Fear Your Strengths: What You Are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem [Hardcover]

Once you’ve discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you.

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 onoverplayedstrengths—when more isnotbetter.

Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths serve them well—versus betray them. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on their data and practical experience 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.

Fear Your Strengthsprovides 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 so that you can make sure your strengths don’t overpower you but rather move you—and your organization—forward.Introduction
Chapter 1: Strengths Beget Weaknesses—In Two Very Different Ways
Chapter 2: The Yin-Yang Responsibilities of a Leader
Chapter 3: Mind-set
Chapter 4: Dialing Back
Chapter 5: The Complete Leader
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author“It’s a pleasure to read a book packed with new insights into what truly makes leaders effective, especially one written in such a vivid, engaging style. This is an lC$