Strengths Based Leadership

The authors draw on decades of Gallup research to argue that the most effective leaders build on their natural strengths, assemble complementary teams, and meet their followers' core needs. To support these claims, they describe assembling a research team that reviewed more than 20,000 in-depth interviews with senior leaders, studies of more than one million work teams, 50 years of Gallup Polls on admired leaders, and a new study of more than 10,000 U.S. followers asked to describe why they follow the most influential leader in their life. Three key findings emerged: Effective leaders invest in strengths, they maximize their teams, and they understand what followers need. The book includes access to a leadership version of Gallup's StrengthsFinder assessment, an online tool that identifies a person's top five "themes" of talent and maps them to four domains of leadership strength.

In Part One, the authors argue that striving to be well-rounded breeds mediocrity. They illustrate this through a narrative about an employee named Sarah whose boss, Bob, cycles through leadership fads after attending development programs, imitating Lincoln's communication style one month and championing adaptability the next, without ever understanding his own natural strengths. The authors contrast Bob's approach with the examples of Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi, whose vastly different strengths defined their success, arguing that serious problems occur when leaders try to emulate others rather than leading from their own talents.

The authors then describe the research of the late Donald O. Clifton, whom they call the Father of Strengths Psychology. Beginning in the 1960s, Clifton conducted more than 20,000 structured interviews with leaders across industries, including heads of state. He found no single strength shared by all great leaders; instead, each effective leader truly knows his or her strengths and can call on the right one at the right time. The authors present data showing that when organizations focus on employees' strengths, the odds of employee engagement rise eightfold. They also cite a 2008 longitudinal study that followed 7,660 people over 25 years and found that individuals with higher self-confidence early in life earned progressively more over time. The authors argue that helping people identify their strengths early creates a cumulative advantage that compounds over a lifetime.

Part Two focuses on building effective teams. The authors observe that executive teams are typically assembled based on technical competence rather than on how individuals' strengths complement the existing group. From Gallup's study of thousands of executive teams, four domains of leadership strength emerged: Executing (implementing solutions), Influencing (selling ideas and ensuring the group is heard), Relationship Building (serving as the glue holding teams together), and Strategic Thinking (absorbing information and keeping teams focused on future possibilities). While individuals need not be well-rounded, teams should have representation across all four domains.

To illustrate each domain, the authors profile four leaders. Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach For America, exemplifies Executing. During her senior year at Princeton in 1988, Kopp noticed a divide between students from elite prep schools and those from urban public schools. Driven by her StrengthsFinder theme of Responsibility, she resolved to create a national teacher corps modeled on the Peace Corps. Despite skepticism and setbacks, her Achiever theme, another StrengthsFinder talent, drove her to recruit more than 2,500 applicants, raise $2.5 million, and launch the first 500-member cohort by April 1990, one year after graduation. By 2008, the organization's fundraising goal had reached $120 million with more than 25,000 applicants annually. Kopp describes finding talent as her most fundamental challenge because it "solves all the other problems" (36).

Simon Cooper, president of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, represents Influencing. Cooper assumed the role in 2001 after the departure of predecessor Horst Schulze and was determined to leave his own mark. He concluded that 90% of the brand's image was emotional, created by employees through personal interactions. As someone with the StrengthsFinder Maximizer theme, Cooper pushed the company's already elite customer engagement scores even higher, classifying properties in the 94th to 95th percentile as being in the "red" zone (45) and requiring the 98th percentile or above for acceptable standing. He also launched a residences and fractional ownership initiative that, despite initial criticism, became the fastest-growing segment of the business.

Mervyn Davies, chairman of Standard Chartered Bank, illustrates Relationship Building. Leading a bank with more than 70,000 employees in 70 countries, Davies went against conventional wisdom by focusing on emerging markets in Africa, India, and the Middle East. He leveraged his StrengthsFinder Relator theme through constant communication, including handwritten notes and monthly emails to all employees. When his wife had breast cancer, he sent a candid email to 400 top executives explaining the situation, demonstrating what he called "courageous conversations" (52). This openness created a culture of trust. During his tenure, Standard Chartered's market capitalization nearly tripled, and the bank was one of the few financial institutions able to grow through the 2008 economic crisis. Davies argued that the litmus test of a great leader is whether they can quickly list the people they have developed.

Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, represents Strategic Thinking. Anderson joined a small Minneapolis electronics store as a sales associate at age 24 and rose through the ranks. In the 1980s, Anderson and founder Dick Schulze questioned the commission-based sales model pervading the industry, which created pushy salespeople and eroded customer trust. They made the controversial decision to abandon commissions, a shift Anderson defended by urging skeptics to "think about the next fifteen years, not the next five" (63). The move permanently changed the retail industry. As president from 1991, Anderson defied conventional executive expectations, reading widely, attending conferences outside electronics, and surrounding himself with leaders whose strengths complemented his own.

The authors then present a case study of Hampton, a U.S.-based hotel chain, to show how understanding team strengths drives performance. Hampton President Phil Cordell led talented but siloed individuals who continually escalated issues to him. After reviewing the team's StrengthsFinder results, Cordell confronted the problems, calling the lack of trust a "deal breaker" (69). Members took on roles aligned with their strengths, and within six months, the team operated effectively even in Cordell's absence, freeing Cordell to pursue international expansion.

The authors identify five characteristics of high-performing teams: They focus on results rather than personalizing conflict; they prioritize organizational goals over individual egos; members are committed to personal lives as well as work; they embrace diversity of strengths, age, gender, and race; and they attract top talent because potential stars seek out teams with high expectations and accountability.

Part Three examines leadership from the follower's perspective. Gallup surveyed more than 10,000 people from 2005 to 2008, asking each respondent to identify the leader with the most positive influence in their daily life and list three words describing what that leader contributes. Four basic needs emerged: trust, compassion, stability, and hope. Trust is foundational: Employees who trust leaders have better than a 1 in 2 chance of being engaged, versus 1 in 12 when trust is absent. Compassion matters because people whose supervisors care about them are more productive and more likely to stay. Stability is reinforced by transparency about organizational goals and finances; employees confident in their company's future are nine times as likely to be engaged. Hope is where senior leaders have the greatest influence: 69% of employees who felt enthusiastic about the future were engaged, compared to just 1% who did not. The authors argue that most leaders spend nearly all their time reacting to daily demands rather than initiating for the future, inadvertently conveying a lack of control.

In the conclusion, the authors argue that the ultimate test of leadership is what continues to grow after a leader is gone. They invoke Martin Luther King Jr., who preached on April 3, 1968, that he might not reach the Promised Land with his followers and was assassinated the next day, yet whose influence grew from millions to hundreds of millions. The book's additional resources include the StrengthsFinder assessment, a guide to all 34 talent themes with strategies for meeting followers' four basic needs, and research appendices detailing the development of the Clifton StrengthsFinder, Gallup's 12 core elements of work team engagement (a set of survey items measuring the conditions that drive team performance), and the methodology behind the follower study.