In what may be the cruelest of ironies, overplayed strengths are often at the root of career failure. ~Robert E. Kaplan and Robert B. Kaiser

That’s right; your strengths may be moving you toward career failure.  I’ve seen this phenomenon occur especially when leaders are under stress or pressure.  Like most of us, when the pressure is on we default to what is most comfortable or natural and that is typically our strengths.  But too much of a good thing, really is, too much of a good thing.

Authors Kaplan and Kaiser co-authored Fear Your Strengths based upon years of experience and research.  Here are a few excerpts from their work.

We have learned that to stop overplaying a strength does not mean, as many leaders fear, to stop using it.  It means using the strength more selectively.

A devotion to consensus-seeking breeds chronic indecision.  An emphasis on being respectful of others degenerates into ineffectual niceness.  The desire to turn a profit and serve shareholders becomes a preoccupation with short-term thinking.  To the leader whose best tool is a hammer, everything is a nail.

Overusing a strength is underperformance.

There is no fixed setting on the dial for the proper use of a strength, a virtue.  The volume needs to go up or down according to what the situation requires.

The more versatile the leader, the more effective he or she is.  We have found an exceptionally strong association between versatility scores and ratings of overall effectiveness.

The versatile leader is someone who recognizes their strengths and has enough self-awareness to read a given situation and know what level of their strengths will be most effective and they adjust accordingly.  We all have something we need to watch out for and modulate to become a truly versatile leader.

I was working with a leadership team a couple of years ago and gave them an assignment.  Over the next week, find at least one situation where you need to adjust your strengths to better adapt to someone else’s strengths.  One of them came back and said he really tried, but couldn’t find a single scenario where he needed to adjust.  Today, things aren’t going so well for that leader.  Instead of adapting or adjusting, he’s turning up the dial on his strengths and with each increase on that dial, the situation only gets worse.

Overplayed strengths are often the root of career failure.  What could each of us dial-down or adjust this week?