When Talking About Strengths Feels Uncomfortable, You're Probably Doing It Right

Let me be honest with you. When I first encountered strengths-based work, I felt a flicker of scepticism. It seemed a little too positive, a little too smooth. My inner critic kept asking: "Yes, but shouldn't we focus on the stuff we're not yet good at instead of kumbaya-ing each other?"

I suspect I'm not alone in that. Many of the leaders and HR professionals I work with carry a version of this hesitation. Strengths work can feel soft. It can feel like corporate self-help. And there's something genuinely uncomfortable about being asked, in a professional setting, in front of colleagues, to say out loud that you're good at something. That you have qualities worth naming.

It turns out this discomfort isn't a personal quirk. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Business Research put it plainly:

"talking about one's strengths, especially 'out in the open'... does not come naturally to employees."

The researchers weren't dismissing strengths work. They were identifying the real obstacle, and in doing so, they pointed quite precisely to what actually needs to happen for strengths work to make a difference in teams.

That's what this article is about.

What is a strength, actually?

Before we go further, it's worth being precise about what we mean, because "strength" gets used loosely, and that looseness is part of why the concept can feel slippery. In StrongSuits, we define a strength as a core quality that comes naturally to you.

Not something you've learned to do, not a skill you've developed through effort alone, something so intrinsic that it sometimes surprises or even frustrates you that others don't simply have it too. That frustration is actually a useful signal. If you've ever thought "why doesn't everyone just do it this way?" you're probably close to a strength.

This distinction matters more than it might seem. Most of us have things we're good at that aren't strengths in this sense. We've become competent through training, repetition, or necessity, and we can do the work well, but it costs us something. It doesn't energise us; it depletes us. A strength does the opposite. It gives back as you use it. You could do it for hours and feel more alive at the end than when you started. That's the difference.

This definition connects to serious psychology. Researcher Alex Linley, whose work underpins much of the academic field, defines strengths as pre-existing capacities for a way of behaving, thinking, or feeling that are authentic and energising to the person using them.

The StrongSuits definition says the same thing, just with less jargon and more recognition.

The energising part matters. Strengths aren't just things you're good at. They're things that give you energy rather than drain it. That distinction is easy to overlook, and it changes the conversation considerably.

Strengths-Based Team Performance Starts With the Collective

Most strengths work stops at the individual. You do an assessment, you get a profile, perhaps you have a coaching conversation about it. That's valuable. But a team of individuals who each know their own strengths is not the same as a team that knows how to use them together.

A 2023 study by Maria Christina Meyers, Marianne van Woerkom, and Robin Bauwens at Tilburg University takes this as its starting point. The researchers introduce the concept of "collective strengths use," what it actually looks like when a team, not just an individual, plays to its strengths. They break it down into three components.

• The first is awareness: team members actually know what strengths each person brings. Not in a vague sense, but specifically enough to name them and recognise them in action.

• The second is credibility: team members trust and believe in each other's strengths. This goes beyond knowing. It means genuinely relying on someone because you've seen what they bring, and you trust it.

• The third is coordination: tasks and roles are allocated in line with those strengths. Work gets organised around who brings what.

Together, Meyers, Van Woerkom, and Bauwens argue, these three create the conditions for a team to capitalise on everything its members have to offer.

What the research actually found

The study surveyed 925 employees across 136 work teams, with team performance rated by team leaders rather than by team members themselves. That's an important design choice. It removes the risk of people simply rating their own team favourably because they feel good about the work they've been doing together. The study offers some of the clearest evidence yet for what drives strengths-based team performance across real organisations. The findings are worth sitting with.

Collective strengths use, taken as a whole, was positively related to team performance. That's the headline. But when the researchers pulled the three components apart, something more interesting emerged: awareness alone wasn't enough. Knowing what your colleagues are good at, without genuinely trusting and relying on those qualities, doesn't move the needle. It was credibility, mutual trust in each other's strengths, that most reliably drove team performance.

This makes intuitive sense when you sit with it. A team can go through a strengths workshop, learn something true and useful about each other, and then return to working exactly as before. The knowledge doesn't automatically become trust. And trust, it turns out, is where the performance lives.

The conversation is the mechanism

What the researchers describe as the core obstacle, that talking about strengths out in the open doesn't come naturally, is something I recognise immediately from my own facilitation work. And it points directly to why the structure you put in the room matters so much.

In fact, the researchers are quite specific about what organisations actually need to do: find ways to help team members

"continuously discuss the strengths of others, ask who possesses the right strength for a task, and seek and give feedback on individual strengths."

They acknowledge that this "requires a culture shift towards more appreciation for oneself and others." That's a significant ask. And it raises an immediate practical question: how do you create the conditions for that shift?

One thing I notice consistently in my work is that when I invite people to talk about their strengths, many paradoxically start talking about their weaknesses. It's an almost automatic reflex, particularly in professional contexts where self-criticism reads as self-awareness and modesty is mistaken for humility. The invitation alone isn't enough. The social and psychological conditions have to make it possible.

This is where StrongSuits does its work. The cards give people a shared language and a tangible prompt, something to hold, point to, and play with. And playing is the operative word. When strengths conversations happen through a card game, the social awkwardness that would otherwise make the whole thing stilted simply has less room to take hold. People are having fun. The lightness is not incidental; it's the mechanism.

Credibility, that deeper layer of trust in each other's strengths, grows from repeated experience of exactly this kind of conversation. Not a single workshop, but a shared language that a team can return to, that becomes part of how they talk about themselves and each other over time.

A word on coordination

The research has more complicated findings around coordination, the actual allocation of tasks according to strengths, particularly in teams where people's strengths profiles are similar. Moving too quickly from "we understand our strengths" to "let's restructure how we work" can create friction rather than resolve it.

My own view, informed by facilitation experience rather than research alone, is that coordination is best left to emerge from awareness and trust rather than planned from the outside. When a team genuinely knows and believes in what each person brings, task allocation tends to find its own logic. The facilitator's job, and the game's job, is to build the foundation. What the team builds on it is up to them.

Where this leaves us

Nobody expects to get fit from a single session at the gym. And nobody's teeth stay clean from brushing them once. Strengths work is no different. A workshop is a starting point, not a destination.

What the research suggests, and what I've seen in practice, is that the real strengths-based team performance requires something more specific than a one-off. Repeated conversation. The kind of trust that only comes from genuinely seeing each other's strengths in action, over time. And a structure that makes those conversations feel natural rather than forced, because, as Meyers, Van Woerkom, and Bauwens note, they don't come naturally on their own.

That's not a reason to abandon strengths work. It's a reason to take it more seriously than a one-afternoon intervention. And it's a reason to think carefully about what you put in the room to make the conversation possible.