Start With What Works: A Strength-Based Leadership Approach
Strength-based leadership begins with a simple, counterintuitive habit: asking what already works before asking what is wrong. Picture the moment just before a difficult conversation with a team member. A project has fallen behind. A client is unhappy. Numbers are down for the quarter. What is the first question that comes to mind?
For most leaders, it is some version of: what went wrong?
It is a reasonable question. It is also, in most cases, the wrong place to start.
The alternative is what is often called strength-based leadership: starting every conversation, every review, and every plan with what is already working, before asking what needs to change.
The Instinct to Diagnose
Most leadership training, and most management thinking in general, is built to locate a problem and work backwards from it: what is the symptom, what caused it, what would fix it. It is a logical process, borrowed from engineering and medicine, and it works well when the system in front of you is mechanical. A machine with a broken part really does improve once that part is repaired.
People and teams are not machines. A team is not simply the sum of its weakest performer, and an employee is not simply the sum of the areas listed under “development needs” on last year’s review. Yet that is often where the conversation begins, and where it stays.
The effect is measurable, not just anecdotal. Gallup has found that employees who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged at work, three times more likely to report an excellent quality of life, and considerably less likely to leave their job (source: Gallup, “Employees Who Use Their Strengths Outperform Those Who Don’t”). A conversation that opens with what is broken rarely produces that kind of engagement. Attention narrows to defending or fixing the fault, rather than building something better.
What Strength-Based Leadership Looks Like in Practice
Personal Leadership Program – PLP™, developed by Acuity World founder Henrik Wenøe together with Dr. Joseph Riggio, begins somewhere else entirely: what is already working, and how could you build on it?
This is not a suggestion to ignore problems. It is a decision about sequence. Before asking what needs fixing, ask what is functioning well, even partially. A sales team that has missed its target this quarter has still, almost certainly, done several things right: a strong pitch that landed with one segment, a process that shortened one part of the sales cycle, a client relationship that quietly kept renewing. Start there.
It sounds like a small shift. In practice, it changes the entire tone of the conversation. People engage differently when asked to describe what is working than when asked to explain what is wrong.
From What Works to What’s Possible
Once the present state is clear, the next question follows naturally: if this is what already works, what would an even better version look like? This is the second step of what PLP™ calls the Personal Leadership Spiral™: moving from Present State (what works now) to a Desired State (what could work better), then to the process required to close that gap, and finally to a first, concrete action.
The order matters. Jumping straight to solutions, without first understanding what is already working, tends to produce generic fixes that ignore the strengths already present in the team. Building on what works tends to produce solutions that people actually recognize as their own.
Try It in Your Next Conversation
Before your next difficult 1:1 or team meeting, try asking two questions before touching on what is wrong:
What is working here, even partially?
What would an even better version of this look like?
Only after those two questions, move on to what needs to change. The problem will still be there. It usually takes less time to solve once the conversation has started from a position of strength rather than deficit.
Where This Thinking Comes From
This reframe, the core of strength-based leadership, is one of the first mindset shifts taught in Personal Leadership Program – PLP™, the year-long leadership program developed by Acuity World founder Henrik Wenøe, built on the New NLP™ methodology. It is a small change in sequence with a large effect on how people show up in the room.
