Key Takeaways
Strengths crafting is the intentional practice of personalising your work so it aligns with your unique talents and expertise.
Ditch the gap-filling model. We waste years trying to fix employee flaws while ignoring their natural talents. We must embrace the strengths of our employees to help them amplify their unique superpowers and drive authentic engagement.
Build resilience through mastery. When people apply their natural strengths to difficult challenges, they develop self-efficacy. Using strengths crafting for confidence ensures that even the most daunting professional hurdles feel manageable and rewarding.
Redesign the management dialogue. Leaders should act as facilitators of fit rather than task enforcers. By encouraging strengths crafting for confidence, organisations create a sticky culture where people feel seen, valued, and empowered to contribute.
Why Our Mastery Paradox Leads to Sunday Scaries
We have been sold a lie about professional growth. For decades, the prevailing wisdom has been that to succeed, we must obsess over our "areas for development".
We spend our annual reviews dissecting our flaws and our weekends worrying about the tasks that drain us. It’s a cycle of deficit-based thinking that leaves us exhausted rather than empowered. In the UK, this approach is clearly failing. Insights from Gallup shows that only 10 per cent of employees feel truly engaged at work. The cost is not just financial, it is psychological.
When we spend our days struggling against our natural grain, our confidence erodes. We start to see work as a series of obstacles we are barely equipped to clear. This is when and why we start to feel the Sunday scaries.
If we want to solve the burnout crisis and drive real performance, we need to stop looking at what people do and start looking at who they are. We need to move away from the generic and toward the personal. This is the heart of strengths crafting for confidence.
An Example: A Curious Way to Network
I often turn to strength crafting when I’m faced with a challenge. And I refer to strengths crafting in coaching sessions too.
A personal example I often share relates to when I first launched Tailored Thinking. I knew I needed to build roots in the North East business community as I was new to the area. On the face of it, networking is often seen as a skill that requires high-energy extroversion, something that didn't come naturally to me.
Traditional advice would suggest I just "feel the fear and do it anyway". But I chose (or crafted) a different path. I looked at my own internal toolkit and tapped into a superpower; my strength of curiosity.
Rather than traditional networking, I set a goal to have 100 meaningful conversations with 100 interesting people about work. By reframing a "scary" task through the lens of a personal strength, I transformed a daunting (and draining task) into something exciting and experimental.
Leaning into my curiosity changed the entire experience and impact of my connections. I had fantastic conversations. I wasn’t worried about a “sales” agenda. And, after learning about my challenge, people started to refer me to others to have conversations with. This was strengths crafting in action. It turned a daunting task into a space where I could genuinely thrive.
What is Strengths Crafting?
Strengths crafting is the intentional practice of personalising your work so it aligns with your unique talents and expertise. It is not about ignoring your responsibilities or avoiding the difficult parts of your role. Instead, it is about shifting the "how" of your daily actions. It is a move from a rigid, ready-to-wear job to a semi-tailored suit that fits your specific professional shape.
The science behind this is becoming increasingly robust. While early job crafting research focused on how we change our tasks in general, more recent job crafting studies have focused on the specific impact of using our natural strengths. Research by Marianne van Woerkom, Wido Oerlemans and Arnold Bakker found that when people are encouraged to proactively use their strengths at work, they don't just perform better. They report significantly higher levels of self-efficacy, the internal belief that they have what it takes to succeed.
Essentially, using our strengths acts as a psychological buffer.
Another key study by Evy Juipers and colleagues in 2019 demonstrated that even small, intentional "strengths crafting" interventions lead to a measurable boost in work engagement and a significant decrease in burnout. It turns out that when we play to our natural advantages, we aren't just working harder. We are working with a different kind of internal engine, one fueled by mastery rather than just effort.
Three ways to craft your way to confidence
If you are ready to stop over-thinking and start crafting, here are three practical ways to begin today.
Conduct an energy audit. Spend a week noticing which tasks leave you feeling energised and which leave you depleted. Rather than just looking at what you are "good at", look for the areas where time seems to vanish because you are so engrossed. Once identified, look for small ways to dial these up by just 10 per cent in your weekly schedule.
The strategic volunteer. Look for a project or a committee that requires a skill or strength that you love using but isn't part of your main role. If you are a natural storyteller stuck in data entry, offer to write the project summary or internal blog. By intentionally choosing to use your strengths and superpowers in new areas, you charge your own resilience battery.
Facilitate a strengths swap. Talk to a colleague about the tasks that drain them. You might find that the very thing they dread, such as organising a complex spreadsheet, is something you find oddly satisfying. Swapping small tasks based on energy rather than just capacity ensures the team as a whole is playing to its latent potential.
Designing a workplace that actually fits
The evidence suggests that standardisation is the enemy of excellence. If you treat your employees like interchangeable parts in a machine, you will get robotic results.
True confidence doesn't come from a motivational speech or a wellness initiative. It comes from the daily experience of using your natural talents to achieve meaningful goals. Strengths crafting is one of the most sustainable ways to make work better and make better work. It is time to ditch the straightjackets and embrace a future where work actually fits the human doing it.
Ready to unlock the latent potential in your team?
We are hosting a dedicated online Strengths Crafting Workshop on Thursday 26th March 2026, specifically designed to give senior leaders, HR & People professionals, and coaches the practical tools to bring strengths to life.
During this full-day workshop, delivered in partnership with our friends, At My Best, you’ll have the opportunity to walk away with the knowledge, framework, and connections to make strengths crafting a reality within your organisation. Plus, you’ll get a pack of your very own Job Crafting Cards and Strengths Cards in the post.
Join us at our next workshop—book your place here!
References:
Van Woerkom, M., Oerlemans, W. G., & Bakker, A. B. (2016) Strengths use and work engagement: a weekly diary study
Link: Read the study here
Kuijpers, E., Kooij, D. T., & van Woerkom, M. (2020) Align your job with yourself: The relationship between a job crafting intervention and work engagement
Link: Read the study here
