Strengths in Excess: The Hidden Risks to Inclusive Leadership

Conventional wisdom says that leaders should capitalize on their strengths to maximize their impact. But as we’re only now discovering, inclusion can turn to exclusion when you take those strengths too far.

Based on my coaching experience, a key challenge that many leaders face in their journey towards inclusive high performance: overplaying their strengths.

At first blush, this may sound ridiculous. If you’ve built a career around excelling in an area, why wouldn’t you want to continue leveraging those strengths? Won’t you lose your edge if you start focusing on areas where you’re not as strong?

But as the saying goes, too much of a good thing is not good. In this case, overplaying your strengths can leave the people on your team feeling judged and found wanting, which is hardly the environment you want to create if your goal is inclusion.

While leveraging strengths is valuable, but an overreliance has the potential to alienate the team and negatively impact inclusivity. As Drucker wrote many years ago, ‘the effective executive makes strength productive and doing so, you need use all the available strengths.’ I’m not saying give up your strengths completely — but I am advocating for a balanced approach. This requires self-awareness to understand your impact across different situations and knowing when and how to adapt your approach.

Self awareness is critical for leadership and a must-have for inclusive leaders

As a leader, you need to accept that you don’t have all the answers, and that your default approach will not always be the best approach in every situation — and that’s okay! Self-awareness means having a conscious understanding of your emotions, strengths, behaviours, and limitations, so you can recognize when you need to dial up or dial down your strengths.

A multifaceted concept, so let’s break down what self-awareness includes:

• Understanding Strengths in Context: Know how and where your strengths are most effective.
• Welcoming the Unexpected: When things don’t go according to plan, demonstrate calm and reasoned responses.
• Changing before you have to: Recognize when a change in strategy is necessary, adapting to new circumstances, value practical outcomes over rigid processes.
• Seeking Help: Know when to ask for help. It’s a strength, not a weakness. Reaching out when necessary can accelerate results and demonstrates humility.
• Owning Your Flaws: Be quick to own up to errors, commit and learn from them.
• Mastering Your Moods: Keep your emotions in check for better decision-making and building relationships.
• Understanding Impact: Regularly evaluate how your actions affect others and adjust to lead more inclusively.
• Remaining Curious: Prioritize listening to other’s perspectives. Not only does this practice provide insights but also shows respect and builds trust.

When all things are equal, the degree of self-awareness often determines why some leaders succeed and others falter. Self-aware leaders tend to prioritize tasks effectively, make more informed decisions and demonstrate greater empathy, humility, and patience. Qualities that build more meaningful connections within their teams.

How does this impact inclusion? Self-awareness contributes to inclusion by serving two main purposes: First, enables leaders to notice and adjust behaviours that might actively exclude others. Second, modeling these attributes sends a strong message that being proficient in certain areas and requiring support in other areas is normal, ultimately setting up a flexible, inclusive work environment where all strengths are valued and supported.

What happens when leaders lack self-awareness? Unfortunately, not everyone is as self-aware as they could be. Often, being rewarded for certain strengths can reinforce a fixed mindset, leading to the assumption that excelling in these areas is all that matters. It’s a common trap — confirmation bias in action.

This lack of self-awareness can lead to unintended consequences. Under stress, some leaders double down on their strengths, seeking security in what has previously brought them success.

They think, ‘If a little is good and got me here, more must be even better.’ Yet, there’s a tipping point where strengths turn into liabilities.

Decisiveness can become inflexibility; assertiveness may devolve into aggression; detail orientation moves into micromanagement; consensus-building turns into indecision,and results driven leads to fatigue and high turnover.

The perils of overemphasizing the positive — a never-ending list. For leaders who habitually overuse their strengths, this behavior isn’t just an anomaly; it often becomes their default setting — difficult to change and dismissive of alternative approaches. In this state of overdrive, these leaders are prone to overlooking or rejecting methods suggested by others.

Overusing strengths can unintentionally turn inclusion into exclusion. For instance:

● Decisive leaders may push for quick decisions, inadvertently exclude the voices who try to slow things down and ensure every angle is considered before a decision is made.

● Collaborative leaders might provide excessive latitude, which prevents the team from learning to work independently or take initiative, sidelining those who are ready for more responsibility and autonomy.

● Assertive leaders run the risk of dominating conversations and overshadowing the quiet voices, effectively creating an environment where only certain voices are heard and valued ultimately diminishing team unity.

● Leaders with a relentless drive for results risk pushing their teams too hard, focusing excessively on outcomes. This overemphasis on goal achievement overshoots its intended benefits and can become counterproductive, ultimately leading to project failures and team fatigue, eroding morale and effectiveness.

Overreliance on a single skill is like paddling an outrigger canoe with too much force on one side — it tips and capsizes. Without the counterbalance of diverse skills and perspectives, the canoe doesn’t glide smoothly but starts to veer, leading into a vicious cycle of fatigue. Productivity and morale dips as the boat of inclusion takes on water, ultimately compromising the journey.

How to find balance

Some leaders are often startled to learn that the strengths they value may be undermining their team’s effectiveness. On the positive side, this means they’re motivated to recalibrate their approach.

But getting someone to ease up on a strength they’ve turned into a habit isn’t easy. For one thing, excelling in this strength has likely been beneficial to their career success. For another, telling someone to “stop doing what you’re good at” is not a winning strategy!

So, how do you find balance as a leader? The following questions can help you identify areas where you may be overplaying your strengths and trace the tendency to overkill to its source:

· What are my top strengths and how do they benefit my leadership now?

· What is the opposite of my top strength, and what are my views on it?

· How can I stretch an underused strengths and use this in my leadership approach?

Can every leader achieve a perfect balance? Likely not. It’s natural for all of us to excel is some areas more than others, resulting in a lopsided set of strengths and perspectives. This is normal, but you’ll need to practice conscious awareness to know when you’re strengths are in overdrive. It is the process of checking your impact that makes all the difference.

In closing how would you answer this, are you steering the team toward an echo chamber of your own strengths? Or, what are you doing to amplify the diverse strengths of your team?