Unleashing Potential: The Benefits of Focusing on Strengths Over Correcting Weaknesses

There's a magic ratio to feedback.

The secret? 5 positives for every 1 negative.

Despite the best intentions and high quality of the coaches I've seen... I've never seen any coach get close to this ratio.

Our culture spends a disproportionate amount of time focused on correcting weaknesses and fixing them rather than optimizing strengths.

I think the main reason for this focus actually cuts quite deep. Most of the time, coaches aren't rewarded, at least not immediately, for winning and big success. They're "rewarded," in that they keep their job if they minimize losing.

That approach means that they're more likely to address things they perceive will lead to losing - weaknesses - than things that might improve the odds of winning. Even if their ultimate goal is to win, the system isn't set up to naturally promote that.

The problem with this approach is that eventually, you need to build skills to sustain success. You have to help your athletes and team think, feel, and perform better if you want to build a championship team.

You need to focus on strengths if you want your athletes to be great.

(The ideal might be to both address strengths and deficits. But, with limited resources and time, and increasing pressure to achieve, most leaders pick one.)

The Benefits of a Strengths-Based Approach

The data is fairly robust on this one.

If we use our strengths, we tend to get better performance and better well-being (Dubreuil et al., 2016; Harzer & Ruch, 2016).

And:

• Individuals who focus on developing their strengths are 3 times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life.

• Teams that focus on strengths are 12.5% more productive.

• Employees who use their strengths every day are 6 times more likely to be engaged at work.

• Strengths-based development can lead to a 41% reduction in employee turnover.

• Strengths-based leadership can increase employee engagement by up to 73%.

• Organizations that focus on strengths have a 29% increase in profitability.

It's hard to ignore.

But, we also know that taking a deficit-erasing approach also has some effectiveness (otherwise, nobody would do it). When workplaces focus on addressing limitations, performance on some tasks does improve and engagement can improve as well.

Where the deficit-based approach tends to fall short is in sustaining motivation to engage over time.

What the research suggests is that, in the short term, correcting deficits does improve self-efficacy (Els et al., 2018) and enhance performance (Mohammed et al., 2019). But when we start to look a bit deeper, we find that this approach does not lead to people rating their own performance as better, or have others rate their performance as better (based on both behaviors and results) (Hiemstra & Van Yperen, 2015).

When people focus on weaknesses, they feel more confident, but that confidence doesn't translate to seeing or believing performance is getting better - and as a result, the desire to continue drops.

In contrast, when performers focus on developing strengths, they tend to experience some of these things the deficit approach is missing. Their performance is rated as better, their problem-solving improves, and their creativity goes through the roof. It also promotes the behaviors we want to see in making an organization function better on the whole (van Woerkem et al., 2016; Macaskill & Denovan, 2013; Cable et al., 2015; Littman-Ovadia & Lavy, 2016).

When we focus on strengths, we get performers who are more effective, solve problems better and faster, are more creative, and are more fun to work with.

The Role of Self-Determination

When it comes to performance, it would be ideal if we could find ways to support our talents' innate drive to develop, rather than having to constantly correct what we think is going wrong.

We want our performers to want to get better.

We know that organizations offering support to their front-line performers leads to a sense of their needs being satisfied and reduced frustration (Forest et al., 2022). The question is, does satisfying those needs lead to sustained autonomous motivation - the will to do the work, on their own, because they care about it? And, does it matter how we satisfy those needs - through a strengths-based approach or a focus on reducing deficits?

SDT and Building on Strengths vs. Fixing Weaknesses

In 2 studies totaling over 750 participants, Dubord & Forest (2023) set out to determine the impact of a strengths-based approach and deficits-based approach on psychological needs satisfaction (or frustration) and subsequent performance and well-being. 

Their model looked like this:

The idea is that focusing on strengths leads to increased needs satisfaction, reduced needs frustration, and as a result increased autonomous motivation that leads to greater well-being and performance.

In contrast, focusing on correcting deficits is inversely related to need satisfaction and mildly related to need frustration, which leads to increased controlled motivation, lower performance, and lower well-being.

In other words:

A strengths-based approach is the only path that leads to an autonomous, coming-from-within drive to get better.

But the strengths-based approach does more than just lead to autonomous motivation.

It actually proactively prevents need frustration (the sense that we aren't fully supported or don't have what we need to be successful) and reduces controlled motivation (the feeling of needing to do somebody outside ourselves told us so.)

Though the authors didn't arrive at this conclusion, the other critical point this data seems to direct us to is that a strengths-based approach leads to greater self-regulation. With our needs met, we're freer to focus on getting better for the sake of improving and figuring out exactly how we do that. If our needs aren't met, we're too busy figuring out how to get what we need with no energy leftover to optimize how we get better.

The data on controlled motivation seems to support this - controlled motivation is essentially external regulation.

What this means for you

The clear takehome here is that focusing on strengths does in fact enhance performance in ways that correcting weaknesses does not. And, not only does it lead to enhanced performance, it leads to better motivation to sustain that performance over the long term.

Pragmatically, it can be as simple as just starting with catching your players or team doing something right. We're so drawn to what we think isn't working that we tend to overlook what works well. Catching people doing something right is a pillar of good coaching, and giving feedback about that is likely to get them to enact the same correct behavior in the future.

In fact, in my interviews with players, they constantly tell me that being told they're doing a good job isn't a sign that they should rest on their laurels. It's a signal that they should repeat that behavior again.

You might also try to get a bit closer to that 5:1 ratio I mentioned at the opening. Giving people 5 bits of praise is very challenging, but a way to make it easier is to talk constantly about the strengths that people have and how it leads to enhanced performance. This can be as straightforward as saying, "You did a great job leveraging [insert strength] there. Keep it up."

The more you bank the positive feedback, the more room you have to give some critical feedback when the time is right.

Finally, you can encourage your team to do some work on identifying their own strengths and sharing them with you. Once you create a mental model of the strengths of your team members, it'll be easier to figure out how they fit together, complement one another, and where to direct your attention for strengths-based feedback.

References

Gradito Dubord, M. A., & Forest, J. (2023). Focusing on Strengths or Weaknesses? Using Self-Determination Theory to Explain Why a Strengths-based Approach has More Impact on Optimal Functioning Than Deficit Correction. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 8(1), 87-113.

Dubreuil, P., Forest, J., Gillet, N., Fernet, C., Thibault-Landry, A., Crevier-Braud, L., & Girouard, S. (2016). Facilitating well-being and performance through the development of strengths at work: Results from an intervention program. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 1(1– 3), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-016-0001-8

Harzer, C., & Ruch, W. (2016). Your strengths are calling: Preliminary results of a web-based strengths intervention to increase calling. Journal of Happiness Studies, 17(6), 2237–2256. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10902-015-9692-y

Forest, J., Gradito Dubord, M. A., Olafsen, A. H., & Carpentier, J. (2022; in press). Shaping tomorrow’s workplace by integrating self-determination theory: A literature review and recommendations. Chapter to be published in R. Ryan & E. Deci (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Self-Determination Theory. Oxford University Press.

Els, C., Mostert, K., & Van Woerkom, M. (2018). Investigating the impact of a combined approach of perceived organisational support for strengths use and defcit correction on employee outcomes. SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 16(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajhrm.v16i0.882

Hiemstra, D., & Van Yperen, N. W. (2015). The efects of strength-based versus defcit-based selfregulatedlearning strategies on students’ efort intentions. Motivation and Emotion, 39(5), 656–668. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9488-8

van Woerkom, M., Bakker, A. B., & Nishii, L. H. (2016). Accumulative job demands and support for strength use: Fine-tuning the job demands-resources model using conservation of resources theory. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(1), 141. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000033

van Woerkom, M., Mostert, K., Els, C., Bakker, A. B., De Beer, L., & Rothmann, S., Jr. (2016). Strengths use and defcit correction in organizations: Development and validation of a questionnaire. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 25(6), 960–975. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1359432X.2016.1193010