Positive Psychology is revolutionizing the way we engage people, transform strategy, and prepare for open innovation with customers, suppliers, and other key stakeholders. Talking about positive Strengths gets people excited. 
Millions of managers have been introduced to strengths-based approaches, Appreciative Inquiry (AI), and the positive psychology of human strengths. For example, more than two million people have taken the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS), while more than two million managers have used the assessment tool Strengths Finder for their leadership development. 
Here, I seek to take the positive-strengths perspective to a new octave. I provide a framework for a strengths-based leadership system and point to tools, stories, and research as a roadmap. I call this framework the three circles of the strengths revolution. 
Circle 1: The elevation of strengths. This circle is all about enriching our leadership capacity for the elevation of strengths--since individuals and groups are always stronger when they have their successes and strengths in focus--and will excel only by amplifying strengths, never by fixing weakness. 
Nobody articulated this assumption better than Peter Drucker. “The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.” Great leadership is all about strengths. 
Everything in management is filtered through the way we do inquiry. We’re constantly doing analyses--and our success as leaders is filtered through the way we know and read people and situations. And many organizations have inherited a deficit-bias and an inertia that clouds their ability to feed strengths and fuel opportunities. For example, one company had 2,000 measurement systems of what goes wrong, including its annual low morale survey, its classic exit interviews to study turnover, and its focus groups with the most dissatisfied customers. Hence, 80 percent of management attention was going to fix weakness. This 80-20 deficit-bias helps explain why only 20 percent of people today feel their supervisors and organizations recognize their greatest strengths, play to those strengths, and leverage those strengths to a great extent every day. Strengths leadership says that it’s time, not to avoid or deny weaknesses, but to radically reverse the 80-20 rule. 
Great leaders see strengths and opportunities that no one else notices. They appreciate and inquire simultaneously. To appreciate means to see those things worth valuing. To inquire means to search, question, and discover. This appreciative intelligence--to see, to elevate a spark of strength or opportunity and turn it into a flame (even a legacy torch) --is a master strength. Think of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, and the culture of positivity and possibility that elevates everyone at Southwest and propelled Amazon into a game-changer. 
Think about societal leaders and models-- Gandhi’s or Mandela’s capacity to summon people’s best, or Helen Keller’s capacity to elevate inner strengths no one else could see. In England’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill saw things in his people that no one else could see and spoke to them with a laser-like faith and eloquence that gave them a new idea of themselves. Great leaders elevate strengths, see what’s best or what works, and evoke what’s next. 
The capacity to inspire positive change is accessible to all of us through talent management, leadership training, and executive coaching. Since people excel only by amplifying strengths, not by fixing weakness, people are asking. “Why can’t this positive and productive perspective be brought to everything we do (like the design of new products, or enterprise-wide IT transformation)? What about strengths-based engagement with customers, supply chains, and communities?” For this, it’s time to embrace phase two. 
Circle 2: Become a multiplier of strengths, from elevation to configurations. This circle is about creating new macro combinations and configurations of strengths across systems. When people play to their strengths, engagement soars, and active disengagement (Which costs U.S. firms $300 billion each year) can plummet. In world-class companies, the engagement vs. disengagement scores stand at a ratio of 10:1 (in average companies. that ratio is less than 2:1). Moreover, high-engagement organizations have 3.9 times the earnings-per-share growth rate. Engaged employees are more productive, profitable, customer-focused, innovative, collaborative, and growth-oriented.
Elevation, engagement, and success reinforce one another in a positive feedback loop. The 80-20 reversal or turn to strengths does more than perform--it transforms. It builds an enterprise-wide capacity and achieves a multiplier effect. The shift happens when leaders turn macro, not just micro, in their strengths thinking. Two examples: 
U.S. Navy CNO Admiral Vernon Clark turned to AI’s large-group methods to achieve a concentration effect of strengths. Turnover rates were costing billions, and the three-star admiral had read about the AI summit method--a large-group planning, designing, or implementation meeting that brings 300 to 2,000 or more stakeholders together in a concentrated-strengths way to work on a task of strategic and creative value. 
That day, Admiral Clark launched a series of AI summits and a new Center for Positive Change. These 500-person summits brought in external stakeholders, supply partners, citizens and even peace groups--all groups with a stake in the future of the Navy. This high-engagement process improved the Navy’s bottom-line performance by $2 billion. 
Cindy Frick, a Roadway Express executive, shared how her managers used to “starve opportunities” while they focused on the problematic. In this $4 billion trucking company, she orchestrated over 65,500-person summits in two years, engaging truck drivers, dock workers, executives, teamsters, managers, and customers. Frick tapped the strengths of over 10,000 people and transformed a culture of entrenched silos into a high-performance system. The stock price went from $14 to $55 a share in two years. 
Let’s think in terms of constellations of strengths. True innovation happens when strong, multidisciplinary groups come together, build a collaborative and appreciative interchange, and explore the intersection of their different points of strength. Moreover, this macro minded ability to connect ideas, people, and resources from across boundaries paves the way for something even more inspiring in management. 
Circle 3: Positive institutions bringing human strengths to society. This is about the creation of positive institutions that enable the magnification and the refraction of highest human strengths outward into society. Think of GE’s ecomagination initiative as an example of today’s sustainability revolution and of the way we can spread reverberating strengths, stories, and solutions worldwide with the click of a button. The strengths-based change starts with a small shift that makes a seismic difference. 
The third circle represents the largest frontier for strengths-based organizations. It is time now to see each circle overlapping: the elevation of strengths, the connection and combination of strengths, and now the magnified refraction outward of strengths. 
The third circle is about harnessing the higher strengths of institutions as agents of change in society. Using the language of human strengths (for example, we might focus on the 26 strengths in the VIA-IS classification, strengths such as wisdom, courage, and humanity), we are now seeing industry-leading stars becoming vehicles for magnifying courage or bringing more humanity into their communities. Whether we call it sustainability a focus on clean energy advances, zero waste, or green product design) or business as an agent of world benefit (eradicating poverty through profit), or businesses as a force for peace in conflict zones), stories and cases about companies that prosper by combining sound management, social vision, and eco-innovation are becoming common. 
Sustainable value creation (bringing what is meaningful outside, such as customers and communities, into the room) is the big business opportunity. Sustainable value is not only a next step in open-source strengths approaches--it is an unprecedented innovation engine. 
When we unite the strengths of markets with global issues, the return for society and the business can be exceptional. Strengths soar when there’s a purpose bigger than the organization. 
Ask: Where are we as a company? The strengths revolution has scarcely begun, but the tools, the three circles framework, and our economy of strengths show that it’s an exciting start. 
It’s time to think strengths, think macro, and think how to harness the concentration effect of configurations--for management is all about the elevation, combination, and refraction of strengths. LE 

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