Leading with Strengths in a Disengaged World

This article is adapted from Ted's Smart Thinking podcast episode 377: Engagement and Strengths - A Conversation with Emily Lorenz and Tim Hodges.

Every year, I sit down with two of my favorite people in the world of leadership development and walk away thinking differently about something I thought I already understood. That is exactly what happened when Tim Hodges and Emily Lorenz joined me on the Smart Thinking Podcast for our annual conversation about CliftonStrengths, employee engagement, and the state of the workforce in 2026.

Tim is the Executive Director of the Clifton Strengths Institute at the University of Nebraska and a Senior Consultant at Gallup. Emily is a researcher at Gallup with a PhD in educational measurement and statistics and one of the sharpest minds I know when it comes to taking data and making it mean something in the real world.

Every time we talk, I leave with something new. This time, I left with a lot.

The Skeptic in the Room

One of the first things I wanted to dig into with Tim was a question I hear all the time from leaders who are trying to build a strengths-based culture. What do you do when someone in your organization just will not engage with it? Their blind spot is the tool itself.

Tim's answer was practical and honest. The best way to turn around a skeptic is to get them to take the assessment and then actually have a coaching conversation. Many people have been labeled by a poorly designed assessment in the past, and that experience left a mark. The resistance is not always stubbornness. Sometimes it is scar tissue.

But what if you cannot get them to take the assessment at all? Tim said you can still affirm what you see. Telling someone, "You are the most creative person I have talked to in weeks, I wonder if we could lean into that for this project," is strengths language without the tool. You are spotting a glimpse of excellence and naming it. That usually gets people on board.

It connects back to something we all learned in our first psychology class but rarely apply consistently. Positive reinforcement works. If you want more of a behavior, recognize it when you see it. Catch people being good. If a student talks too much in class, Tim's advice is not to silence them but to ask them a question before the bell even rings. Make them feel seen and needed, and you change the whole dynamic.

That is not just classroom management. That is leadership.

What the Data on Teachers Is Actually Telling Us

Emily is currently leading a three-year study with Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation called the Teaching for Tomorrow study. Over 10 nationally representative surveys of teachers, they are collecting data on what is really happening in classrooms across the country.

The finding that stopped me cold was this: two thirds of teachers say they do not have enough people resources at their school to do their job effectively. Not enough support staff. Not enough paraprofessionals. Not enough special education teachers, behavior intervention specialists, or school psychologists.

And here is the twist I did not see coming. Newer teachers feel that strain more than their veteran counterparts. My first instinct was to think the opposite, that the 15 and 20 year veterans would be the ones mourning the loss of the infrastructure that used to exist. But Emily explained it well. When you are new to any job, you are already navigating a steep learning curve. Layer onto that a lack of the human support systems you need to do your work, and you have a recipe for burnout before a career even finds its footing.

Tim put it perfectly when he said, "We need to be curious when we see results, not make assumptions." He was pointing out that the obvious interpretation of "I don't have the materials and equipment I need" would be a technology problem. The deeper finding was that it was a staffing problem. You have to ask the question behind the question.

And then Emily dropped a number that I think every school board member and superintendent in the country needs to sit with. One in four classroom teachers say they do not have enough furniture for the number of students in their classroom.

We are debating AI in the classroom while some teachers are hunting for chairs. That is the hierarchy of needs, and we are spending our time at the top while the foundation is crumbling underneath.

The Global Engagement Crisis and the Manager Squeeze

Emily shifted our conversation to the state of global engagement, and it is not a comfortable picture.

Global employee engagement is at its lowest point since 2020. Only 20 percent of workers worldwide are engaged with their jobs. In the United States, that number is 31 percent. The organizations I have the privilege of working with, organizations that are intentional and disciplined about their culture, are floating around 70 percent. So it can be done. But the gap between where most organizations are and where they could be is enormous.

What is driving the decline? Emily pointed to something she called the manager squeeze. The middle managers who are responsible for taking a leader's vision and translating it into daily team culture are the ones who are losing ground the fastest. Their engagement is dropping. And at the same time, they are being asked to manage larger teams, navigate more organizational change, and do it all with less time and less support from above.

Gallup research shows that only about one in ten people have the natural talent to be a truly great manager. Another 20 percent can be trained and developed into effective managers. For the rest, it is simply not a natural fit. And when we promote people into management for the wrong reasons, we set them up to fail, and we set their teams up to suffer for it.

The solution, Emily said, starts with communication. When a leader is navigating massive change and the manager is getting less of their time and attention, the people on that manager's team feel it. The information gap becomes a trust gap. And the trust gap becomes a disengagement problem. It is not always a leadership values problem. Sometimes it is just a bandwidth and systems problem. But the impact on people is the same.

What Actually Makes a Team Effective

Here is the finding that Emily shared that I will be citing for the rest of my career. When Gallup set out to discover whether certain combinations of strengths made teams more effective, the researchers expected to find that certain profiles or theme combinations would rise to the top.

They found something much simpler. More than any specific combination of strengths, what made a team effective was whether the team members knew each other's strengths. That was it. Knowing mattered more than having.

Think about what that means in practice. It means I do not need to build the perfect team on paper. I need to build a team that understands itself. When I know that my colleague leads with Achiever and drives toward completion, and she knows that I push hard toward the next idea, we are not frustrated with each other. We are complementary. The friction disappears when we have the language to name what we are seeing.

I have been putting this into practice by printing team grids at five feet by eight feet and hanging them wherever the team meets. It is a conversation starter every single day. And when we do our team coaching sessions, I have everyone circle the number where a colleague's top strength lands in their own report. If Emily's number one is my number 32, I circle 32. It grounds the conversation in real self-awareness rather than abstraction.

Then we ask three questions. How do we see this person using that strength? What do we need to do differently to support them in it? And when we see them operating in their blind spot, how can we best bring that to their attention?

That last question is the one that changes everything.

Turning It Down, Not Turning It Off

You can never turn off a strength. But you can turn it down. That is the language I use when I am coaching, and Tim reinforced it beautifully throughout our conversation.

Emily leads with Achiever and Maximizer. She wants to get things done and she wants them to be excellent. She told a story about a meeting where she kept thinking three to twelve months ahead, trying to maximize a dashboard her team was building. Her colleagues, who had a strong enough relationship to say it clearly, told her she was over-maximizing. And she was self-aware enough to stop and ask if that was true.

That is strengths coaching in real time. It is not about fixing a flaw. It is about recognizing that every strength has a context where it shines and a context where it creates friction. Emily's Achiever is an asset. In that moment, in that meeting, she just needed to turn it down from volume ten to about a six.

Tim shared something that has stuck with me about his son Liam, who leads heavily with Competition. As a middle schooler, Liam would come home from a wiffle ball game in the neighborhood having won and still be furious because the other kids were not acknowledging the win the way he needed them to. Tim's instinct was to tell Liam to calm down, to not be so competitive. That did not work. What worked was redefining the win. A win is getting invited back in June and July and August. That gave the Competition strength somewhere to go that served Liam instead of isolating him.

That is the coaching move. Do not fight the strength. Redirect it.

The Four Most Powerful Words in Coaching

Tim said something in our conversation that I want every leader, parent, and teacher to write on a sticky note and put somewhere they will see it every morning.

What do you think?

Four words. Enormous power. He described sitting with a governor and a business chairman in one of his leadership classes when a student asked the governor for advice. The governor's response was that the best leaders, once they have earned the right, stop giving answers and start asking questions. When someone comes to you with a challenge, the instinct is to solve it for them. That feels good for the ego. But if you genuinely want to build someone's capacity, you ask what they think they should do next. And almost always, they know.

Tim applies this with his undergraduates constantly. Students come in trying to decide between two job offers or two law schools. He asks one question, listens, affirms, and they leave grateful. He might have said ten words the entire conversation. But he gave them something more valuable than an answer. He gave them confidence in their own judgment.

There is a phrase one of my colleagues shared that I love. An unspoken expectation can never be met. Tim told me he had actually been the one to say that, which made the moment even better. But the truth of it stands. We cannot expect people to read our minds. We cannot expect managers to intuit what we need. We have to say it. And leaders, that means creating a culture where it is safe to say it.

Caring About People Is Not Soft. It Is Strategy.

One of the Q12 items that is declining fastest right now is whether employees feel that their supervisor or someone at work cares about them as a person. When that number drops, everything else follows.

Emily noted that a significant portion of the workforce right now is feeling unsupported and stuck. In a normal economy, people who are unhappy at work leave. Right now, a lot of people cannot or will not take that risk. So organizations are sitting on a workforce that is emotionally detached and has nowhere to go. That is a fragile, expensive situation to be in.

Tim's observation from the field is that what employees need right now, especially given the uncertainty around AI and the economy, is a manager who will tell them the truth. Not a manager who waits until the severance package arrives. A manager who says, six months from now we are going to face a challenge, and here is what I think you should be building right now to be ready.

That kind of trust is not built in a single conversation. It is built through consistent, meaningful interactions over time. Gallup research shows that having a meaningful conversation roughly every seven days is a significant driver of engagement. Not a formal review. Not a performance evaluation. Just a real conversation. Because if we go more than a week or so without connecting, the narrative in our heads starts filling in the gaps, and the stories we tell ourselves are rarely the accurate or optimistic ones.

And here is something I want to say directly to everyone who has a manager they appreciate. Tell them. Leadership is lonely. The higher you go in an organization, the fewer people there are to encourage you. Managers absorb complaints, crises, and hard conversations all day long. A single, genuine "I see you and I appreciate what you are doing" fuels a manager for weeks. Do not wait for a formal moment. Say it when you feel it.

The Kids Are Going to Be Okay

I want to end where Tim ended, because I think it is exactly the right note.

A few weeks before our conversation, Tim led a study abroad trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with 10 student strengths coaches from the University of Nebraska. They walked into rooms with students from Malaysia, Bangladesh, Oman, Pakistan, and all over the world. The Nebraska students were nervous. What would they have in common? How would this even work?

Within three minutes, the room was alive. Conversations were happening everywhere. Laughter, connection, discovery. CliftonStrengths became the shared language, and it crossed every cultural and religious and national boundary in that room without breaking a sweat.

We have a lot more in common than we have different. Strengths give us a way to find that common ground fast.

The data on engagement and well-being is challenging right now. The situation for teachers is real and it needs to be addressed. The pressure on middle managers is significant and it is not going away on its own. But there are organizations out there right now that have cracked the code. Organizations where engagement is at 70 percent and rising. Organizations where people feel seen, supported, and connected to their work.

It is not magic. It is intentional daily decisions, meaningful conversations, and the courage to ask four simple words.

What do you think?

That is where we start. And if we start there, we can build something worth belonging to.

If you want to dig into Emily's research, search for the Walton Family Foundation Gallup Teaching for Tomorrow study. There is an entire library of findings there that will change how you think about the educators in your community. And if you have not taken the CliftonStrengths assessment yet, I would encourage you to start with your top 10. Understanding who you are is the first step toward navigating the world more effectively, and more joyfully, than you ever thought possible.