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, …
