proven to be extremely useful since we have explicitly and deliberately employed it.
This report documents our ideas about this technique and some of the ways we have used it.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for reviewing an earlier draft of the paper: David DeVries, Bill Drath, Rebecca Henson, Bill Hodgetts, Rob Kaiser, Rebecca Kaplan, Denise Lyons, Connie McArthur, and Amy Webb.
Introduction
A primary responsibility of effective leaders is to develop key people as well as themselves. In the area of leadership studies, quite a bit is known about how managers develop. We know, for example, that much of it happens on the job; challenging jobs, for example, can bring out latent capability.1
Another common way of helping managers to develop is to confront them with their shortcomings. If job challenges pull capability out of managers, feedback (especially 360-degree feedback) is intended to strongly encourage managers to correct their weaknesses. This is an effective way to address performance issues, although, as you will see, not the only way.
The purpose of this report is to call attention to a kind of development that goes beyond addressing shortcomings, yet one that is often overlooked. I propose that much of the energy spent in developing managers is channeled into getting them to see and take seriously their deficits, but what is often not considered is that it may be equally valuable to help managers recognize and internalize their strengths. A counterintuitive notion—yes, but one that is borne out if one takes a close look at the stance that many managers take to their strengths.
The report begins with the idea that the failure to recognize one’s strengths is, in fact, at the root of many performance problems. Next I take up the difficulty of getting through to managers about their strengths. Following that I treat the gains that can be realized from internalizing strengths. Finally, I identify a series of principles to guide practitioners in using strengths as leverage for helping managers develop.
Certainly recognizing strengths as developmental tools has relevance for anyone in the field of management or executive development. No less so, it has value for managers at all levels seeking to grow and improve. It is also a useful idea for supervisors at any level to keep in mind when they enter performance appraisals and coaching conversations with their direct reports.
1 McCall, M. W., Jr., Lombardo, M. M., & Morrison, A. M. (1988). The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
How the Failure to Recognize Strengths Affects Executive Performance
Not fully recognizing one’s strengths, far from being a mere curiosity about managerial high achievers, is actually at the root of many performance problems. Not appreciating that they are already strong in a certain area—not knowing their own strength, as it were—managers tend to overuse it or they tend to overinvest in developing it.
This link between performance problems and managers’ relation to their strengths is critical. One senior manager, understanding this connection, said about the top person in his company, “If he internalized his strengths, a lot of his weaknesses would go away. It’s because he doesn’t accept his strengths that these weaknesses exist.” Seeing that link can help executives and their coaches alike avoid working away on the presenting symptoms while failing to get at the nonobvious root cause.
There is one attribute, more frequently than any other specific skill or trait, that our executive clients underestimate in themselves. Of all the many things that executives, the majority of them “overachieving perfectionists” (as one of their number called them), must do or be to meet the diverse, continually changing demands placed on them, what could that one thing be? Is it presentation skills, conflict management, sensitivity to people, long-range planning, leadership ability? No, it is intelligence. The tendency to underestimate one’s intelligence can turn out to be responsible for an executive’s performance problem.
It is striking when those individuals viewed as clearly above average intellectually see themselves as merely average compared to their cohorts, as nothing special. One exceptionally smart executive, whose trademark in his company was intellectual leadership, told us, “I always had the feeling that people around me were brighter.” He went on to say, “I was fortunate to be fairly bright.”
Another executive, let us call him Avery Stout, was described by fifteen or twenty of his coworkers responding to a open-ended question about his strengths as very intelligent. The fact that three-quarters of this group volunteered this characteristic completely unprompted was a statement in itself. On top of that, many used superlatives. A superior: “He’s highly intelligent; very, very bright; I’m sure he has a very high IQ; I think he is a very bright light-bulb.” A peer: “He is clearly very, very smart.” Another peer: “First of all, he’s brilliant.” A third peer: “I think his greatest strength is his intelligence.” A subordinate: “I think he is very intelligent, extremely intelligent.” Another subordinate: “I’d say his major strength is his intelligence.” A third subordinate: “I would say his greatest strengths are that he is very bright and quick on his feet.”
Although Avery himself cited “above-average intellect” as one of his strengths, he responded in the feedback session to the entire section of strengths by saying, “I am surprised at the comments about brilliance and being very, very smart. I rank myself as [only] above average.”
He actually carried on a running debate with some of his subordinates and peers about how smart he was. He told us, “I don’t think of myself as that smart. It’s a core belief. I do have a good enough understanding most of the time, but that’s not brilliance. It’s personality and tricks.”
How did this disparity in perceptions of a strength turn into a liability? Being unaware of the extent of his intellectual ability, Avery was not able to take into account its impact on his dealings with people. He had a habit of being impatient and critical in meetings with his management team. How did this rough treatment of his subordinates correspond with his inability to see how smart he was? His attitude was, “I’m not that smart and I get it right away, what’s wrong with you?” He did not make allowances for how quick he was when judging how smart other people were.
Permit me to speculate briefly as to why a population of obviously smart people would look upon themselves as not especially strong in this respect. First, when you look into their histories, many of them had bad experiences in school or in their families that left them feeling inadequate intellectually. They didn’t get good grades. They had trouble with a specific skill like computation that they equated with being smart. They were made to feel dumb by teachers or classmates or parents. They got off on the wrong foot in school. They had a learning disability that went undiagnosed for years. They didn’t test well; their SAT scores weren’t high. They took an IQ test once and didn’t get what in their mind would be a high score. They didn’t go to college or didn’t finish college or went to a lesser college, and privately regard that as a stigma. They had an older sister or brother who was an outstanding student, and they never measured up to that standard.
The educational system lets people down. In addition to the obvious casualties, the dropouts or low performers who never learn the basic skills and therefore leave feeling like complete failures, there are the people who go on to be successful in life but nevertheless harbor feelings of intellectual inadequacy because of bad associations with school.
A second possible reason why it is
