Stop Overdoing Your Strengths

The Idea in Brief

Taken too far, your strengths can become weaknesses.

Consider two leadership strengths: forcefulness (driving your team hard) and consensus-building (getting everyone's agreement on decisions). Overdo forcefulness, and your team's productivity may improve but its morale will weaken, eventually undercutting productivity. Overdo consensus-building, and morale may rise but productivity might ultimately suffer (for instance, decisions take too long), eventually eroding morale.

How to strike a balance? First, seek evidence that you're overusing particular strengths. Extremely high ratings on a 360-degree feedback report may offer clues. Then, redirect your strengths. For example, one executive who was seen by his colleagues as overly aggressive applied his inherent determination to himself--to stop coming on so strong.

The Idea in Practice

Kaplan and Kaiser offer these suggestions for rebalancing your strengths:

Acknowledge Your Overused Strengths

It's hard to spot strengths you're overdoing. The following practices can help:

When coworkers give you the highest rating on a leadership behavior, this may indicate you're taking the behavior too far. 360-degree feedback doesn't capture overkill. Review the highest ratings on your most recent 360-degree report and ask yourself, "Is this too much of a good thing?"

Ask coworkers three questions: "What should I do more? What should I do less? What should I continue unchanged?"

Ask yourself, "Do I privately pride myself on being superior to other leaders in any way?" If so, this is precisely the attribute you're at risk of overdoing.

If you're still not sure, ask your spouse or partner whether you're overdoing any strengths.

Redirect Your Strengths

Try to balance the strengths you're overdoing by doing a bit more of their opposite.

A manager's strong preference for consensus building made for overly long meetings that tried her team's patience. Beyond a certain point, they wanted her to step in and decide. When she stopped shooting for agreement among the entire team and began settling for eight out of ten instead, her meetings became much more productive. The people who didn't agree accepted the majority's opinion and appreciated that their views had been considered. The entire team was glad that meetings no longer took so much time from their day.