Message to Leaders: “Stop Overdoing Your Strengths”
Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser advise managers to stop over-relying on their strengths and learn to develop versatility in a Harvard Business Review article.
Article Summary
Despite all the talk of “play to your strengths,” there is a potential downside to strengths-based development. Strengths, it turns out, can be overused and become unproductive. Most of us can readily see strengths overused in other people. We readily recognize the direct leader who verges on abrasiveness, the inclusive leader who tries too hard to please everybody, the operational leader who gets lost in the details, and so on. But we are often blind to our own tendencies to go overboard. This article describes the costs of strengths overused and provides guidance for how to recognize and correct for this often under-appreciated source of leader ineffectiveness.