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.

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.