Category: leadership

For millennia, people have been searching for a magic formula or elixir that explains leadership success: from ancient literature on leadership that searched for the individual kissed by the gods (Charisma) to historical ‘great man approaches’ (already limited by gender bias). However, the current fascination is with the concept of ‘strengths’.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the notion that there are certain skills, knowledge, and attitudes that produce higher levels of performance in a task, whether it’s sales, engineering, nursing, or hospitality. Leadership is required of all professions, and it has its own set of skills and abilities. So far, so good. But the strengths approach has been misapplied to mean that you should only undertake tasks in which you are strong, and avoid wasting your time attending to your weaknesses; in areas where you don’t have natural talent, you or your organisation should assign tasks to other people.

The emphasis on strengths has fundamentally discouraged people from challenging themselves to become better leaders. That’s not to say that people shouldn’t attend to their strengths, nor that they are not happier and more successful when using their strengths at work and in other aspects of their lives. But as it stands, they can just throw up their hands and say ‘well, envisioning the future just isn’t a strength of mine, so I’m not going to become very good at it’ or ‘I’m not very comfortable letting people know how much I appreciate their accomplishments, so I won’t bother’. 

First, ignoring feedback about things you’re not good at is inconsistent with a lot of research on learning. Second, it’s not very motivating to tell people to give up before they even start, or when things don’t go as well as expected the first time they try them. Finally, this thinking is impractical: organisations can’t bring in a new person every time someone makes a mistake or there’s a new challenge that someone initially doesn’t have the skills and abilities to handle.

Over all the years we’ve been researching leadership, we’ve consistently found that adversity and uncertainty characterise every personal-best leadership experience. Typically, they’re challenges people have never previously faced. When confronting things they haven’t done before, people often have to develop new skills and overcome existing weaknesses and limitations. They make mistakes and may even feel incompetent. If people built only on strengths, they would likely not challenge themselves or their organisations. You simply cannot do your best without searching for new experiences, doing things you’ve never done, making mistakes, and learning from them. Challenge is an important stimulus for leadership and for learning.