What is it about?
This study explored how leaders experience strengths-based coaching, a popular approach that focuses on building personal strengths rather than fixing weaknesses. Through in-depth interviews with seven leaders, the research found that coaching improved self-awareness, confidence, and sense of purpose. However, it also revealed a pattern where growth in some areas left other developmental needs unaddressed. The study introduces the concept of "selective well-being activation" to explain this tradeoff.
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Why is it important?
Strengths-based coaching is widely used in leadership development, but until now, the field lacked a clear explanation for why leaders can feel both better and incomplete after coaching. This study fills that gap by identifying a specific mechanism: coaching tends to enhance dimensions of well-being tied to confidence and purpose while underserving dimensions that require honest engagement with limitations and relationships under stress. The concept of selective well-being activation provides coaches, organizations, and leadership development professionals with a practical framework for diagnosing when a coaching approach is producing imbalanced growth and what to do about it. For organizations investing in leadership development, the takeaway is concrete: strengths-based coaching works best when it sits inside a broader system that also addresses leaders' blind spots, not as a standalone fix.
Perspectives
This article started with a question I kept bumping into in my coaching practice: why do some clients leave coaching sessions feeling energized but still quietly frustrated? The research gave me language for something I had been observing for years without a clean theoretical frame. Writing this as both a practitioner and a researcher meant I had to hold those two identities in tension throughout the process, which, appropriately enough, mirrors exactly what the findings describe. I'm most proud of the selective well-being activation construct because it doesn't indict strengths-based coaching. It just tells the truth about it. My hope is that coaches and organizations use this work not to abandon what's working, but to build something more complete around it.
Lorenzo Moultrie
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Strengths-based coaching and psychological well-being: A qualitative study of developmental benefits, blind spots, and identity change., Psychology of Leaders and Leadership, June 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/mgr0000181.
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