The central idea of the strengths movement is that it’s wrong to focus on trying to fix an executive’s weakness because greatness comes only from building on natural talent. Strengths advocates promote this very worthy idea  to stop obsessing about your weaknesses because you’re never going to be great at those things. Instead, maximize your strengths. The problem is that’s just one side of the story. And it’s overstated. What’s missing from the strengths movement is that a strength can be overused and become dangerous and debilitating. It is neglectful, if not irresponsible, to assess executives for their strengths without warning them of the risk of taking that strength too far.

There is power is focusing on your strengths, but it derives from acknowledging them in their totality, from having a keen, finely-tuned awareness of both the good and the harm they can do. Becoming a better leader, then is not a matter of indiscriminately playing to your strengths, but of continually adjusting their volume to just the right setting for every situation.

Our article in the May 2013 issue of Leadership Excellence addresses our concerns with the strengths movement and implications for Implications for senior executives and practitioners.

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Certainly, control has its uses. Even at its most inclusive and enabling, leadership is essentially about influencing others. But dysfunctional control—gratuitous intrusions into other people’s space where little is gained and much is lost—is counterproductive and disabling.

You know these leaders. They fill their own space and yours too. They have a lot to say and feel free to say it. Up to a point it’s justified—they often have a lot to offer. But when conversational space gets dominated, the energy goes out of the room. Team members stop speaking up and stop listening. What over-controlling leaders think of as helping, team members experience as meddling. Their power has been usurped.

What triggers such a dysfunctional level of over-control, and what can be done about it?

Mindset is at the core of behavior. Who you are is how you lead. A senior executive once revealed to us in a feedback session that he operated on the assumption that, as the leader, he should know everything all the time. He kept saying the word ‘should.’ It hinted at the constant pressure he put on himself to demonstrate his worth. Leaders who fall prey to that kind of emotionally-laden, erroneous logic are compromised in their ability to perform.

The feedback was ugly. In their ratings and comments, his direct reports called him out for gross violations of their space. Despite being credited with big intellect, business acumen and relentless drive, he was rated only average on overall effectiveness. In meeting his own need to prove himself, he was quick to speak rather listen, jumping right in anytime a question or problem came up in a subordinate’s space.

In the first feedback meeting he took the hit with minimal defensiveness. By the next morning he’d concluded, “I need to give other people space. Let them speak, let them lead.” He meant it, but what are his chances? Not good. Let’s get real: the forces that have grossly distorted his form won’t suddenly go away.

If you are serious about improving your way of leading, you have a much better chance of success if you don’t just work on your behavior but also on your mindset. For example, to rein in over-control, leaders must fight through instinctive defenses and admit to a motivation they wish they didn’t have, such as anxiety, and then to form a new mental habit (I don’t have to prove myself because my team knows I’m smart) to go with the new outward habit (give other people space to lead).

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Did that journal editor have a point? Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest American Presidents and one of our personal favorite leaders, offers a fascinating example. Like many leaders with strong people skills, Lincoln’s tremendous gift put him at risk for struggling with tough calls about his people.  His genuine liking of people and not wanting to hurt them seemed to color his judgment, and delay corrective action by giving people too many chances to turn things around. Nowhere is this more evident than in the disastrous example of how Lincoln managed George McClellan, his general in the early stages of the Civil War.

Lincoln was not alone in struggling with tough people calls. Today over half of executives are too soft on accountability. This shortfall is particularly common among those with strong people skills, who are bedeviled by two hazards when it comes to tackling performance issues. In our latest HBR blog post, we explore these two hazards that can undermine this leadership strength.

The first hazard is that caring leaders tend not to be direct, especially when there’s a conflict. They might avoid talking with the other person altogether; or soft-pedal the message to the point where the person walks out of the room blissfully unaware of the seriousness of the problem. The hazard is augmented when leaders rationalize, usually by telling themselves, “I don’t want to make anyone upset.” They’d like to believe they are being protective of the other person, when in fact they’re protecting themselves.

Leaders with strong people skills should also be aware of a second hazard: that they, like Lincoln with McClellan, will be much too slow to act. Well-liked leaders, if they are honest with themselves, shy away from tough action because they fear it will hurt their reputation. Another way that such leaders hang themselves up is by pointing to the subpar performer’s good points. But if you wait until that person has no redeeming value, you’ll wait forever. Finally, once these leaders do achieve clarity that the person needs to go, they let concerns about implementation delay action unnecessarily. “It will be hard to find a replacement” or “It’s a bad idea to make a change now because there’s been so much instability lately.” In attempting to rein in tendencies that impede your ability to deal with tough personnel issues, self-delusion is your biggest threat.

To become more effective, leaders with strong people skills should first, wake up to the fact that that very aptitude puts you at risk of misapplying it. Realize too that the more heavily you rely on those skills and the more deeply you believe in them, the graver the risk. Second, wake up to the value of the antithesis of a strong people orientation — tough-mindedness about people. Finally, be able to imagine that the height of people skill is to combine these seeming polar opposites — to take needed tough actions in a constructive, respectful way.

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