Are you guilty of over-playing any of these leadership strengths?

I’ve worked in leadership development for all my career. I have had the pleasure of working with and coaching a wide range of senior leaders all from different backgrounds and organisations.

These leaders have some great strengths which they have used effectively to keep getting promoted as well as enabling their teams to deliver great results. But what happens when a leader overplays their strengths? Usually when overplayed a strength becomes a weakness or an area for personal development. Here are my top three key leadership strengths and what happens if a leader overplays them.

• Strength – As a leader, you have a depth of technical capability, knowledge and experience.
  When overplayed – You may find that you become ‘the answer man or woman’. People may become reliant on you and your technical knowledge to answer their problems instead of looking for the answer themselves. This might encourage ‘lazy thinking’ where team members immediately come to you first before even attempting to resolve the problem themselves. You may also be seen more as a technical expert as opposed to a Leader.

• Strength – You enjoy being part of the team you lead, you are liked by team members and respected. You know the individuals in your team very well and enjoy their company.
  When overplayed – If a leader is too close to the team then this may hinder his/her ability to make tough decisions as well as manage any underperformance in the team, they may also put off having a difficult conversation in the hope that this person will improve over time. Sadly, if underperformance is not tackled early on then it makes the conversation even harder to have 6 months down the line as well as impacts both the team’s performance and morale as they may question why as a leader you are tolerating underperformance.

• Strength – You have high expectations of yourself and the team. You set challenging goals that stretch team members and have the tenacity to keep going until the job is done.
  When overplayed – The difficulty for a leader who has high expectations of themselves and possibly others is that perhaps not everyone in the team is capable of meeting the leader’s expectations and sometimes this can make the leader feel frustrated and disappointed. Whilst it’s good to set challenging goals for people to achieve, a leader must also be there to provide support to ensure that he or she is setting the individuals and the team up for success. When a leader becomes so focused on getting the job done they can sometimes leave others behind or become impatient if things are not moving quickly enough.

Strengths are key to any leader’s success; the trick is to notice when you might be overplaying them.