How the Failure to Recognize Strengths Affects Executive Performance

Not fully recognizing one’s strengths, far from being a mere curiosity about managerial high achievers, is actually at the root of many performance problems. Not appreciating that they are already strong in a certain area—not knowing their own strength, as it were—managers tend to overuse it or they tend to overinvest in developing it.

This link between performance problems and managers’ relation to their strengths is critical. One senior manager, understanding this connection, said about the top person in his company, “If he internalized his strengths, a lot of his weaknesses would go away. It’s because he doesn’t accept his strengths that these weaknesses exist.” Seeing that link can help executives and their coaches alike avoid working away on the presenting symptoms while failing to get at the nonobvious root cause.

There is one attribute, more frequently than any other specific skill or trait, that our executive clients underestimate in themselves. Of all the many things that executives, the majority of them “overachieving perfectionists” (as one of their number called them), must do or be to meet the diverse, continually changing demands placed on them, what could that one thing be? Is it presentation skills, conflict management, sensitivity to people, long-range planning, leadership ability? No, it is intelligence. The tendency to underestimate one’s intelligence can turn out to be responsible for an executive’s performance problem.

It is striking when those individuals viewed as clearly above average intellectually see themselves as merely average compared to their cohorts, as nothing special. One exceptionally smart executive, whose trademark in his company was intellectual leadership, told us, “I always had the feeling that people around me were brighter.” He went on to say, “I was fortunate to be fairly bright.”

Another executive, let us call him Avery Stout, was described by fifteen or twenty of his coworkers responding to a open-ended question about his strengths as very intelligent. The fact that three-quarters of this group volunteered this characteristic completely unprompted was a statement in itself. On top of that, many used superlatives. A superior: “He’s highly intelligent; very, very bright; I’m sure he has a very high IQ; I think he is a very bright light-bulb.” A peer: “He is clearly very, very smart.” Another peer: “First of all, he’s brilliant.” A third peer: “I think his greatest strength is his intelligence.” A subordinate: “I think he is very intelligent, extremely intelligent.” Another subordinate: “I’d say his major strength is his intelligence.” A third subordinate: “I would say his greatest strengths are that he is very bright and quick on his feet.”

Although Avery himself cited “above-average intellect” as one of his strengths, he responded in the feedback session to the entire section of strengths by saying, “I am surprised at the comments about brilliance and being very, very smart. I rank myself as [only] above average.”

He actually carried on a running debate with some of his subordinates and peers about how smart he was. He told us, “I don’t think of myself as that smart. It’s a core belief. I do have a good enough understanding most of the time, but that’s not brilliance. It’s personality and tricks.”

How did this disparity in perceptions of a strength turn into a liability? Being unaware of the extent of his intellectual ability, Avery was not able to take into account its impact on his dealings with people. He had a habit of being impatient and critical in meetings with his management team. How did this rough treatment of his subordinates correspond with his inability to see how smart he was? His attitude was, “I’m not that smart and I get it right away, what’s wrong with you?” He did not make allowances for how quick he was when judging how smart other people were.

Permit me to speculate briefly as to why a population of obviously smart people would look upon themselves as not especially strong in this respect. First, when you look into their histories, many of them had bad experiences in school or in their families that left them feeling inadequate intellectually. They didn’t get good grades. They had trouble with a specific skill like computation that they equated with being smart. They were made to feel dumb by teachers or classmates or parents. They got off on the wrong foot in school. They had a learning disability that went undiagnosed for years. They didn’t test well; their SAT scores weren’t high. They took an IQ test once and didn’t get what in their mind would be a high score. They didn’t go to college or didn’t finish college or went to a lesser college, and privately regard that as a stigma. They had an older sister or brother who was an outstanding student, and they never measured up to that standard.

The educational system lets people down. In addition to the obvious casualties, the dropouts or low performers who never learn the basic skills and therefore leave feeling like complete failures, there are the people who go on to be successful in life but nevertheless harbor feelings of intellectual inadequacy because of bad associations with school.

A second possible reason why it is common for executives to feel inferior intellectually is that the United States is fixated on intelligence, IQ-type intelligence in particular. And as a result, smart people worry about not being smart enough and have trouble being objective in assessing their level of ability. We have had people who graduated first in their class in college or law school or business school argue that they were not exceptionally bright because really bright people become nuclear physicists or win Nobel Prizes.

This discussion of the implications of downplaying or not recognizing a particular strength shows us that not recognizing strengths can result in executives’ distorting their performance. They do this in three basic ways: They overdo what they underestimate in an effort to compensate, they underdo the thing they underestimate because they inhibit themselves, and they make up for a perceived deficit by making extra effort in other areas. Let’s look at these now.

They Overdo What They Underestimate

Failing to realize that they are more than adequate in an area that is very important to them, executives therefore overdo it in that arena. Some executives, for example, put a premium on being responsible and as a result err on the side of taking too much responsibility. In meetings they do the lion’s share of the problem solving and are too quick to take over when their subordinates run into problems.

Other executives don’t know their own power. And not realizing how powerful they are and in fact worried about not being powerful enough, they overwhelm people. Their personal power is immediately evident. And they possess knowledge and skills that add impressively to their inherent power. Yet, if the truth were known, they are forever on the alert to the danger of losing power. Not being able to see straight about how powerful they are, ironically they undermine their effectiveness by overpowering people. And their fear of eroding their power prevents them from doing things that would make them less overpowering, less intimidating. They can’t admit a mistake or acknowledge to people that they need to improve. The idea that to admit a weakness is a sign of strength is counterintuitive.

For a long time one executive we worked with did not know that he overdid the forceful side of leadership: “I don’t see myself as being tough or powerful.” After working his way through the extensive assessment report we gave him, he opened his eyes to how powerful he was and to the underlying assumption that drove it: “I didn’t see until now how brute force was adversely affecting my relationships with my people. I probably thought the opposite: brute force, being on top of things, giving people insights, would lead them to hold me up [in high esteem], lead them to follow me. But I see now they also want me to ease up and let them in.”

In another case, one executive’s assiduous efforts to prepare for presentations actually undercuts his effectiveness. Not trusting himself to think on his feet, he uses numerous overhead transparencies as well as detailed notes. Tied to his props and notes, he restricts his freedom to think and to connect to the people to whom he is presenting. His overpreparation and the anxiety that spurs it make him less smart than he is. Feeling inadequate, he overprepares. Overprepared, he hampers his intellectual ability: “I have to prepare. I’m not fast on my feet so I have to know the material down pat. I work hard to make up for not being intelligent enough.” It is not the lack of intelligence that is the problem. It is the anxiety about not being intelligent enough. If he could stop worrying so much about not being smart, he would be smarter.

In cases like these, executives come by their anxiety honestly. Early on in life they had bad experiences that burned these lessons into their consciousness.

They Underdo What They Underestimate

The flip side of the behavior discussed in the previous section is that many executives, not recognizing a strength, doubt themselves in that area and therefore shy away from managerial functions that include activities related to it. They hold back. One instance of this that we have seen repeatedly is the executive who is skilled with people but, not seeing the extent of his or her interpersonal assets, inhibits himself or herself interpersonally.

One executive was completely taken aback that others described him as attractive as a person. Not knowing that he had this going for him, he hung back in relationships, even at work. Another executive at pains to treat people well trod lightly, to the point of hampering his effectiveness. His matrixed role required him at times to push his function’s initiatives hard, but wanting, as he said, “peace in the valley,” he was reluctant to be aggressive.

An executive who had great relationships and was effective in many ways hurt his performance and hurt himself by failing to take sufficient control. What kept him from being more forceful? “Fear and wanting to please,” he said. His manner, if you paid attention, gave away his uneasiness. His voice quavered ever so slightly, and there was a smooth niceness to his manner of speaking that seemed to suggest a nonthreatening individual. Although pleasant, his way of presenting himself lacked an edge to it. He was almost compulsively modest, almost afraid to take credit even when it was manifestly due him, as was evident in this exchange with his direct reports: “My team said, after the good year we just had, ‘You should feel good about the results.’ I told them, ‘No, it’s really you guys who do the work.’ And they said, ‘No, you focused us. We needed you to lead us.’” He explained to us what lay behind the stance he took. “They feel like peers to me. I used to be in awe of these guys.” When we pointed out that he had once held the same job, he said, “Sometimes I forget. ‘Forget’ may be the wrong word. ‘Underappreciate’ is [the word]. It’s hard to remember how far you’ve come.”

They React to Perceived Lack of Talent by Trying Too Hard

Besides discounting a specific skill, executives may underestimate themselves in general and make up for this perceived overall deficit with extra effort. This across-the-board sense of inadequacy shows up in a tendency to underrate their overall effectiveness a point or more on a 10-point scale. Executives can be very hard on themselves.

Here are two of the ways they do it.

Through brute determination. Consider the pressures that this executive applied to himself. This is someone who saw himself as “not well educated,” a “late bloomer,” someone who had to “play catch-up” in his career. Throughout his working life and especially when he took on a new assignment, he worried, “Am I smart enough?” His response to his perceived deficiencies? “I’ve succeeded not by academic success or analytical ability or a high IQ. I’ve done it almost entirely by brute force. I take all that energy and plow it into my job…. Do I feel in the back of my mind that it’s more brute force than talent? Yes, I think so.”

Where did he get the idea that he wasn’t smart? In school. “I don’t consider myself intelligent: in school I had to work hard and I took it personally.” Feeling that he could not count on his brainpower, he compensated by stepping up his horsepower: “I’ve always had doubt about my ability to lead them [my people]. I’m not that smart so I have to work hard.” He has placed his faith in all-out effort: “I rely on brute force because I’m comfortable with it. I know it works.”

He concluded as a child that he had to work harder than his fellow students. “I always had a lot of anxiety about test taking. I always asked myself, did I study hard enough, am I prepared enough?” His credo: “Leave nothing to chance.”

What he regarded as his winning formula he had adopted back in high school. Starting in grade school, he had been only an average student. (It turned out, on further questioning, that he had never truly applied himself but did not make allowances for that, continuing to the present day to think of himself as so-so intellectually.) Why did he not study hard? Perhaps because his two older sisters were star students. He discovered he could distinguish himself on the football field. In accounting for his success, he used the same refrain: “I became a star not because I was talented. I did it through brute force.”

Because this was the first time that he had succeeded out in the world, his football experience made a strong impression on him. An offensive lineman, he regularly played opposite bigger players and prided himself in getting the better of his opponent, opening up holes for the running backs or protecting the quarterback on passing plays. In the process of overexerting himself he injured his knee and had to drop off his college football team after his sophomore year.

He worked virtually all the time. He worked evenings; he worked weekends. He almost could not not work, for fear of departing from his anxious ideal of conscientiousness. When the possibility of easing up was raised, he worried, “If I let up, will I be as effective?” He had come to resent his regimen, yet he was seemingly helpless to change it.

In his career he has relied upon intense involvement to ensure the right outcome, to keep the organization on course: “Just to succeed I had to be very controlled, focused, planned. It was my way of making up for deficiencies.”

Through trying too hard to prove themselves. Underestimating themselves in general, some executives fall all over themselves in an effort to show that they add value. It can be startling to find out that an obviously effective senior manager in good standing harbors a private fear that he or she has done it all with smoke and mirrors and that any day his or her career will turn out to be a fairy tale with an unhappy ending. A senior manager, a very capable leader in many respects, with a solid track record in his current assignment, let us in on his private experience: “It’s that feeling of occasionally saying to yourself, ‘I’ve parlayed a little ballsiness and a lot of good luck with some pretty poor competition into a position of power and money well beyond my abilities, and I’m going to be proven a complete jerk at any moment.’ I feel everything’s built on sand. Like I can do computer art but it’s clip art.”

Another senior manager told us he did not truly believe his success. The way he put it: “I’m not sure this is real. I ask myself, ‘Am I really good or not? Is this really a sham?’” In response I said, “So you worry that if you pinch yourself, you will go back to being a frog.” He agreed: “Yes, that’s what I see when I look in the mirror. It’s all kind of unreal or surreal.”

This was an individual from humble origins who had made a success of himself. There was no magic wand, no princess whose kiss transformed the frog instantly into a prince. He had turned himself, over time, into a corporate prince but could hardly believe his eyes. He had grown up in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and no one in his extended family had ever gone to college. His sister explained the attitude he took toward himself: “I shouldn’t be this good because I came from Leadville. So if I work hard, I’ll be fine. He’ll always say, never forget where you came from. But that’s limiting.”

Several months later he raised the same theme. “I’m afraid that someone like [my boss and the CEO] is going to feel I’m not as good as I am. I’m afraid if they really knew me they would see I’m an imposter. That’s why I keep them at a distance and only let them measure me by my accomplishments, so I’m not found out.” (We were the ones who had introduced the term imposter to him.) It is not uncommon for perfectly capable executives performing ably in their present jobs to harbor the private worry that they are in danger of being fired.

What are the spillovers on the weaknesses side of this general sense of inadequacy? Any of a number of things. Arrogance is one. Arrogant executives can come across as genuinely bullish on themselves and their ability but that would be a misreading. Behind the superior attitude, the sense that they have all the answers, lies a painful lack of confidence. They go out of their way to prove what they themselves do not believe.

Another common problem that arises from an effort to counter the feeling of unworthiness is being overly dependent on external reinforcement. These executives are excessively concerned with what other people think of them. They care too much about status and advancement and compensation and other outward signs of worth. One other often seen distortion in an executive’s managerial behavior is the huge and ceaseless effort to prove oneself; that is, prove oneself in ways that don’t help the cause but get in the way. It manifests itself in trivial but annoying personal habits like talking for the sake of talking.

One especially self-honest executive admitted to us, “If one of my people asks a question, I’ll immediately give them the answer. Out of a need to prove myself. Rather than turn the question back to them to get them to think about it. When I answer the question, it’s selfish. I’m meeting my need to be productive.”

Perfectionism is a major reason why managers underestimate themselves. This is perfectionism not in the particular sense of being overly exacting or detail-oriented but in the general sense of setting unrealistically high standards or expectations for oneself and therefore, necessarily, always finding oneself wanting.

The ceaseless effort expended by high-achieving perfectionists can be understood as a faulty control mechanism, the cybernetic system by which a person regulates how much energy is expended to reach a desired state.² Because perfectionists set impossibly high standards for what constitutes good performance or sufficient preparation, they read each situation as requiring more work than is objectively true. They are prone to perpetually see a gap between what they actually do and what they are required to do, and they are fated to work endlessly to close that gap. Their control system registers a false reading, like a thermostat that reads the temperature of a room as being cooler than it actually is and as a result the furnace runs more than necessary and overheats the room. The perfectionist constantly attempts to improve his or her performance to meet an unrealistically high standard.

²  Frost, R. O., & Marten, P. A. (1990). Perfectionism and evaluative threat. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 14(6), 559-572.