Overplaying strengths in your team

Overplaying a strength can turn into a weakness if teams rely on it too much. Photo by Chris Jarvis on Unsplash

There is a big risk and opportunity cost for teams that ignore the individual and collective strengths of team members. There are risks on the other side of the coin as well. It is possible that strengths can be overplayed at both individual and team levels.

A 2009 article by two Roberts (Kaplan and Kaiser) in the Harvard Business Review explores this idea by referencing their ‘25 years of leadership consulting and our analysis of 360-degree feedback on about 1,200 middle and senior managers (completed by nearly 15,000 co-workers over the course of a decade)’. Here are some of the key points that are useful for the performance of all teams.

• Overused strengths have negative impacts on two aspects of team performance: vitality (defined as morale, engagement, and cohesion) and productivity (quantity and quality of output).

• Once you overplay a strength, you’re at risk of diminished capacity on the opposite pole. In other words, using your preferences too much can expose you to underutilising other useful aspects of your performance.

• They found that 55% of the managers were rated by coworkers as using too much of at least one leadership attribute, but the majority of those managers did not rate themselves as overdoing that attribute.

This final point may be the most pertinent. We are often not great at recognising when our own strengths have been overplayed. For example, a leader who is visionary and sees the big picture may take too long to implement actions. Inversely, a team member with a gift for getting work done may not spend enough time considering the larger implications of their actions.

What makes it more complicated is that those strengths are often the reasons that we are a part of the team and are often things that we cherish.

Once again, this is where the idea of operating as a team shows its value. Finding a way to share and deploy collective and complementary strengths allows teams to choose when to deploy their various strengths – when we need our visionary colleagues and other times when we just need to get $#!+ done! Designing and operating through the lens of complementary strengths reinforces that all of us are better than any one of us.

Some questions to help use strengths appropriately in your teams:

• Do you ever find yourself overplaying a strength?

• How can you identify when you or your team members are at risk of overplaying a strength?

• Can your team leverage complementary strengths to be collectively better?