Without Mindfulness, Our Strengths Can Become Our Weaknesses: blog

Without Mindfulness, Our Strengths Can Become Our Weaknesses

NOTE FROM JIM

Research evaluated by authors Robert B. Kaiser and Robert E. Kaplan reveals that each of our strengths can be taken too far, to the point of compromising our performance. How could this be?

Find out! Learn how to mitigate this tendency, the tendency that leads our strengths to become our weaknesses, by accessing the Kaiser/Kaplan HBR post.

To entice your curiosity I've left you with some excerpts. Read the full article to gain great benefit. 

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Don't Let Your Strengths Become Your Weaknesses

by Robert B. Kaiser and Robert E. Kaplan 

EXCERPTS

Our new book, Fear Your Strengths (2013), is a cautionary tale based on 50 years of combined experience assessing thousands of leaders and coaching hundreds of executives. We've seen virtually every strength taken too far: confidence to the point of hubris, and humility to the point of diminishing oneself. We've seen vision drift into aimless dreaming, and focus narrow down to tunnel vision. Show us a strength and we'll give you an example where its overuse has compromised performance and probably even derailed a career.

Further, the more pronounced your natural talent and the stronger your strengths, the graver the risk of taking them to counterproductive extremes. In one study...There was a clear correlation between having talent in certain areas and overdoing behaviors associated with those talents... Overall, leaders were five times more likely to overdo behaviors related to their areas of natural talent than areas in which they were less gifted.

One of the more counterintuitive things we have discovered is that not only do many leaders not know what their strengths are, but they also downplay and deflect feedback about their strengths. It takes extra effort to get the strengths to sink in, but doing so is prerequisite to fine-tuning how you use them. Fine-tuning is an art that requires an exquisite blend of both self-awareness and situational awareness.

 ...read and respond adeptly... know...ing your default tendencies [strengths]... [and] get the [volume] setting [of the strength] just right for the situation...

 ... Getting strength under control is about refining a skill you already have. It requires learning to be more selective about what situations call for that strength and calibrating how much is enough, versus too much.

 Access Full Article And Other Great Stuff: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/dont_let_your_strengths_become.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date