What Can Be Gained from Internalizing One’s Strengths
There are two interrelated ways to bring one’s view of oneself in line with the more favorable view held by others. Both accrue significant gains for those willing to add them to their behavioral profile. First, temper strengths that have been overplayed. And second, build up skills that have been underplayed. It is a matter of having executives stop worrying so much about the things that they are already good at and transfer the excess emotional energy to where it is needed, from the strong side to the weak side.
What are taken to be weaknesses are many times the effects of overdoing strengths. In these cases, if the managers could learn to recognize the extent of their capability, they would be less liable to take the strength to a counterproductive extreme.
Executives (as well as people in general) invest certain attributes with huge significance, operating on the assumption that this capability will protect them or will ensure their success in the world. It becomes an obsession with them. And loading this attribute with so much emotion, they cannot be objective about it. Given how critical it is to them, they never feel they have enough of it. Their perfectionism makes them poor judges in this respect. So they overdo it, and what would otherwise be a wonderful unalloyed strength becomes a weakness.
Those qualities or strategies that executives overdo are things on which they place tremendous value—hard work, preparation, control, intelligence. It is almost as if executives invest these properties with quasi-magical power, the power to save their lives in some sense. Their extremely strong attachment to these things is closely associated with their overuse of them.
Thus, when they come to see how strong in actuality they are in these respects, they are able to recalibrate their reading of how much is enough. This is another way in which accepting one’s strengths can alleviate performance problems. When managers can learn to see what those around them see, to see how well endowed they are, they can be reassured. They can allay their anxiety that they don’t do enough and consequently stop doing too much.
One executive that I worked with was talking one day about taking the pressure off, relaxing, “not being so pent up … about things.” He hastened to add, however, that he didn’t mean a swing to the opposite extreme: “By relax I don’t mean become complacent or lackadaisical.” At another point in our work with him he put the recalibration this way: “One way to be successful now and in future jobs is to be a little more comfortable with my abilities. That doesn’t say you don’t have to work hard.” He understood that it is a matter of degree: “This process has helped me understand that I don’t have to be quite as driven.”
Two benefits that accrue to managers who take in the reality of their strengths are: they use their strengths more selectively and they make allowances for their strengths.
Using strengths more selectively. When executives begin to take in how powerful or intelligent or otherwise well endowed they are, it improves their performance by making it possible for them to use their strengths more selectively. The fault had lain in using a characteristic (old faithful) when it was not useful or using it to excess. To choose more wisely when to use a strength or how much of it to use can represent a distinct improvement in managerial practice.
Selectivity is a key word. A large part of development is learning to use one’s strengths more selectively. As one high-powered and at times overpowering executive discovered, “I don’t have to give up my fastball; I just don’t have to throw it all the time.”
When executives can strip away the excess, they are left with the effective core.
Making allowances for one’s strengths. Executives may not have a perspective on their strengths or on the particular ones that have great significance for them. Because they so badly want to be good in a certain respect and because they worry so much that they are not, they have trouble being objective about that attribute in themselves. Their emotions surrounding that attribute cloud their judgment. Not realizing fully how good they are, they do not take that into account in working with other people.
When Avery read the summary of coworkers’ comments on his strengths, especially all the appreciation for how smart he was, it had an impact. As a result he began to make allowances for his superior intellectual ability. His recognition helped him be more patient with people who didn’t “get it right away,” where before he had been rough on them.
Abrasive executives can have a difficult time putting a stop to their destructive behavior. Pointing it out to them is no guarantee that they will change, even if they resolve to do better. Immediately after the session in which one executive had his revelation about his strengths, however, his offensive behavior stopped. It was as if that way of relating to people simply dropped out of his behavioral vocabulary. Having incorporated the change in attitude, he was able to sustain the change.
A year later he did revert in a staff meeting set up to deal with a difficult business situation, but by the next meeting he had righted himself. As clear-cut an improvement as this change represented, it hardly made him a blemish-free leader. But it did remove a serious objection to his leadership as well as an impediment to his effectiveness. And the improvement stemmed from a newfound appreciation of his intellectual capacity, a view he had resisted for years.
Another executive prone to overdoing it who was ultimately able to let the full extent of his strengths sink in reported soon after the feedback session that one of the headlines was, “You don’t have to always prove you know everything. People accept that you’re smart and knowledgeable. People accept you’re the leader. You don’t have to prove it every day. They know you’re the boss.” One of the benefits of recognizing a strength is that you have an easier time understanding other people’s reactions to you. By gaining a more realistic idea of how powerful you are, for example, you can tune in more readily to signals that a subordinate is intimidated. It is a form of taking responsibility for one’s behavior.
Energy Is Freed Up for the Weaker Side
For every managerial characteristic that is overdone, there is usually an opposing, complementary characteristic that is underdone. Managers who take forceful leadership to an extreme often give short shrift to enabling leadership. And conversely, those managers who overdo enabling leadership tend to underdo forceful leadership.3
If managers can reduce their investment on one side of a duality, then they free up emotional energy for the other side. The side previously emphasized no longer draws a disproportionate share of energy, and the surplus becomes available for the side previously valued less. If you come to believe that you are actually very good at something that you badly want to be good at, then you can relax on that point. You free up energy, including emotional energy, for other things.
Perhaps the best way to show this is to tell you some stories that relate actual experiences with executives.
An overly forceful type who freed himself to be more people oriented. Several years ago we worked with an executive whose reactions to his assessment data helped me see the dynamic of freeing up energy for the other side clearly for the first time. Like many others, he prized intelligence above all other traits:
There’s nothing that I’d rather have people say about me. It’s probably too important.
This executive made this statement in the feedback session after he read the glowing comments about his intellectual ability. And it was insightful of him to sense that he was probably overly invested in this part of himself.
Though he had not thought of himself this way he did not resist the different view. He was able to take satisfaction in his coworkers’ highly favorable opinion of him:
I was surprised that those strengths [intelligent, analytical] were universally seen. I was insecure about them. These are things that I admire in others.
He was pleasantly surprised to learn that the very set of things that he admired in others, other people admired in him.
In caring so much about being smart he had unwittingly allowed other management functions to suffer, especially relationships. It was not just that he lacked skill, which he obviously did. It was that he placed relatively little value on relationships, and the interpersonal returns were commensurate with the limited investment. Now that he saw that he had become the highly intelligent person he had dreamed of but worried he would never be, he saw right away that he could pull back on that investment a little and invest the newly available resources elsewhere:
What this says to me is that I don’t need to try so hard to do this [be intelligent, analytical], because it’s the image I wanted to have.
As soon as he saw that he now possessed the thing that he had long sought, he immediately drew the implication that he could expend less effort. He no longer had to prove himself in this way. It was this individual’s realization that helped me to see the connection between accepting one’s strengths and releasing energy to make up deficits.
In overrelying on his own intellect and underrelying on the contributions of others, this executive had come close to polarizing on the forceful-enabling continuum. He identified powerfully with the forceful pole, with being an intellectual force. And he identified weakly with and had relatively little use for the enabling pole, that is, drawing on the resources of others. When he came to appreciate how capable intellectually he truly was, he no longer needed to hold on so tightly to the forceful pole, and he immediately could imagine a stronger attachment to the enabling pole. It had been his habit to rely on his own thinking, his own thought process, and he saw now the opportunity to relate to other people in such a way that he would make better use of their thinking. With this new perspective he could now see the need to break several bad habits.
One, he had had a tendency to come to project meetings declaring, “I’ve got the answer!” Two, his decisiveness and his bias for action, good things generally, meant that he frequently cut off discussion and therefore did not get all the relevant input. Three, his abrasiveness discouraged some people from speaking up. And, four, in his effort to articulate his thoughts, he not only did not listen well, he neglected to draw people out.
An enabling-oriented executive who freed himself to be more of a force. From working with Jim Merriam (not his real name), I learned that even managers who got great grades in their assessment reports can benefit from taking better account of their capabilities. It would be natural to assume that this class of manager, fairly rare in my experience, would have little or nothing to gain from a feedback report that was highly favorable. It would be like going to your doctor for a physical and getting a clean bill of health. Driving away from the doctor’s office, you would feel grateful that there was nothing wrong and that you could get on with your life. But your life wouldn’t change.
Given the limits of what we knew a few years ago about how to use positive feedback, we made the tacit assumption that the stronger an executive’s report, the weaker our position, the less we had to offer. What we learned from working with Jim Merriam was how wrong that assumption was.
No senior manager is so good that he or she can’t get better. All humans, no matter how much they have realized their potential, possess significant, serious potential to improve—if they can only discover it. Jim, in fact, made a significant change: he became a stronger leader.
We knew enough to point out how favorable the data were, but we were not prepared for Jim’s reaction on the second day of the usual two-day feedback session. (To protect this individual’s privacy I have altered some of the details of his circumstances, but I have left untouched the words he used to describe his experience.)
The first thing out of his mouth was, “The realization was very liberating.” It took him no time to start drawing the implications: “Out of this is the reinforcement that it’s okay to take off a little of the pressure. Which will make other things possible. This experience has helped me recognize that there’s a degree of relaxing that goes with this, which helps me in other areas.” This experience of being released by affirmation we have since seen in other executives.
In a conversation three months later it was evident that the effect had held up. Jim continued to use the same language to describe it: “This has been a very nice liberating experience. It takes some of the pressure off.” Intuitively understanding the importance of taking in the good things about himself, he had reread the report more than once. The realization had not faded, as it sometimes does in our work with executives. In Jim’s case there was no doubt: “I have been able to accept it. It’s stayed with me.” If anything, the impact had intensified. He now talked more broadly about confidence and self-esteem. “This process has given me the confidence that if I get into a situation that doesn’t go well, I’d still have value. I’d still be okay. That’s taken the pressure off, a lot of pressure.”
In a long, reflective conversation we had with Jim two and one-half years after the feedback session, he returned to the same theme. He began his account by commenting,
There was always this feeling within me that I didn’t quite measure up. I was always putting a lot of pressure on myself even though there were outward signs I was very successful—accomplishments, promotions.
The assessment report, along with our interpretation of the report, revealed to him that he did in fact measure up:
I guess the one word that occurred to me in thinking about our conversation today is relax. It [the insight] really allowed me to relax into who I was with a degree of self-assurance. By relax I don’t mean [become] complacent or lackadaisical. It releases you so you’re not so pent up and you’re not so tenuous.
His sense of self-worth had been somewhat tenuous. Now he had gotten a better grip on it: “You aren’t always walking on that tightrope, feeling if you make a misstep you fall off that track.”
If the realization was liberating, what did it free him to do? The most important thing is it helped him to become a still stronger leader.
He freed himself to become more of a factor in top management, to speak up more and to be more assertive. Jim had always distinguished himself by running his piece of the business exceedingly well, but in forums with his superiors and his peers he had taken a low profile. “My natural inclination with a group of senior people would be to be cautious, but I have stepped out more,” he reported nine months after the intervention. “Previously I haven’t enjoyed being thrown in with other senior people, especially superiors. This is tangling with people. I’m not sure I could have been as effective with my former point of view.” Two and a half years out he continued to enjoy a more influential role in senior management. This is the change in behavior that meant the most to him:
The greatest thing that happened to me was that this process allowed me to move into a strategist role in the company. I realized that I had a voice that was important and could be effective in shaping the corporation’s strategy and that it was important to express that and not take as cautious an approach as I might have. So it helped me be a risk-taker in unknown circumstances; it’s a heckuva lot easier for me to be reserved than being an outspoken person.
I’m more effective upstream by fifty percent because I’m much more open, confident, willing to speak my mind, willing to take a controversial position, realizing that I don’t always have to win the point. So from that standpoint, it has helped me greatly.
In addition to the inherent satisfaction it provided, the greater visibility helped his chances of advancing.
With his own people too he began to communicate more freely and powerfully, a change that coworkers began to see in the months following the assessment:
I think this release helps me to be a real person with people and a genuine person. Part of this is showing what you are passionate about and what do you stand for. These are qualities that were inside of me but they were suppressed because of this baggage I was carrying around. That is part of releasing and saying I was okay.
He understood the change as becoming more comfortable being himself. In retrospect he could see that he had played a role, put up a facade:
If you spent a lifetime acting and suppressing, I think it takes a whole lot for you to make genuine change, and you do that through being more aware and releasing yourself to be a little more open and experiment.
It’s letting a little more of my natural self out. This is liberating. I fully admit that there’s a facade. With maturity and age it’s faded a little. But the data have said it’s okay to let the facade go away.
Interestingly, his newfound openness also carried over to his marriage. (We sometimes involve the spouse in our process, but with Jim we did not.) He reported later that he had begun to spend more time with her and to talk more personally with her:
I can be vulnerable with her in a personal way. Here again it comes back to me feeling okay. Before, it was part of not feeling confident—you don’t want to be vulnerable. You want to be in control. That’s one of the things I’m working on. I’m not there. But I can recognize it and experiment.
Never one to claim more than he deserved, he said near the end of his retrospective account, “Let me assure you that I am a work in progress. I’m not there.”
One reason why managers do not succeed in their efforts to fix their performance problems is that their values get in the way. As long as they place supreme value on the capability they already possess (working hardest at it because they doubt they have enough of it), and, if the truth were known, place a relatively lower value on the weaker areas, their prospects for improvement are clouded. To develop the weaker side is therefore not simply a matter of acquiring skill; it requires that executives overcome a bias against that side. Emotions enter in.
Another emotion that may come into play is fear, a fear of the other side. In addition to being attracted to one side, executives may be repelled by the other side, creating a double whammy. Many executives are attracted to mastery, to attaining mastery to the nth degree, and at the same time they are uncomfortable with relationships. An executive whose strengths lay almost entirely in the area of mastery understood this in himself very well: “I can control these talents and push them in the right way to compensate for weaknesses. I do it by keeping the adrenaline high. I build walls around myself with them and I always keep them up. I keep reinforcing them because I know the other side, the human side, the feeling side, I’m not as good at.”
This is what Sidney Blatt called defensive avoidance.4 People who opt in their lives for mastery and self-assertion do so not only because they are attracted to that line of development but because they are avoiding the other line. In this case the tendency to overdo strengths is overdetermined, and the challenge of correcting the imbalance is doubly difficult.
3 Kaplan, R. E. (1996). Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership: You Can Do Both. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.
4 Blatt, S. J. (1995). The destructiveness of perfectionism. American Psychologist, 50(12), 1003-1020.