Fear Your Strengths What You Are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem

As a leader, your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, but they tend not to accept it in practice. And 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. The authors help trace individuals' leadership behavior back to the "crooked thinking" and "trigger points" that can throw it off kilter. They identify four different overarching qualities of leadership and describe the damage that results when each is taken to an extreme, and how to get them back in balance. This work offers a practical psychology of leadership-a better way for leaders to get a reading on their performance, one that is truer to the realities of managerial work.

Robert E. Kaplan is founding partner of Kaplan DeVries Inc., which specializes in assessing leaders for selection and for development. He lives in New York City with his wife, Rebecca.
Robert B. Kaiser is president of Kaiser Leadership Solutions, which provides innovative tools for improving performance, including the patented Leadership Versatility Index.

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