Are Your Strengths Potentially Derailing You

Are your greatest leadership strengths actually derailing you?

Play to your strengths, find your strengths, and spend as much time as possible in your sweet spot.

Is it possible that advice is derailing you?

Let’s go through a scenario and see if that’s a possibility for you or members of your team. Think about yourself and someone on your team you are developing,

Bring to mind, your top three to five leadership strengths. We are going to use those strengths to work through an example.

My top strengths are consistency, ability to see the big picture, developing others, and collaboration.

Number 1, I am very consistent. I get 360 feedback reinforcing I am strong in this area. My reaction, I think this is great. A strength recognized by me and others only has positive consequences. How could consistency be negative?

Every strength has an opposite pole that shows up as a weakness. For consistency it might be, a lack of flexibility, no wavering, or the inability to change. The impact on my team; they do not bring forward change possibilities. I am inadvertently suppressing innovation.

“Don’t bring that to him. He will not change his mind. Once he sets something in his mind, it is a done deal, don’t waste your time.”

Whoa, that sounds harsh. However, that opposite pole could be hurting my effectiveness.

Next one, think about the big picture.

“Oh yeah, he has the big picture. Always knows what’s going on at the highest level. However; sometimes we need him to understand the details, and we can’t get him there. He does not represent us well when he does not know the nuances.”

Collaboration. “He brings us together to ensure we all have input. Then we spend a lot of time, building consensus. If we do not have consensus we don’t move forward. He is indecisive. I wish he would just say, okay, I heard from everyone and got your points. This how we are moving forward.”

Last one, developing people. “Oh yeah, he develops people. He spends a lot of time getting to know individuals’ strengths and weaknesses. He knows where they want to go and works to develop their skills. Often, his focus on development is at the expense of production results. He cannot develop everyone. Sometimes he needs to cut some people loose so we can meet our goals as a team.”

I gave you examples of how my strengths could be derailers. What are your strengths or the strengths of a subordinate you are leading, and how could they be weaknesses?

Put this to work for you and the members of your team. First assess yourself then assist members of your team to assess themselves. Start by identifying the top 3-5 strengths and acknowledge how they make you a solid leader. Then take each one and assess how that strength may be derailing success or diminishing effective leadership.

What most leaders find is; the strengths for a high percentage of the time, make them effective. It is only a small percentage of time that our strengths cause problems. Mostly when overused or being unaware we are leaning too heavily on our strengths. This is often when one is under stress or complacent.

This exercise raises our self-awareness on what is needed to make us effective.

There are times we need to move away from our strengths to be a stronger leader.