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A Leadership Insight from Grady McGonagill
Dr. McGonagill teaches in our program, Assessing and Refining Your Leadership Style.
In recent years the
“strengths-based” approach has become a popular movement in
leadership development. In this view, a person can become a great
leader just by identifying and amplifying his or her strengths.
Clearly it makes sense to recognize and build on strengths, but it is
risky to focus only on them. Neglecting your limits and blind spots
can leave you highly vulnerable to being derailed at some point. Even
highly talented leaders can have “fatal flaws” that undermine
their strengths. We believe it makes sense to take a balanced
approach: leverage your strengths and manage your limits.
Strengths are not enough.
50% of managers “derail,” i.e., are let go
or passed over. To ensure being among the survivors, your strengths
may not be enough for many reasons. Since strengths vary in
competitiveness and relevance, you may have strengths that don’t
distinguish you from others. Or, your strength/s may be distinctive
but not relevant to the mission of your organization. For strengths
to be truly strategic assets, they must be both distinctive and
aligned with the organization. To succeed, managers must possess
roughly half to two thirds of the most mission-critical skills needed
by their organization. And, they must have no significant
shortcomings in the remainder of the mission-critical skills.
Relevant strengths can also vary by level of management. For
example, when supervisors move to the managerial level, they must
shift from technical skills and a customer focus to motivating
others, managing conflict, and managing through systems. At the
executive level, there is greater emphasis on strategic agility and
managing vision and purpose. Strengths may also not match the
cultural context. In an increasingly global world, what is strength
in one culture may be a weakness in another. Finally, strengths can
become weaknesses. For instance, a limited focus on one’s
expertise can lead to arrogance. Similarly, unbridled flexibility can
turn into impulsiveness, and single-minded exercise of a talent for
maintaining order can lead to rigidity.
How to strike the right
balance between focusing on strengths and weaknesses? We recommend
three strategies:
- Know your strengths and leverage them mindfully:
Get clear on your distinctive
strengths. What are the special things you contribute to teams or
organizations? Are there particular conditions that enable you to use
them? Personality profiles such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
are useful for this kind of self-understanding, but it’s not
enough. You need to know the particular way you use your strengths.
What’s your unique signature? Identifying and reflecting on your
greatest leadership successes is an excellent way to deepen your
understanding of how you leverage your strengths when at your best,
and how you can build or extend that formula to more situations.
- Know your limits and manage them
selectively:
Get clear on your limits, the things you don’t do well and the things you don’t like to do
or tend to avoid. Determine which may cause problems for your
current/future leadership challenges and decide how to manage them.
Although you don’t have to be excellent at everything, there are
likely to be some things that need doing in a minimally competent way
that you either aren’t good at or don’t enjoy. You can ignore
them, but this can be risky in terms of advancing or retaining higher
positions. If you don’t want to invest in skill development, you
might delegate or find a partner with complementary strengths.
- Know and address your potential Fatal Flaws:
There are several common kinds of fatal flaw:
- Gaps between
walk/talk. Such gaps can result from lack of emotional
intelligence-- in particular interpersonal skills-- which undermine
noble statements of aspiration about collaboration.
- Extreme skill
deficits. What constitutes such a deficit depends on the role.
Not being able to make a coherent presentation, for example, would
be a barrier to many management positions.
- Inability to manage “inner
demons.” The experiences of many highly visible national
leaders illustrate that it’s very risky not to be aware and in
control of the ‘shadow’ sides of oneself. To cite one example,
former adviser to several U.S. presidents David Gergen says of
Richard Nixon: “He had inner demons that he had never conquered,
and perhaps never understood….He became the architect of his own
demise—a prime example of a man who had all the makings for the
presidency but failed because he never developed what it took to
look inside himself.”
In summary, the secret
to long-term leadership and career success is identifying and
nurturing a well-rounded portfolio of skills, along with a lack of
glaring weaknesses.
Note: The title of this
Leadership Insight is adapted from the excellent book, The
Perils of Accentuating the Positive (2009), edited by Robert
Kaiser. That work is the source of several of the citations as well.
Other Leadership Insights from our Faculty
David Stroh and Marilyn Paul
Jeswald Salacuse
Nicholas Washienko
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