A coaching client, a successful executive leader, recently told me,: “I’m an engineer, I’m trained to find and solve problems. To focus on what’s broken and get ahead of it. That worked great to get me here; not so much now that I’m leading a team.”

Here’s the thing we get backwards, almost universally: we treat fixing what’s broken as the responsible path and leaning into what’s already strong as a kind of indulgence. It’s not. The research doesn’t support that hierarchy. But the data says we’ve got it backwards. According to work by researcher and strengths expert Marcus Buckingham, the best teams are working in their strengths at least 70% of the time Not 100%. Seventy.

Before we get to what actually works, it’s worth understanding why we default to the wrong instinct in the first place.

Why we naturally look at our failures and our weaknesses first

As a culture, we are trained to focus on what’s broken. School grades punish the weak subject. Performance reviews spend most of their airtime on “areas for growth.” Feedback loops are engineered to surface gaps. This isn’t incidental — it’s the water we swim in.

There’s a deeper reason this instinct runs so strong, and it’s not a character flaw. It’s wiring. Our energy is drawn toward remembering and minimizing failure because we are, at bottom, threat-avoidance machines. A weakness reads as danger — to your job, your reputation, your standing on the team — so attention snaps toward it automatically, long before you’d think to notice what’s already working well. Psychologists call this negativity bias, and it’s one of the most well-replicated findings in the field: when equal measures of good and bad are present, the bad weighs more heavily on us, psychologically, than the good. It’s also tangled up with loss aversion — the well-documented tendency for the pain of losing something to hit about twice as hard as the pleasure of gaining something equivalent.

Put simply: fixing a weakness feels like closing off a risk. Building a strength feels speculative, upside-only — and our risk-averse wiring quietly discounts anything that doesn’t look like risk reduction.

There’s a second layer to this, too. Most of us are simply better at naming our weaknesses than our strengths. We wrestle with a sense of inadequacy and dwell on shortcomings far more fluently than we catalog what we’re good at. Strengths, ironically, tend to be so natural to us that we don’t even register them as remarkable — until someone else points them out. (“Wait, that’s not normal? I thought everyone could do that.”) Weaknesses announce themselves. Strengths hide in plain sight.

And yet — the research is clear on which direction actually produces results. When we lean into what makes us uniquely brilliant, and simply mitigate (not ignore) what we’re not good at, we perform better, we find more meaning in the work, and — critically for anyone in a leadership seat — people are more likely to follow us.

What is a strength, actually?

A strength is not a personality trait like “honesty” or “persistence.” A strength is an activity — something you do — that meets two conditions: you have a natural talent for it, and it energizes you. It’s the intersection of competence and aliveness. You can be good at something and hate doing it (that’s not a strength, that’s a skill you’ve built out of obligation). You can love something and be mediocre at it (that’s a hobby, not a strength). A true strength is where “I’m good at this” and “this fills my tank” overlap.

The challenge with fixing what’s broken

Here’s where the math gets interesting, and where the research gets genuinely counterintuitive.

Trying to fix a weakness takes a lot of investment for a reasonably small return. With real, sustained effort, you can move an activity you’re not naturally good at from poor to competent. That’s real progress — but it has a ceiling, and the ceiling isn’t very high.

Put that same amount of energy into an existing strength, and you can move it from high-performing to genuinely brilliant. Zenger and Folkman’s research, drawn from analysis of well over 100,000 leaders, found that leaders who focused their development on strengths saw roughly three times the improvement in effectiveness compared to leaders who focused on shoring up weaknesses.

Separately, the Corporate Leadership Council’s landmark study of 19,000 employees found that emphasizing strengths in performance conversations improved performance by over 36% on average — while over-emphasizing weaknesses actually decreased performance, by nearly 27%. That’s not a small effect. That’s a study telling you the conventional approach to performance management is, on average, actively counterproductive.

There’s also an emotional undercurrent worth naming. Focusing on weaknesses first tends to be a fear-based effort — we’re organizing around avoiding failure rather than reaching toward success. Those are not the same motivational engine, and they don’t produce the same quality of work, or the same quality of life, even when the underlying task gets done either way.

None of this means weaknesses don’t matter. They do — but selectively, and in a specific order.

Fix the floor, then raise the roof

This is the two-part model I now use with clients and teams:

1. If you have a limiting deficiency that’s genuinely getting in your way, work it up to a level of basic competence — nothing more. This might be public speaking, analyzing data, finding your voice in meetings, or learning to collaborate well with a colleague whose style grates against yours. These are excellent things to work on with a coach, by the way — I do this work with clients regularly. The goal isn’t excellence in this area. The goal is simply to get it out of the “liability” column, so it stops actively undermining you and stops eating airtime that belongs to your strengths.

2. Move yourself — and your team — incrementally toward working in strengths. This doesn’t happen overnight, and it shouldn’t be forced overnight. But if you can shift the mix by even 5% a month, you’re at a fundamentally different, far sounder place within a year. Small, compounding moves beat a dramatic reorg of everyone’s role.

Finding what lights people up

If you’re leading a team, the practical work here starts with getting specific.

● Break work into its individual components, not just job titles, and identify which parts are genuinely enlivening for each person. Two people with the “same job” often love completely different parts of it.

● Ask better questions in your 1:1s. Try: What are you looking forward to this month? What are you proud of from the last few weeks? Which items on your priority list do you find yourself avoiding — and which ones do you keep circling back to, even when no one’s watching?

● Organize the work around strengths, not just around org-chart logic. Once you know what energizes each person, build project assignments around that map wherever you have the flexibility to do so.

● Lever the diversity on your team. A team where everyone shares the same strength is a team with a blind spot. The goal isn’t uniformity — it’s complementary brilliance. And diversify- that is, hire people with different strengths to enhance the power of your team.

● Look for ways to shift depleting activities into energizing ones — sometimes by reassigning them, sometimes pairing people with differing strengths, sometimes by pairing depleting tasks with something the person does love, sometimes by simply naming that a task is a “floor” task rather than pretending it isn’t.

Leveraging your own strengths

This same logic applies to you, not just the people you lead. Pay attention to where you consistently show up strongest — not where you think you should be strong, but where the evidence actually is: the moments people come to you unprompted, the work that doesn’t feel like work while you’re doing it, the feedback that surprises you because it names something you’d stopped noticing. That’s your map. Follow it more than you follow the gap list.

What’s the impact?

When you fix the floor and raise the roof — rather than spending your best energy sanding down every rough edge — you get three things at once: better performance, more meaning in the work itself, and a team that’s genuinely excited to follow you. That third one matters more than it might sound. People don’t follow leaders who are competent everywhere. They follow leaders who are unmistakably, unapologetically excellent at something — and who help them find the same thing for themselves.

The floor keeps you standing. The roof is what you’re actually here to build.