Internalizing Strengths: An Overlooked Way of Overcoming Weaknesses in Managers

Kaplan

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9781882197491
• eBook ISBN: 9781604917000
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Because executives tend to be problem solvers, they typically focus on weaknesses when they want to improve their performance. This approach can be helpful but there is another that can be just as effective: recognizing strengths. A senior manager whom the author interviewed said this about a top person: "If he saw his own strengths and internalized them, a lot of his weaknesses would go away." In this report, the author explains why it is critical to recognize strengths in order to improve performance and why it is often difficult to get that notion across to executives. For practicing managers and those who develop them, this report offers sound but often neglected developmental principles for overcoming weaknesses.

What Can Be Gained from Internalizing One’s Strengths

There are two interrelated ways to bring one’s view of oneself in line with the more favorable view held by others. Both accrue significant gains for those willing to add them to their behavioral profile. First, temper strengths that have been overplayed. And second, build up skills that have been underplayed. It is a matter of having executives stop worrying so much about the things that they are already good at and transfer the excess emotional energy to where it is needed, from the strong side to the weak side.

Strengths Are Tempered

What are taken to be weaknesses are many times the effects of overdoing strengths. In these cases, if the managers could learn to recognize the extent of their capability, they would be less liable to take the strength to a counterproductive extreme.

Executives (as well as people in general) invest certain attributes with huge significance, operating on the assumption that this capability will protect them or will ensure their success in the world. It becomes an obsession with them. And loading this attribute with so much emotion, they cannot be objective about it. Given how critical it is to them, they never feel they have enough of it. Their perfectionism makes them poor judges in this respect. So they overdo it, and what would otherwise be a wonderful unalloyed strength becomes a weakness.

Those qualities or strategies that executives overdo are things on which they place tremendous value—hard work, preparation, control, intelligence. It is almost as if executives invest these properties with quasi-magical power, the power to save their lives in some sense. Their extremely strong attachment to these things is closely associated with their overuse of them.

Thus, when they come to see how strong in actuality they are in these respects, they are able to recalibrate their reading of how much is enough. This is another way in which accepting one’s strengths can alleviate performance problems. When managers can learn to see what those around them see, to see how well endowed they are, they can be reassured. They can allay their anxiety that they don’t do enough and consequently stop doing too much.

One executive that I worked with was talking one day about taking the pressure off, relaxing, “not being so pent up … about things.” He hastened to add, however, that he didn’t mean a swing to the opposite extreme: “By relax I don’t mean become complacent or lackadaisical.” At another point in our work with him he put the recalibration this way: “One way to be successful now and in future jobs is to be a little more comfortable with my abilities. That doesn’t say you don’t have to work hard.” He understood that it is a matter of degree: “This process has helped me understand that I don’t have to be quite as driven.”

Two benefits that accrue to managers who take in the reality of their strengths are: they use their strengths more selectively and they make allowances for their strengths.

Using strengths more selectively. When executives begin to take in how powerful or intelligent or otherwise well endowed they are, it improves their performance by making it possible for them to use their strengths more selectively. The fault had lain in using a characteristic (old faithful) when it was not useful or using it to excess. To choose more wisely when to use a strength or how much of it to use can represent a distinct improvement in managerial practice.

Selectivity is a key word. A large part of development is learning to use one’s strengths more selectively. As one high-powered and at times overpowering executive discovered, “I don’t have to give up my fastball; I just don’t have to throw it all the time.”

When executives can strip away the excess, they are left with the effective core.

Making allowances for one’s strengths. Executives may not have a perspective on their strengths or on the particular ones that have great significance for them. Because they so badly want to be good in a certain respect and because they worry so much that they are not, they have trouble being objective about that attribute in themselves. Their emotions surrounding that attribute cloud their judgment. Not realizing fully how good they are, they do not take that into account in working with other people.

When Avery read the summary of coworkers’ comments on his strengths, especially all the appreciation for how smart he was, it had an impact. As a result he began to make allowances for his superior intellectual ability. His recognition helped him be more patient with people who didn’t “get it right away,” where before he had been rough on them.

Abrasive executives can have a difficult time putting a stop to their destructive behavior. Pointing it out to them is no guarantee that they will change, even if they resolve to do better. Immediately after the session in which one executive had his revelation about his strengths, however, his offensive behavior stopped. It was as if that way of relating to people simply dropped out of his behavioral vocabulary. Having incorporated the change in attitude, he was able to sustain the change.

A year later he did revert in a staff meeting set up to deal with a difficult business situation, but by the next meeting he had righted himself. As clear-cut an improvement as this change represented, it hardly made him a blemish-free leader. But it did remove a serious objection to his leadership as well as an impediment to his effectiveness. And the improvement stemmed from a newfound appreciation of his intellectual capacity, a view he had resisted for years.

Another executive prone to overdoing it who was ultimately able to let the full extent of his strengths sink in reported soon after the feedback session that one of the headlines was, “You don’t have to always prove you know everything. People accept that you’re smart and knowledgeable. People accept you’re the leader. You don’t have to prove it every day. They know you’re the boss.” One of the benefits of recognizing a strength is that you have an easier time understanding other people’s reactions to you. By gaining a more realistic idea of how powerful you are, for example, you can tune in more readily to signals that a subordinate is intimidated. It is a form of taking responsibility for one’s behavior.

Energy Is Freed Up for the Weaker Side

For every managerial characteristic that is overdone, there is usually an opposing, complementary characteristic that is underdone. Managers who take forceful leadership to an extreme often give short shrift to enabling leadership. And conversely, those managers who overdo enabling leadership tend to underdo forceful leadership.³

If managers can reduce their investment on one side of a duality, then they free up emotional energy for the other side. The side previously emphasized no longer draws a disproportionate share of energy, and the surplus becomes available for the side previously valued less. If you come to believe that you are actually very good at something that you badly want to be good at, then you can relax on that point. You free up energy, including emotional energy, for other things.

Perhaps the best way to show this is to tell you some stories that relate actual experiences with executives.

An overly forceful type who freed himself to be more people oriented. Several years ago we worked with an executive whose reactions to his assessment data helped me see the dynamic of freeing up energy for the other side clearly for the first time. Like many others, he prized intelligence above all other traits:

There’s nothing that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• How the Failure to Recognize Strengths Affects Executive Performance
• Why Talking to Executives About Their Strengths Can Be Difficult
• What Can Be Gained from Internalizing One’s Strengths
• How to Help Executives Use Strengths for Development