History of Strengths Based Leadership

Studying leadership from the perspective of strengths is a new area of study, which came to the forefront in the late 1990s as a result of two overlapping research developments. First, researchers at Gallup initiated a massive study that included interviews of over 2 million people to describe what’s right with people—that is, their talents and what they are good at—rather than what’s wrong with people. Second, academic research scholars began to question the exclusive focus in psychology on the disease model of human problems and started to study mentally and physically healthy people and what accounted for their well-being.

From this work, a new field called positive psychology emerged. Each of these two developments helped to explain the rising popularity of strengths-based leadership. Best known as a public opinion research organization that conducts political polling, Gallup also conducts research in other areas of social science. For nearly 40 years, the study of strengths has been a major focus at Gallup. This work was spearheaded by the late Donald O. Clifton, under whose leadership millions of people were interviewed regarding their performance and human strengths.

Based on these interview data, Gallup researchers designed and published the StrengthsFinder profile, an online assessment of people’s talents and potential strengths. Now known as CliftonStrengths, this assessment is one of the most widely used self-assessment questionnaires in the world and has been completed by more than 20 million people to date. Organizations use the assessment to help employees become more engaged and improve their performance.