Marcus Buckingham helped launch the Strengths Revolution when he co-authored Now, Discover your strengths. For two decades he has been a leading proponent of strengths based development. In this interview with Adam Grant he tackles overusing strengths:

“I’m just giving you my reaction. A strength is not good or bad, it’s morally neutral. You can use it for ill and you can use it for good. You can never have too much of a strength, you can only use it poorly. What we’re talking about here is intelligence. You can use your strengths unintelligently. If you think you can ever have too much of a strength, your coaching then sounds like this: “Be less of yourself, Adam. Turn yourself down.” And for you, you’re like, “How do I metabolize that?” Whereas if I say to you, “Listen, you’ve got a great strength in…” — maybe you’re super assertive — “Stop pissing people off, and start using that to persuade them to do something they didn’t intend to do.” And then you lean in and go, “How do I do that?” Now all of a sudden, I’m like, “I don’t know. Here’s what I would do, but what you might try …” That just feels better than me going, “Turn yourself down. You’re at 11. Turn it to six.” And you’re like, “I can’t.” Or “You’re too empathetic.” No. You can never be too — if you’ve got empathy, you’re empathetic. A challenge with you then is how do leverage that intelligently to create the outcomes that you want? You can’t be crying all over people all the time. But that doesn’t mean you have too much empathy. It means we’ve got to help you channel that productively. It leads to different conversations.”

Maximizers and Developers will love this episode, but so too will anyone interested in Strengths based development.

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