Fear Your Strengths » strengths

Don’t Let Your Strengths Become Your Weaknesses

admin — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:35:41 +0000

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.

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Debunking Popular, but Flawed, Advice to Leaders

admin — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:34:27 +0000

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.

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Bob Kaplan On Why You Should Fear Your Strengths

admin — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:34:46 +0000

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, harmonic tension. But, again, often there is too much strength on one side and that often begets weakness on the other side. Take the general manager who is too narrowly focused on getting short term results and doesn’t pay enough attention to strategy.

What to do? Simply put, you have to learn to turn the dial down on the overused side, and turn it up on the underused side – modulating as the situation requires.

Easier said than done, to be sure. Because to change in this way, you need to learn to cling less to what you’re good at and value more what you lack. And that can be a bit terrifying.

But the payoff is exhilarating.

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