Fear Your Strengths

What You Are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem

Robert E. Kaplan, Robert B. Kaiser

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781609949068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Once you've discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, and they see it in others. But they don't see it as clearly in themselves. Mainly, they think of leadership development as working on their weaknesses. No wonder. The tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths—when more is not better.Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths serve them well—versus betray them. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on their data and practical experience to identify four fundamental leadership qualities, each positive in and of itself but each of which, if overemphasized, can seriously compromise your effectiveness. Most leaders, they've found, are "lopsided"—they favor certain qualities to the exclusion of others without realizing it. The trick is to keep all four in balance.Fear Your Strengths provides tools to help you become aware of your leadership leanings and excesses and provides insights for combatting the mindset that encourages them. It offers a practical psychology of leadership, a better way for leaders to calibrate their performance so that you can make sure your strengths don't overpower you but rather move you—and your organization—forward.

Chapter 1

Strengths Beget Weaknesses—
In Two Very Different Ways

RICH SPIRE’S TALENT SHIMMERS. He embodies everything that the word “leader” has come to mean in the business world. The same raw, competitive instinct he had as a baseball player in Little League and right through college—always swinging for the fences—animates his leadership today. As president of a sector of a large, fast-growing technology company, he never shies away from making big, bold moves. He knows his business and is uncannily adept at identifying industry trends and opportunities. He has a positive attitude that won’t quit. “Self-actualization,” he often says, “comes from the impossible dream achieved.”

Spire is a commanding presence with a true gift for articulating his vision in a way that persuades and excites people—not just in broad terms but, as one colleague says, “with enough color and granularity that people can grasp their portion of the vision.”

“He has more potential than anyone I know,” says another. “He has huge talent, intelligence, and strategic insight. And it’s all wrapped up in a charismatic package.”

What could possibly be wrong with this picture?

As is often the case with natural leaders, the use of power comes easily to Spire, but perhaps too easily. He so stunningly wields his intellectual firepower and charisma that he makes it a daunting task for others to contend with him. His forceful leadership—a good thing when used in correct proportion—effectively renders him unable to elicit, nurture, and benefit from other input in the organization. “I think he stakes out his positions too early,” says one colleague. “People then seek to be in agreement with him rather than bringing their best thinking.”

What’s more, Spire’s penchant for bold, strategic action often exceeds his organization’s ability to keep up. It isn’t just that he is too aggressive strategically; he correspondingly neglects—and even undervalues—the operational component of his strategy. His CFO puts it this way: “[Spire’s] vision outstripped our internal capacity. His strategic reach was too great to be executed with the bench strength we had. It’s useful to have vision, but he needs to implement it in a more measured way.”

Facing into the headwind of Spire’s forceful personality and his voracious appetite to have a big impact, some people on his team simply give up trying to influence him. “It takes too much emotional energy to keep confronting this guy,” says one, “and he isn’t going to listen anyway.” In defeating his loyal opposition, Spire puts himself and his organization at risk.

By taking his talents to such an extreme, Spire undermines those very talents. They in fact become a weakness. There is a tragic irony in this. What could be a great asset turns into, at least in part, a liability. It’s an unfortunate loss for the leader and for his organization. Just like a point guard whose uncanny court vision causes him to make lightning-quick passes that catch his teammates flat-footed, or like a running back who is so fast he crashes into his own lineman, a leader of prodigious but immoderate talents will leave half of his team in the dust. A gift can often work against the gifted.

All managers, regardless of level, are likely to overuse their strengths. A leader’s desire to be forceful and straightforward with direct reports becomes a tendency to be abusive and peremptory. A devotion to consensus-seeking breeds chronic indecision. An emphasis on being respectful of others degenerates into ineffectual niceness. The desire to turn a profit and serve shareholders becomes a preoccupation with short-term thinking. To the leader whose best tool is a hammer, everything is a nail. A leader who goes to his best tool in every situation, who consistently overplays his hand, may perform adequately, or even well, but he is ultimately far less effective than he might be. As one manager said about himself, “Overusing a strength is underperformance.”

The irony that maximizing a strength corrupts it is beautifully captured in Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio. An old writer on his death bed muses: “In the beginning when the world was young there were truths and they were beautiful, and then people came along. The moment a person took a truth to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live by it, he became grotesque, and the truth became a falsehood.”

Overusing one’s strength not only corrupts the strength, but it begets weakness in yet another way. What deforms leaders, makes them grotesque, is that not only do they embrace their strength as the only truth but they consequently ignore an equal and opposing strength. The result of this collateral damage is lopsided leadership: too much of one thing made worse by too little of its complement. When Rich Spire overplayed his considerable powers of persuasion, they drowned out his ability to hear the voices of his staff.

Likewise, Spire had the setting on his strategic ambition cranked up so high that it swamped its opposite, operational realism. His CFO, familiar with Rich’s instinct to grab strategic ground, would often counsel him: “Let’s make sure we execute in a measured way so growth won’t just be a flash of light and burn out.” Spire confessed, “I jump in with both hands and both feet because I only have one speed: high.” For leaders like Spire, the challenge is to turn down the volume on his natural strength and turn it up on its opposite, which he usually ignores. It’s all about getting the setting right on both dials.

This is a practical notion that goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who postulated that what is good, virtuous, and effective in thought and action is the midpoint between deficiency and excess. Aristotle’s precept has often been mistaken to advocate moderation in all things. On the contrary, speaking of courage, or of compassion, he emphasized that what is needed is the right amount for the circumstances. “Anybody can become angry or give money, but to be angry with or to give money to the right person, and in the right amount, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way—this is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” There is no fixed setting on the dial for the proper use of a strength, a virtue. The volume needs to go up or down according to what the situation requires.

There is no better—or more extreme—case of corrupted strengths than that of Jeffrey Skilling, who as company president personified the infamous scandal at Enron. Although Rich Spire’s voracious appetite for taking strategic ground crossed the line that separates productive from counterproductive, Skilling’s unchecked growth mania eventually crossed the line from counterproductive to ruinous, unethical, and illegal. Skilling had a huge hand in Enron’s collapse, which led to what was then, in 2001, history’s largest corporate bankruptcy. At the time of this writing, he is in prison, several years into a 25-year sentence for conspiracy, fraud, and insider trading.

Jeffrey Skilling was brought to Enron to head its trading operation, a sideline business in what was primarily an old-line natural-gas company. Brilliant and creative, he saw and seized the opportunity to convert Enron’s contracts to buy and sell natural gas into financial instruments that could be traded, something that had never been done in the industry. That was Skilling’s strength: he was clever and visionary. But he overplayed that strength and took his business-building zeal beyond ethical limits. He used mark-to-market accounting to book the total estimated value of, say, a ten-year contract on the very day the contract was signed. He engineered financial deals, schemes really, that removed debt from Enron’s balance sheet and thereby projected a false picture of the company’s financial condition. In the end, Enron had borrowed $38 billion of which only $13 billion appeared on the balance sheet.

Skilling’s leadership was lopsided in so many ways. A big-idea guy, he ignored the blocking and tackling of implementation. When picking people, he overvalued intellect and undervalued social skills. When rewarding people, he overrelied on money as a motivator but was personally abusive and grossly neglected the organization’s increasingly destructive and corrupt culture.

Skilling was also a classic victim of the Peter Principle. He was made president of Enron despite coming from a consultant background devoid of operational experience on the industrial side. He lacked the practical experience to know there are some things you can’t do. To compound the problem, Skilling either ignored or steamrolled Enron’s Risk Assessment and Control (RAC) group, whose job it was to veto deals that broke the rules or ran exceedingly high business risks.

In the end, no one individual, discrete event, or single policy brought Enron down. The collapse was aided and abetted by CEO Kenneth Lay, CFO Andrew Fastow, and a host of other lieutenants, as well as the outside accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, which ultimately signed off on Enron’s false financial statements. The book that chronicled Enron’s downfall, The Smartest Guys in the Room, described it this way: “The scandal grew out of a steady accumulation of habits, values, and actions that began years before and finally spiraled out of control.” But Skilling was the leader. Ultimately, it was his excessiveness and his lopsidedness that bred and sanctioned Enron’s out-of-control culture.

The destructiveness of overweening strength can be seen in endless leadership examples, from the historically notorious, such as Hitler or Mao Zedong, to the ignominious, such as Jeffrey Skilling, to the immoderate, such as Rich Spire—each larger than life in his own context. However, there are also multitudes of leaders at all levels of every imaginable type of organization laboring in relative obscurity whose leadership is marred by the same fundamental dynamic. Daily organizational life is replete with examples, and the warning signs can be quite commonplace.

A most ordinary example is overtalking. Some leaders who excel at expressing themselves articulately and at great length have a lot to offer but don’t know when to stop. Eventually, the energy goes out of the room. Other leaders who talk too much are storehouses of knowledge or great storytellers. They have the ability to hold the floor and they enjoy doing so immensely, but they ultimately lose their audience. That is because overtalkers of all stripes have one fatal flaw in common: they act as if there is nothing to be gained from hearing from others. The dial is cranked up too high on their strength—the ability to be articulate—and it’s stuck at that setting, effectively precluding any ability to listen.

In one study we found that leaders are five times more likely to overdo a strength than their other attributes. Whatever they were best at, they got carried away with. Likewise, they tended to neglect the opposing and complementary behaviors. For instance, managers who, using the Gallup Strengths Finder instrument, categorized themselves as “Achiever,” “Activator,” and “Command” tended to be rated by coworkers as too forceful and not empowering or participative enough. Conversely, as you would expect, those classifying themselves as “Developer,” “Harmony, and “Includer” were rated the opposite by coworkers. Don’t just discover your strengths, as Gallup recommends; also understand how you use them, including what happens when you overuse them.

The signs and symptoms of overplayed strength are everywhere and affect every leader. It’s not just that performance suffers; promising careers derail. Yet overuse of strengths is often overlooked because neither leaders nor their handlers are attuned to how strength can beget weakness. To be sure, not every weakness is a by-product of overused strength. Sometimes, it is a shortcoming that can be rectified by getting more experience or training or giving greater effort. But in every leader, in every person, there is at least one strong tendency that carries with it the risk of being too strong as well as a secondary risk of rendering the opposing tendency too weak. When this insidious lopsidedness takes hold in a leader—often very early in life—it can become chronic, deeply habitual, and in the worst cases virulent.

To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson: you must stand in terror of your strengths.

Chapter 2

The Yin-Yang Responsibilities
of a Leader

THERE IS NO BETTER single expression of ideal leadership than the ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang. The Chinese saw nature as the interplay of dualities that had both complementary and opposing characteristics—sky and earth, day and night, water and fire, active and passive, male and female. Neither element in the pair takes prominence or precedence, but each is useful and valid and reinforces the other in a positive dynamic. The familiar yin-yang symbol represents this perfectly, showing two black-and-white teardrop shapes, curled and flowing into each other, continually adapting to each other to form a continuous and complete circle. The elements are negative images of each other, yet they are interdependent and inextricable.

When it comes to leadership, the importance of this idea is a practical, not a philosophical, matter. Leaders are no strangers to the idea that skill sets come in pairs. They often refer to themselves as “balanced” or not, as “task-oriented” or “people-oriented.” Despite this awareness, however, few leaders are able to combine opposite approaches in a holistic way. They usually resolve the tension between the two sides simply by taking a position and favoring one over the other. In fact, lopsided leadership could be described as dysfunctional duality, in which one element of a pair of strengths has grown to dominate and to stunt the other.

Some of this is the result of conscious decisions leaders make on a day-to-day basis, but much of it is tacit and unconscious, the product of leaders’ innate qualities and experiences. All their lives they have learned to define their leadership persona on the basis of being one thing and not the other: If I am bold, I can never retreat. If I am a visionary, it is small-minded to worry about operational details. Over the course of a career, one strength hypertrophies while the other atrophies.

In the course of our work, we have concluded that there are two core dualities that confront all leaders: the need to be forceful combined with the need to be enabling, and the need to have a strategic focus combined with the need to have an operational focus. Together these dualities constitute the “how” and the “what” of leading (see the figure). In the simplest terms, forceful leadership is taking the lead, and enabling leadership is making it possible for others to lead. The dynamic tension between the two sides determines how people work ...