiling would be pretty low, because Alice just didn't enjoy it, nor was she particularly gifted in it. Moreover, in this school, Alice would probably fall far short of fulfilling her potential in math. Without opportunities to build on her strengths, she probably wouldn't excel to the extent she might have if she'd been allowed to pursue her passion.

The more important result would be a likely blow to Alice's self‐confidence. By shining a klieg light on her weaknesses, and ignoring what she both enjoyed and was best at, her teachers would unwittingly feed this negative cycle of low confidence and mediocrity.

The problem here is that self‐esteem, and especially low self‐esteem, doesn't respect boundaries. It's unlikely Alice would cheer herself up by reminding herself that, despite her average performance in English, she still has great potential in math. Studies by several psychologists have established the phenomenon of overgeneralization, in which people expand the negative implications of failure far beyond a given scenario.¹¹ Alice's self‐confidence would likely deteriorate across the board, and her performance, both socially and academically—and perhaps even in math—would suffer as her faith in her abilities declined.

This research suggests that if the school had instead focused—not exclusively, but primarily—on Alice's promise in math, she would have improved in that area, and might have overgeneralized in the other direction: Being happier and feeling more accomplished, she might have improved in English as well.

As Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has said: “You don't build self‐esteem by patting people on the back and telling them they're wonderful. Confidence is a much more complex phenomenon that comes from experiencing one's strengths in action.”¹²

If we can manage our weaknesses to the point where they don't prevent us from exercising our strengths, we can build self‐confidence through experiences that validate our strengths. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, in articulating what's known as his theory of self‐efficacy, calls these “mastery experiences”: events in which we perform effectively, or become noticeably better at something, and experience success. Studies by Bandura and others suggest mastery experiences increase our self‐confidence,¹³ which in turn improves performance and the likelihood of future mastery experiences—a virtuous cycle, as shown in Figure 4.2.

The experience of failure, on the other hand, makes us more likely to perform badly again the next time around, which will lower confidence in a vicious cycle of negative reinforcement, as shown in Figure 4.3.

The more easily controlled of these two variables is whether a person succeeds through mastery experiences—rather than whether he can first establish high self‐confidence—so we start there in our 10X leadership approach. If Alice were encouraged to build on her strength in math, for example, she would likely become more confident, which would improve her chances of becoming a better student overall.

A friend of ours, “Bob,” whom we coach informally from time to time, is a computer programmer who has worked for the same software company for the last decade. In each of his first eight years on the job, at the annual performance evaluation, his bosses delivered a variation of the same message: Bob, your skills are great, and your knowledge is vast, but your programs are sloppy. You make a lot of mistakes, and the documentation isn't very accurate. Every year, Bob would leave the evaluation thinking he should probably find another line of work, but he never got around to it. He continued to work on these weaknesses, struggling to reach competency.

One day a colleague in the company's troubleshooting department—a separate entity from programming—went out on medical leave, and Bob, looking for a change, stepped in. He found he was good at it. He had a gift for tracking down the programming flaws of others and coming up with solutions. He loved playing detective and coaching other programmers on how to solve problems. As it turned out, Bob wasn't just good; he was better than anyone else in the company. So he switched to a permanent position in troubleshooting and within two years was running the entire department. He was much happier after that. He looked forward to getting up and going to work every morning—and he even looked forward to the annual performance review. It all started with an accidental mastery experience that placed him squarely in his Peak Potential Zone.

To spend more time in your Peak Potential Zone, it is important that you spend time reflecting on what your passion and performance strengths are, and then seek input from friends and colleagues who know you well. This way, you can design and schedule mastery experiences that will help keep you where you should and want to be. The key is to increase the amount of time you spend there, even slightly. Small changes can make a big difference.

Leading with Strengths

As he grew his career in positive psychology, Tal connected much of his own history—and particularly those two early writing courses at Harvard—with the work of people like Clifton. As Maxine, his instructor, had pointed out, Tal was once two different people. As a classroom student he was bold, curious, engaged, and full of knowledge and insight. But as a young writer, perhaps in part because of bad experiences that focused on his weaknesses, he was timid and afraid of making mistakes.

In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Clifton and Buckingham wrote: “Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has ‘the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built.”¹⁴ By focusing on his strengths as a writer, Tal continues to improve as well as derive much joy from writing. If he’d gone in another direction, casting a critical eye on his weaknesses and devoting most of his energy to managing them, he would merely have prevented failure.

As we mentioned, a lack of self‐confidence in oneself—our own lowered expectations—can establish the self‐fulfilling prophecy of mediocrity. But so can a lack of imagination on the part of those with whom we work. Whether or not an employee is able to use his or her strengths at work is in large part due to the expectations and decisions of organizational leaders.

A series of studies has demonstrated that leaders and authority figures play a major role in the successes or failures of the people under their supervision—in bringing people's hidden strengths to the surface. In 1965, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted an experiment in a California public elementary school: They told teachers that about 20 percent of the school's children, whose names were on a list they received, should be expected to be “intellectual bloomers”—to experience a spurt in intellectual development—based on their results on the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition.

That's what Rosenthal and Jacobson told the teachers, anyway. In reality, there was no such thing as the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition; the children had all taken a standard IQ test to establish a baseline. In addition, the names on the list of soon‐to‐bloom children were chosen at random. The list was an indiscriminate 20 percent sample of the entire school population.

When Rosenthal returned at the end of the year, he learned the students in the random sample labeled bloomers had significantly outperformed their classmates in all subjects, from language arts to mathematics. More amazingly, when he administered another IQ test to students, he found that the IQs of the bloomers had increased significantly over the course of the year.

IQ, or a person's intelligence quotient, was believed at the time—and had been believed for decades—to be a measure of innate intelligence: You were born with a certain inherited IQ, and would die with that same IQ. Rosenthal and Jacobson proved that students' IQ could actually be increased significantly with high expectations.

The investigators, understanding they had created a new reality, called their result the Pygmalion effect,¹⁵ named for the mythical Greek sculptor who, finding no woman in the world who met his strict standards, carved his own woman out of ivory—and, with the goddess Aphrodite's help, brought this statue to life as his living soul‐mate.

Harvard professor J. Sterling Livingston replicated Rosenthal and Jacobson's findings in the workplace: Managers were told that their employees had been given a test to identify potential and were then given the names of those who had done best—but as in Rosenthal and Jacobson's experiment, the names had been chosen randomly. In his write‐up of the study, titled “Pygmalion in Management,” Livingston noted two interesting things: First, managers' expectations had a huge impact on the performance and career progress of their employees. Second, managers' own self‐perceptions—what they believed about themselves—had a subtle mirroring effect on what they believed about their subordinates; if they were confident in their ability to develop and inspire people, they would expect more of their workers, who generally responded by meeting these expectations. But if managers doubted themselves, they tended to expect less, and to receive less.

“The superior managers' record of success and confidence in their own ability give their high expectations credibility,” Livingston wrote. “As a consequence, their subordinates accept these expectations as realistic and try hard to achieve them.”¹⁶

In 2006, leadership researchers Bruce Avolio and Fred Luthans summarized a century's worth of studies on leadership development, and they found that “The largest developmental impact was raising positive beliefs instilling in them the conviction that they were better at a performance task than they thought.”¹⁷ The single most reliable indicator of how successful an employee will be, in other words, is the extent to which somebody believes in her.

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind, wrote that we need to stop asking, How smart is the student? and start asking, How is the student smart?¹⁸ The question presumes everyone is smart—we're just smart in different ways. We have different strengths. Our role as teachers and leaders is to help identify and encourage those strengths.

Connecting the Dots: A Note on Courage, Patience, and Serendipity

In the workplace, where deadlines press, serendipity can be frustrating. There's no fixed protocol or timeline for bringing strengths to the surface; their discoveries are often the accidental collision of preparation and opportunity—or a series of such collisions, perhaps over a period of years. In his 2005 commencement address to Stanford University graduates, the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told the story of his days as a floundering student with no interest in anything with a practical use. He dropped out of college for a while and then vowed to take only courses that interested him. The first he signed up for was a class in calligraphy.

“I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” he said. “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.”

Jobs stumbled onto the founding of Apple Computer 10 years later, thinking he and his partner, Steve Wozniak, would make inexpensive computers for hobbyists. “When we were designing the first Macintosh computer,” he said, “it all came back to me…it was the first computer with beautiful typography.”¹⁹ Jobs would later make a point to list the names of his engineers inside the housing of each computer Apple produced—because, he said, “artists sign their work.”²⁰

Now, 40 years after the company's founding, Apple's products still are renowned for their elegance, simplicity, and seamlessness. Steve Jobs's legacy didn't happen overnight—it happened as he became more immersed in the world of technology and began to see the connections between the emerging world and the work of the old masters. He followed his interests, tried new things, and, as he put it, started to connect the dots. His proven talent for design, and his passion for it, collided with the world of gray boxes envisioned by the greatest technological thinkers of the day and changed the course of the industry.

“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college,” Jobs said. “But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.”²¹

Connecting the dots for an individual requires time, an open mind, and the courage to try and fail. But how do good leaders connect the dots when it comes to creating a team, if the connections are so often accidental, and might not make sense for another decade? We think that, just as leadership is a privilege to be earned, rather than a title to be given, it's also an art, rather than a science. And part of the artistry of strengths‐based leadership is the ability to create conditions in which these fortunate accidents can happen.

Strength‐focused leaders increase the probability of such accidents by building diverse teams—diverse in cultures, perspectives, strengths, passions, and ages—that, although they may not seem a natural fit at first, have the potential to fall into place like the pieces of a puzzle. Just as a professional sports team needs a suite of specialists, a work team needs to be composed of varied and complementary skill sets—but of course, their roles, at first, will be far less obvious, and company leaders sometimes make the mistake of combining people with similar strengths. A work team at an accounting firm, for example, need not—should not, certainly—be composed entirely of individuals who have great numerical skills but fall short on people and organizational skills. Such a group possesses indispensable strengths, but its weaknesses are likely to hold it back.

The leader of a diverse team, instead of making a new project into a punch list of individual assignments, can take a looser approach. He or she can look at the skill set and try to find the best fit for a certain task but can also create the possibility for innovation, asking: Who wants to tackle this? It may not be clear why a team member wants to take on a certain task until later.

The strengths‐based approach goes explicitly against the approach many leaders use to assemble work groups: Often, managers choose people they think are well rounded and versatile. But as Buckingham and Clifton warned, in Now, Discover Your Strengths: “When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp.”²²

Leading with strength means understanding the difference between a well‐rounded individual—whose versatility guarantees competence but not excellence—and a well‐rounded, multifaceted team composed of sharp individuals who complement one another. It supports the idea of people being great at some things, even at the expense of other things.

In the Cotswolds region of England, at the Sainsbury's supermarkets he runs in Cheltenham and Gloucester, John Taylor tries to create a culture in which team members are encouraged to bring their strengths to bear on the stores' everyday functions. When he saw one of his employees, a college student working nights in the store bakery, didn't seem to be particularly engaged in his work, John asked whether everything was okay. The student told John he was frustrated. The software the store was using to manage its waste required employees to enter data—codes for expected shelf life and freshness—manually for every product in stock. It was clunky and inefficient and left too much room for error. “This kid was 18,” John told us, “but he was studying computers, and he had a business he'd set up on the side, building websites for people. He said: ‘I could build you a better system over the weekend. Are you interested?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ And the system he built is one of the systems we use now. It's far more effective and easier for our colleagues to use.”

A strengths‐based leader looks beyond the immediate objectives of a given work unit and embraces the spirit of the “teach a man to fish” aphorism: The larger goal is to rise above mediocrity and cultivate curiosity, boldness, and a team with strong perspectives and opinions. As a leader who has studied and begun to master your own strengths, you'll be able to guide your team members, awakening and directing their passions. They'll likely achieve bigger and better things—and they'll likely experience more joy, spending their days doing what they love and are good at.