Strengths Matter, but do not overdo it!

Over the last 10 plus years, our understanding of how leaders deliver has significantly increased. There was a time when leadership meant all great qualities and no weakness.  Leaders were supposed to excel in everything they do, demonstrate high level of confidence and be very assertive. Anything less was not a leadership material. And leadership competency movement picked up momentum to measure where leaders in an organization stacked up with respect to the laundry list of competencies believed to be associated with enduring success. Leaders took coaching, signed up for executive MBA programs and participated in many other development initiatives to enhance and perfect the competencies.

Prof Deborah Ancona of MIT Sloan School of Management captures this vividly in her HBR article titled, “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader( HBR-February 2007) : “We have come to expect a lot of our leaders. Top executives, the thinking goes, should have the intellectual capacity, to make sense of unfathomably complex issues, the imaginative powers to paint a vision of the future that generates everyone’s enthusiasm,  the operational know-how to translate strategy into concrete plans, and the interpersonal skills to foster commitment to undertakings that could cost people’s jobs should they fail. Unfortunately, no single person can possibly live up to those standards.”  Tall order, by any measure you will agree.  So, as we embark on our journey as leaders, it is important to recognize that being effective leaders is not just about being gifted with all great qualities, attributes and competencies.

Our understanding is further enhanced by Dr Gareth Jones & Robert Goffee whose research work in the field of leadership should come in to comfort leaders.  In their words, “nobody wants to work with a perfect leader — he does not appear to need help! So, show you’re human — warts and all. You will build collaboration and solidarity between you and your followers, and underscore your approachability.”  In fact, in their work published in HBR (Why should anyone be led by you – Sep /Oct 2000 issue), they even add: “another advantage to exposing a weakness is that it offers a leader valuable protection. Human nature being what it is, if you do not show some weakness, then observers may even invent one for you!

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Now that we have focused on understanding why leaders need not be super human, but can be at peace with themselves that they are not perfect version of some of kind of a blend between Pied Piper and Napoleon, let us turn our attention to yet another aspect of leadership. This is perhaps the focus on this blog post itself. What do leaders do with their overarching strengths? Show it all the time? Show it in all occasions? Show it to cover their weakness? Thankfully, we have some advice to follow here as well. Great leaders in reality are not known to “overuse their strengths”. There is mounting evidence that leaders who overuse their towering strengths may actually end up with their strengths turning into weakness. It may sound counter-intuitive for many of us… that how can strengths turn out to be our weaknesses. Seminar work by Dr.Robert Kaplan of Balanced Scored Card fame establishes this phenomenon rather clearly.  Leaders have hard time understanding this dynamic – that your strengths, when overdone, can become your weakness, and sometimes can even become your nemesis.  In the last decade, there has been significant amount of thought leadership that highlighted the following:

• One can only build on one’s strengths and focusing on weaknesses to fix is more like damage control and not development
• You deliver your best when your strengths are at play in what you do every day
• Wasted strengths are “Sun dials in shade”

I do not think we need to see anything controversial here. Yes, a strength-focused culture delivers more than a deficit-focused culture. The issue is what happens when a leader overuses his or her strength. In their best-selling book, “Fear Your Strengths”, Dr Kaplan and his co-author, Robert Kaizer make a case for balancing towering strengths and not overdoing the same. For example, if your strength is your forcefulness, try overdoing this. Your team’s productivity may improve, but their morale will weaken, according to these thought leaders.  On the other hand, if your great strength is your ability to build a consensus and if you overdo this, your staff morale may improve, but productivity may suffer.

Kaplan and Kaizer offer some advice for leaders that can protect them from turning their strengths into weakness:

1. Ask your co-workers what should I do more? What should I do less? What should I continue unchanged?
2. Ask yourself, “Do I privately pride myself on being superior to other leaders in any way?”  If so, this precisely is the attribute you’re at the risk of overdoing.
3. If you are still not sure, ask your spouse or partner whether you’re overdoing any of your strengths

So, we now know why leadership is not easy.  It is about doing a whole lot of balancing act with ourselves. While we don’t have to be a perfect production of the Almighty, we do need to build on our strengths that our organizations and followers value. However, the job is incomplete if we start overdoing our strengths. Doing it just about right is the key. Perhaps, this is an area where coaches and coaching have to spend significant time going forward. Executive coaching today is focused on helping executives become even stronger in their strengths. It is about time that organizations offered coaching to very successful executives so that they can balance their strengths and know how to guard against overdoing it.

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