Ebook: Fear your strengths: what you are best at could be your biggest problem

Once you've discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you. You can have too much of a good thing.

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 on overplayed strengths. Nowhere in most assessments is there language or diagnostics that can reveal when someone is overdoing it—when more is not better.

Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths are betraying them. They draw on their data 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,...