The Research Is Finally Catching Up to What I’ve Been Teaching for Years
A newsletter landed in my inbox this week from the Positive Psychology team, the same organization that has spent years building strengths inventories and helping coaches match clients to their natural talents. The subject line was almost a confession: When strengths stop being useful.
The piece made a simple point, and I sat up when I read it. A client’s problem often isn’t a missing strength. It’s the overuse of a favorite one, applied in the wrong moment. Directness that serves a leader in the boardroom can wound someone in an intimate conversation. The tool isn’t broken, it’s just being swung at the wrong job. Their recommended fix wasn’t “find a new strength.” It was learning to recognize when a go-to strength has quietly become a liability, and building the range to reach for something else instead.
Coming from Positive Psychology, that’s notable. This is the very tradition that gave the business world the strengths-based movement in the first place — the idea that we grow faster investing in what we’re already good at than grinding away at our weaknesses. For that camp to publish a piece warning its own practitioners about the shadow side of their core teaching is a signal worth paying attention to. I’ve been making this argument on stages for years. It’s good to see the data starting to say it out loud too.
I’m Not the Only One Who’s Been Saying This — and That’s the Point
I’ll admit there have been moments building and delivering my keynote “Stronger Than Your Strengths” where it felt like I was arguing against the grain alone — pushing back on a strengths-based orthodoxy that most of the leadership world has treated as settled for twenty years. So when I went looking this week, I wanted to know: is anyone else actually saying this?
The answer is yes, and it turns out I’m in good company.
Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser have built an entire research program around this exact idea, culminating in their book Fear Your Strengths and a Harvard Business Review piece titled, bluntly, “Don’t Let Your Strengths Become Your Weaknesses.” Their data, drawn from thousands of leaders across the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, found something I wish I’d had on a slide years ago: the relationship between a leadership behavior and outcomes like engagement and team performance isn’t a straight line upward. It’s curved. Leaders who underuse a strength get weak results. Leaders who use it “the right amount” peak. Leaders who overuse it drop right back down, often landing as low as the leaders who don’t use it enough. Overdoing a strength is functionally as damaging as underdoing it. That’s not a moral argument. That’s measured, peer-level research, and it says exactly what I’ve been telling rooms full of executives for years.
Kaplan and Kaiser also dug into why leaders overuse their strengths, and their explanation reads like a research paper describing something I learned the hard way in my own leadership: high performers, especially under stress, instinctively double down on the exact attribute that made them successful in the first place. Their coauthor Robert Kaiser put it well — a leader’s mindset throws off his form the same way a golfer’s does, and correcting it takes real intellectual honesty about the emotional roots of the overuse. That’s a researcher describing, in secular language, something close to what I mean when I talk about appetite: the reflex to reach for the familiar comfort even when it’s actively working against you.
A cluster of executive coaches, writing under the banner of “lopsided leadership,” have popularized the same idea from a slightly different angle — every strength taken far enough becomes its own failure mode. Confidence curdles into hubris. Humility collapses into self-erasure. Vision drifts into aimless dreaming. Focus narrows into tunnel vision. A decade earlier, Marshall Goldsmith made an adjacent case in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There — the exact habits that build a leader’s early success are frequently the habits that cap their next level of growth. And even Gallup — the closest thing the strengths movement has to an established church — quietly recommends in its own leadership material that leaders manage their weaknesses alongside their strengths rather than lean on strengths exclusively. That’s the strengths movement, from the inside, admitting “play to your strengths” was never meant to be the whole story.
So no, I’m not the only one who’s noticed the crack in the strengths-only paradigm. Kaplan and Kaiser have the data. The lopsided-leadership coaches have the vocabulary. Goldsmith has the bestseller. Gallup has the quiet hedge. And now Positive Psychology — the tradition that arguably started all of this — has the confession. I take that as validation, not competition. It means the rooms I speak to have already been softened up by a decade of research telling them the same thing I’ve been telling them from the stage: leaning entirely on your strengths eventually stops working.
Where My Approach Actually Goes Further
Here’s what I noticed reading back through all of it, though: every one of these sources treats overused strengths as a diagnostic problem — something to be caught through 360 feedback, self-awareness exercises, or a coach pointing out the pattern, and then corrected through behavioral modulation. Kaplan and Kaiser’s own word for it is “fine-tuning” — notice the overuse, dial it back, reach for the opposite trait more deliberately. It’s smart. It’s well-supported by data. And it’s almost entirely mechanical. It’s an information-and-feedback fix for something they themselves admit is a mindset problem underneath.
None of them ask the question I’ve built my keynote around: why does a leader keep reaching for the same strength even after being told, repeatedly, that it’s hurting them? Kaplan and Kaiser get close — they talk about needing “the courage to rummage in the attic of your mind” — but they stop at insight. They don’t offer a discipline for what to do once you’ve found what’s in the attic. That’s the piece I keep coming back to in my own work: overuse isn’t just a blind spot to be corrected with better feedback. It’s closer to appetite — a default-mode reliance that feels like strength in the moment but is actually the absence of restraint. And if that’s true, the fix isn’t just “get better feedback” or “remember to use the opposite trait.” It’s building the muscle of restraint on purpose, before the moment demands it.
That’s the distinction I keep making on stage, and it holds up against everything the research says:
- The researchers diagnose. I prescribe. Kaplan, Kaiser, Goldsmith, and the lopsided-leadership coaches are excellent at naming the problem and proving its cost. None of them hand a leader a repeatable, daily practice for building the capacity to not reach for the comfortable strength in the first place.
- They treat weakness-work as damage control. I treat it as competitive advantage. The existing literature frames working on weaknesses as something you do because your strengths have started backfiring. I argue it further: restraint and discipline aren’t just how you stop losing points — they’re how the most rigorous leaders actually outperform the ones still coasting on raw talent.
- They locate the fix in awareness. I locate it in character. A 360 review can tell a leader that they’re overusing a strength. It can’t tell them how to actually want to stop, or how to build the internal discipline that makes restraint sustainable rather than a temporary correction after an uncomfortable performance review.
That’s the gap I’ve been standing in for years, and it’s good to see it confirmed from the outside: the researchers have proven the problem is real and costly. I’m the one arguing — and teaching a methodology for — the idea that the deepest fix looks less like optimization and more like discipline.
What This Means for the Conversation We’re Having
I’ll keep saying it: leaning on your strengths alone isn’t leadership, it’s a plateau. The next level of rigor isn’t finding one more strength to lean on. It’s learning what to hold back, and when — the discipline of restraint that most strengths-based training never teaches, because it was never designed to.
The research is catching up. I’ll take it.