to fix weakness.
This 80-20 deficit-bias
helps explain why only 20 percent of
people today feel their supervisors and
organizations recognize their greatest
strengths, play to those strengths, and
leverage those strengths
to a great extent
every day. Strengths leadership says that
it’s time, not to avoid or deny weaknesses,
but to radically reverse the 80-20 rule
.
Great leaders see strengths and
opportunities that no one else notices.
They
appreciate
and
inquire
simultane-
ously. To
appreciate
means
to see those
things worth valuing
. To
inquire
means
to
search, question, and discover
. This
appre-
ciative intelligence
—to see, to elevate a
spark of strength or opportunity and
turn it into a flame (even a legacy torch)
—is a
master strength
. Think of Amazon’s
Jeff Bezos or Herb Kelleher, former CEO
of Southwest Airlines, and the culture
of positivity and possibility that ele-
vates everyone at Southwest and pro-
pelled Amazon into a game-changer.
Think about societal leaders and
models—Gandhi’s or Mandela’s capac-
ity to summon people’s best, or Helen
Keller’s capacity to elevate
inner strengths
no one else could see. In England’s
darkest hour, Winston Churchill saw
things in his people that no one else
could see and spoke to them with a
laser-like faith and eloquence that gave
them a new idea of themselves. Great
leaders
elevate strengths
,
see what’s best or
what works
, and
evoke what’s next
.
The capacity to inspire positive
change is accessible to all of us through
talent management, leadership training,
and executive coaching.
Since
people excel
only by amplifying strengths, not by fixing
weakness,
people are asking, “Why can’t
this positive and productive perspective
be brought to
everything
we do (like the
design of new products, or enterprise-
wide IT transformation)? What about
strengths-based engagement with customers
,
supply chains, and communities?” For
this, it’s time to embrace phase two.
• Circle 2: Become a multiplier of
strengths, from elevation to configura-
tions.
This circle is about creating new
macro combinations and configurations
of
strengths across systems. When people
play to their strengths, engagement
soars, and active
disengagement
(which
Three Circles
P
OSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
is revolutionizing
the way we engage
people, transform strategy, and prepare
for open innovation with customers,
suppliers, and other key stakeholders.
Talking about
positive strengths
gets
people excited.
Millions
of managers have been intro-
duced to strengths-based approaches,
Appreciative Inquiry
(AI), and the posi-
tive psychology of human strengths.
For example, more than two million
people have taken the
Values in Action
Inventory of Strengths
(VIA-IS), while
more than two million managers have
used the assessment tool
StrengthsFinder
for their leadership development.
Here, I seek to take the positive-
strengths perspective to a new octave. I
provide a framework for a
strengths-
based leadership system
and point to
tools, stories, and research as a
roadmap. I call this framework
the
three circles of the strengths revolution
.
• Circle 1: The elevation of strengths.
This circle is all about enriching our
leadership capacity for
the elevation of
strengths
—since
individuals and groups
are always stronger when they have
their successes and strengths in focus—
and will excel only by amplifying
strengths, never by fixing weakness
.
Nobody articulated this assumption
better than
Peter Drucker
. “The task of
leadership is to create an alignment of
strengths in ways that make a system’s
weaknesses irrelevant.” Great leader-
ship is all about strengths.
Everything in management is filtered
through the way we do inquiry
. We’re
constantly doing analyses—and our
success as leaders is filtered through
the way we know and read people and
situations. And many organizations
have inherited a
deficit-bias
and an
inertia that clouds their ability to
feed
strengths
and
fuel opportunities
. For
example, one company had
2,000 mea-
surement systems
of what goes wrong,
including its annual low morale sur-
vey, its classic exit interviews to study
turnover, and its focus groups with the
most dissatisfied customers. Hence,
80
percent of management attention was going
costs U.S. firms $300 billion each year)
can plummet. In world-class compa-
nies, the engagement vs. disengage-
ment scores stand at a ratio of 10:1 (in
average companies, that ratio is less
than 2:1). Moreover, high-engagement
organizations have
3.9 times the earn-
ings-per-share growth rate
. Engaged
employees are more productive, prof-
itable, customer-focused, innovative,
collaborative, and growth-oriented.
Elevation, engagement, and success
reinforce one another in a positive feed-
back loop. The 80-20 reversal or turn to
strengths does more than
perform
—it
transforms
. It builds an enterprise-wide
capacity and achieves a multiplier
effect. The shift happens when leaders
turn macro, not just micro, in their
strengths-thinking. Two examples:
• U.S. Navy CNO Admiral Vernon
Clark turned to AI’s large-group meth-
ods to achieve a concentration effect of
strengths.
Turnover rates were costing
billions, and the three-star admiral had
read about the AI summit method—a
large-group planning, designing, or im-
plementation meeting that brings 300 to
2,000 or more stakeholders together in a
concentrated-strengths way to work on
a task of
strategic
and
creative
value.
That day, Admiral Clark launched a
series of AI summits and a new
Center
for Positive Change
. These 500-person
summits brought in external stakehold-
ers, supply partners, citizens and even
peace groups—all groups with a stake
in the future of the Navy. This high-en-
gagement process improved the Navy’s
bottom-line performance by
$2 billion
.
• Cindy Frick, a Roadway Express
executive,
shared how her managers
used to “starve opportunities” while
they focused on the problematic. In this
$4 billion trucking company, she
orchestrated over 65 500-person sum-
mits in
two years
, engaging truck drivers,
dock workers, executives, teamsters,
managers, and customers. Frick tapped
the strengths of over 10,000 people and
transformed a culture of entrenched
silos into a high-performance system.
The stock price went from $14 to $55 a
share in two years.
Let’s think in terms of
constellations
of strengths
. True innovation happens
when strong, multidisciplinary groups
come together, build a collaborative
and appreciative interchange, and ex-
plore the intersection of their different
points of strength
. Moreover, this macro-
minded ability to connect ideas, people,
and resources from across boundaries
paves the way for something
even more
inspiring
in management.
Circle 3: Positive institutions bring-
by David Cooperrider
L e a d e r s h i p E x c e l l e n c e
M a r c h 2 0 1 2
3
LEADERSHIP
STRENGTHS
of the strengths revolution.
