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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Today I'm talking

with Tamas Chamorro Permusick, the CEO of Hogan Assessments and Professor of Business Psychology

at University College London and Columbia University.

He is also a regular contributor to HBR.

Tamaus, thank you so much for talking with us today.

It's my pleasure.

So for several years now, the coaching industry has really focused on this idea of developing your strengths

so this is the idea that instead of looking to show up your weaknesses instead you find out what

you're good at and you focus more on doing more of that and this has gone gone over the last, I don't know, I'd say

maybe 10 years from being counterintuitive to being somehow just the conventional wisdom.

We all know we're supposed to focus on our strengths. But you have really raised some questions about that

and a recent piece you wrote for HBR on HTR.org.

The first criticism you pointed out

was there's actually no scientific evidence

that this approach works. so I thought we could

just start there is it true that there's really no scientific evidence for this

approach at all? Well you know that's a question that has a very short answer

...