Call me Scrooge, but when I hear the phrase “strengths-based” organization, I find myself cringing.


Much the same approach characterizes the fast-growing field of positive psychology. Don’t get bogged down in the depressing psychopathology of your childhood, the positive psychologists say, echoing Abe Maslow and the pioneers of humanistic psychology. Instead, cultivate qualities like happiness and appreciation, and they’ll inexorably get stronger while your less desirable traits recede in importance.



The worst irony is that a strength overused eventually turns into a liability — as the researchers Robert E. Kaplan and Robert Kaiser demonstrated so persuasively in an HBR article several years ago. “There is always an optimum value,” the philosopher Gregory Bateson once explained, “beyond which anything is toxic, no matter what: oxygen, sleep, psychotherapy, philosophy.”


I know this all too well about myself. One of my strengths, I long believed, was the capacity to be straightforward and direct with people, even around difficult subjects. Over the years, I’ve learned that too much righteous honesty, unmediated by empathy, can be hurtful and counterproductive.

Too much empathy, on the other hand, can lead to indulging and enabling others, and neglecting one’s self. Think of empathy and honesty as positive opposites, inextricably intertwined. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient by itself. It makes no sense to train your biceps while ignoring your triceps.

My challenge hasn’t been to be more direct with others. What I’ve needed to learn — and continue to learn — is how to be more attuned to what others are feeling, and more balanced and thoughtful in the way I tell them what I’m thinking and feeling.


Think about your own greatest strength for a moment . What does it look like when you overuse it? What’s the positive opposite you need to cultivate to create a more nuanced sort of strength?


To make the most of what we’ve got, we must instead take on the messy whole of who we are. That means making the best possible use of our strengths, but also slogging away at the weaknesses they can serve to reveal.

We don’t need leaders who’ve got it figured out. Rather, we need ones who feel confident in and clear about their strengths, but are also courageous enough to recognize and take on their shortcomings. It’s a paradoxical challenge we all face: to hold ourselves fiercely accountable for becoming more of what we’re capable of being, but to simultaneously accept ourselves exactly as we are.