The 30% Performance Uplift: Why Strengths-Based Coaching Works (and Why Critics Miss the Point)
The claim that organisations can achieve a 30% uplift in performance by focusing on strengths is widely referenced in the positive psychology and leadership literature. Critics of strengths-based coaching often argue that it reinforces average leadership or encourages people to “stay comfortable” rather than stretch.
The evidence tells a very different story.
One of the most frequently cited performance uplift statistics in strengths-based work originates from a 2002 study by the Corporate Leadership Council, which remains a foundational piece of evidence in strengths-based management. Analysing data from 19,187 employees across 34 organisations, 7 industries, and 29 countries, the study found that managers who focused performance conversations on employee strengths saw an average 36.4% improvement in performance, while performance declined by 26.8% when reviews focused heavily on weaknesses.
While the original study is now over two decades old, its conclusions have been consistently reinforced by subsequent research. More recent meta-analyses through 2024 and 2025 show that employees who use their strengths daily are six times more likely to be engaged and significantly less likely to leave, while organisations adopting strengths-based approaches report an average 23% increase in profit and 14–29% higher sales performance.
Current psychological research also shows that strengths use satisfies core human needs such as competence, autonomy, and relatedness—conditions that directly drive higher task performance and work-related wellbeing—making sustained performance uplift not only plausible, but predictable when strengths-based coaching is applied well.
When strengths-based coaching is purposeful, specific, and context-dependent, it delivers a faster and more sustainable impact on performance than coaching that focuses solely on fixing development gaps.
Why Strengths-Based Coaching Drives Faster Performance Gains
Intrinsic Motivation Is the Accelerator
Neuroscience research consistently shows that intrinsic motivation doing work that feels naturally interesting, rewarding, and meaningful activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centres. Using strengths taps directly into this system.
When people think about what they do well:
Motivation increases
Energy rises
Willpower strengthens
Self-belief expands
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: confidence fuels action, action builds momentum, and momentum accelerates results.
Picturing the use of strengths connects people to self-belief, and self-belief makes goal achievement feel easier.
In contrast, coaching that relies exclusively on a deficit mindset, fixing what’s broken, absent, or weak, adds cognitive and emotional load to leaders who are often already under pressure. While development areas matter, an overemphasis on deficits can be demotivating, chip away at confidence, and make opportunities harder to see.
This is not to suggest that leaders should ignore development needs. Blind optimism won’t make weaknesses disappear. But combining strengths with targeted development work creates greater openness, confidence, and willingness to change.
Evidence From a Global Strengths-Based Coaching Program
A large-scale coaching program in a global FMCG organisation, spanning 30 countries and 180 leaders, provides compelling evidence.
The program explicitly:
Helped leaders uncover their individual purpose
Connected purpose to required business performance
Explored leadership possibility to challenge assumptions
Focused on how leaders influenced teams and stakeholders
A deep-dive analysis of leaders in the Asia-Pacific region showed:
Leaders who made the greatest progress in leveraging a chosen strength experienced the largest increases in performance
Strengths-focused coaching produced a quicker uplift than working on a development need alone
One of the most significant behavioural shifts was greater delegation
Why?
Reminding leaders of what they do well increased their confidence, enabling them to trust others, release control, and operate at a higher strategic level.
By contrast, addressing development needs did improve performance but required far more deliberate effort, consistent feedback loops, and time to avoid reverting to old habits.
As one leader reflected:
“It has been harder to make progress on the developmental goal. I have had to be much more deliberate in my approach.”
Another noted:
“The workload makes it easy to revert to type when working on weaker areas.”
The takeaway is clear: strengths create momentum; development needs require stamina.
Strengths-Based Coaching Done Properly (Not Naïvely)
For strengths-based coaching to have real impact, it must:
Include upfront feedback on development areas
Be linked to specific performance expectations
Target one or two strengths, not all sixty
Be grounded in the current and future business context
Programs that ignore weaknesses entirely risk colluding with inaccurate self-perception or reinforcing unhelpful patterns. Programs that focus only on deficits risk slowing progress and eroding confidence.
The most effective approach is both/and:
Where Strengths Profile Fits
The Strengths Profile assessment provides the clarity needed to do this work properly.
It identifies 60 human strengths, mapped across four areas:
Realised Strengths – energising performance accelerators
Unrealised Strengths – the greatest source of growth potential
Learned Behaviours – competent but draining activities
Weaknesses – areas to minimise, redesign, or support
Strengths Profile does not promise results on its own. It provides a precision map. Performance improves when that map is paired with coaching, accountability, and metrics.
How the Elevate Program Turns Insight Into Measurable Uplift
The Elevate Program by HiR is designed to apply this evidence rigorously.
Rather than generic team development, Elevate:
Identifies specific performance metrics that matter in context
Maps individual and team strengths to those metrics
Targets one or two strengths per leader for deliberate leverage
Surfaces development gaps that could block performance
Coaches application, not awareness
Tracks progress and embeds changes into team rhythms
This is why Elevate works particularly well for:
High performers stepping into bigger roles
Leaders entering new or more complex contexts
Teams under pressure to deliver more with less
Leaders who have lost confidence after setbacks
Psychological Flourishing: The Foundation of Sustainable Performance
Research in positive psychology has increasingly focused on psychological flourishing — a state of optimal functioning that goes beyond happiness to include how well people feel they are doing across key life and work domains.
Building on Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci), flourishing reflects the extent to which people experience:
To measure this, Diener et al. developed the Flourishing Scale, a validated assessment used widely in wellbeing and performance research.
In a large study of 1,187 working-age adults, researchers examined the relationship between strengths use and flourishing. The findings were clear and consistent:
There were strong, statistically significant positive relationships between the use of strengths and overall flourishing
The more individuals used their strengths, the higher their sense of wellbeing, confidence, purpose, and optimism
Certain strengths — including Mission, Optimism, Drive, Gratitude, and Centered — showed particularly strong relationships with flourishing
Why does this matter for performance?
Because flourishing individuals:
Have more energy and motivation
Show greater resilience under pressure
Persist longer toward goals
Are more confident in their ability to succeed
Flourishing is not a “soft” outcome. It is a performance-enabling state.
Work Engagement: Where Strengths Translate Into Output
Work engagement is one of the most reliable predictors of individual and team performance. It is defined as a positive, fulfilling work-related state of mind, characterised by:
Vigor – energy, persistence, and mental resilience
Dedication – enthusiasm, pride, meaning, and commitment
Absorption – deep focus and immersion in work
These dimensions are measured by the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), one of the most widely used and validated engagement tools globally.
In studies of working adults, the UWES consistently demonstrates high reliability, meaning it accurately captures how engaged people feel at work.
Why does engagement matter?
Because engaged employees:
Invest more discretionary effort
Perform with greater consistency
Cope better with pressure and complexity
Deliver higher-quality outcomes
Are less likely to disengage or leave
Crucially, strengths use is strongly associated with higher engagement across all three dimensions. When people work in ways that align with what they do well and enjoy, energy increases, focus sharpens, and commitment deepens.
Connecting the Dots: Why the Performance Uplift Is Real
When you combine these evidence streams, a clear pathway emerges:
Strengths use → psychological flourishing → higher engagement → improved performance
Strengths-based coaching accelerates this pathway because it:
Activates intrinsic motivation
Builds confidence and self-belief
Reduces energy drain from overused learned behaviours
Increases resilience and persistence
Improves focus, delegation, and decision-making
At the organisational level, these individual gains compound into measurable outcomes such as:
This is why organisations frequently report double-digit improvements in performance-related metrics following strengths-based interventions.
The often-quoted “30% uplift” reflects the combined effect of increased engagement, faster goal attainment, and more sustainable energy — not a single metric shift.
Why Strengths-Based Coaching Outperforms Deficit-Only Approaches
Critics sometimes argue that strengths-based coaching reinforces average performance. The evidence suggests the opposite.
When coaching is purposeful, specific, and context-dependent, leveraging strengths produces a faster performance uplift than focusing solely on development gaps. Development needs still matter — but they take longer to shift and require greater cognitive effort to sustain.
Strengths create momentum.
Development areas require stamina.
The most effective coaching combines both:
The Elevate Program is designed to operationalise this research in real organisational contexts.
Rather than generic development, Elevate:
Identifies the performance metrics that matter most
Uses Strengths Profile to map realised and unrealised strengths to those metrics
Targets one or two strengths per leader for deliberate leverage
Surfaces development gaps that could block performance
Coaches application, not awareness
Measures progress over time
This ensures strengths-based coaching is not aspirational, remedial, or vague — but commercially relevant and measurable.
Clients working with HiR on the Elevate Program choose a metric to increase by 30% withiin 90 days - and the result is guaranteed or we keep working with until it's achieved.
The Bottom Line
The evidence does not suggest that strengths alone magically increase performance. It shows that when people are supported to use their strengths more often and more deliberately, the psychological conditions that underpin performance improve significantly.
That improvement — across flourishing, engagement, resilience, and motivation — is what makes a 30% performance uplift plausible when strengths-based coaching is done well.
The role of programs like Elevate by HiR is to turn that potential into measurable results, at both the individual and team level.
The “30% uplift” is not a promise tied to a single assessment. It’s a shorthand for what decades of research consistently show:
Deliberately leveraging strengths produces faster performance gains than coaching focused solely on fixing weaknesses.
When organisations invest in their people, align strengths to strategy, and coach with purpose and context, performance improves quickly and sustainably.
The Elevate Program exists to make that improvement measurable, repeatable, and commercially meaningful.
