In the new post on their Harvard Business Review blog, Rob and Bob explain the two keys to preventing your strengths from becoming weaknesses: self-awareness and situational awareness. Read the full post here.
An approach to development that concentrates on identifying and maximizing leaders’ strengths, to the exclusion of addressing their weaknesses, has gained enormous popularity in recent years. But amid the hype, are there hidden dangers? Could a more balanced strategy for developing leaders be more likely to raise their effectiveness and enhance organizational performance? Rob Kaiser explores these issues in this article from the Center for Creative Leadership’s magazine, Leadership in Action.
A sage once said, “Stand in terror of your talents.” At first blush, that may sound odd. Talents are positive, right? But in my experience with leaders, the greater their talent, the greater the risk to their effectiveness. There are two reasons for this: Not only do leaders run the risk of doing too much of what they’re good at but, as a direct result, they’re also at risk of doing too little of the opposite. Leadership talents are often arrayed as pairs of opposites – strategic and operational, forceful and enabling, yin and yang. Ideally, the two sides co-exist in a positive, …
The latest fad in leadership, “strengths-based development,” gives managers the seductive advice to play to their strengths and don’t waste time trying to fix weaknesses. But this dangerous philosophy contains plenty of half-truths and pseudo-science about how managers develop and become great leaders. Rob Kaiser explains how the strengths fad may also be partially to blame for the go-go, gaga mentality that spun the global economy out of control in this Editorial in Chief Learning Officer.
