A strength, on the other hand, is an “activity that makes you feel strong.” This sort of activity possesses for you certain definable qualities. Before you do it, you find yourself actively looking forward to doing it. While you are doing it, time seems to speed up, one moment blurring into the next. And after you’ve done it, while you may be tired and not quite ready to suit up and tackle it again, you nonetheless feel filled up, proud. It is this combination of three distinct feelings—positive anticipation beforehand, flow during, and fulfillment afterward—that makes a certain activity a strength. And it is this combination of feelings that produces in you the yearning to do the activity again and again, to practice it over and over, to thrill to the chance to do it just one more time. A strength is far more appetite than ability, and indeed it is the appetite ingredient that feeds the desire to keep working on it and that, in the end, produces the skill improvement necessary for excellent performance.

Of the eight conditions that are the signature of the highest-performing teams, there is one in particular that stands out —in study after study, irrespective of industry and irrespective of nationality—as the single most powerful predictor of a team’s productivity. It is each team member’s sense that “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.” No matter what kind of work your team is doing and no matter which part of the world you’re working in, your team will always be most productive when more team members feel delight and joy in what they do every day.

Somehow, on the best teams, the team leader is able not only to identify the strengths of each person but also to tweak roles and responsibilities so that team members, individually, feel that their work calls upon them to exercise their strengths on a daily basis. When a team leader does this, everything else—recognition, sense of mission, clarity of expectations—works better. But when a team leader doesn’t, nothing else that he or she tries, whether in the form of money or title or cheerleading or cajoling, can make up for it. Ongoing work-strengths fit is the master lever for high-performance teams: pull it, and everything else is elevated; fail to pull it, and everything else is diminished.

Of course, if we were able to watch a great athlete training, or a great writer writing, or a great coder coding, we would see that honing a strength is hard work—it is by no means easy to find that incremental margin of performance when you are already operating at a high level—and that a strength is not where we are most “finished” but in fact where we are most productively challenged. Yet we are told to resist the temptation to “just” play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses. In common parlance, we are told to avoid “running around our backhand.” This betrays, perhaps, a misunderstanding of what a strength actually is. It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiest—it is where performance is most impactful and increasing.

The item “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work” exhibited the strongest connection to overall engagement and the strongest connection to other items in the survey. The item “My teammates have my back” showed the second-strongest connection, and the item “In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values” had the third-strongest connection.