As a leader, your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, but they tend not to accept it in practice. And the tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths. Nowhere in most assessments is there language or diagnostics that can reveal when someone is overdoing it - when more is not better. The authors help trace individuals' leadership behavior back to the 'crooked thinking' and 'trigger points' that can throw it off kilter. They identify four different overarching qualities of leadership and describe the damage that results when each is taken to an extreme, and how to get them back in balance. This work offers a practical psychology of leadership-a better way for leaders to get a reading on their performance, one that is truer to the realities of managerial work. As a leader, your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, but they tend not to accept it in practice. And the tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths. Nowhere in most assessments is there language or diagnostics that can reveal when someone is overdoing it-when more is not better. The authors help trace individuals' leadership behavior back to the 'crooked thinking' and 'trigger points' that can throw it off kilter. They identify four different overarching qualities of leadership and describe the damage that results when each is taken to an extreme, and how to get them back in balance. This work offers a practical psychology of leadership-a better way for leaders to get a reading on their performance, one that is truer to the realities of managerial work.

Once you've discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you. You can have too much of a good thing. 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. Nowhere in most assessments is there language or diagnostics that can reveal when someone is overdoing it - 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 are betraying them. They draw on their data 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. Consider Steve Jobs, who was fired from Apple because of his lopsided emphasis on grand strategic vision. It was when he returned and corrected that lopsidedness - exemplified in his mantra "real artists ship" - that Apple became the powerhouse it is today. 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, one that is truer to the realities of managerial work.

Competition is fiercer today than ever before, and effective leadership represents a rare source of competitive advantage. With strong leadership and a richly stocked pool of future leaders, organizations prosper and endure. There is an easy case to make for the imperative of investing in tomorrow's leaders today. It's the law of supply and demand: more organizations in greater competition under increased pressure to perform put a premium on scarce talent. The labor economy has become a seller's market, and poaching or luring talent away from other organizations is a losing proposition. The alternative is to become good at developing your talented managers into great leaders and aggressively seeking out potential and developing it anywhere and everywhere you can find it across the organization. The purpose of this volume is to share what has been learned in the last few years of increased attention to the systematic and strategic cultivation of leadership talent. The time is ripe for leading practitioners to share key lessons about building and filling a leadership pipeline.