Page 216 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Leading Yourself 205

• Balance building on strengths and shoring up weaknesses. Much

research shows that the payback for professional development is
higher when you focus less on remediating weaknesses and more
on leveraging your strengths, especially those that drive the most
value for your organization. But as Robert Kaplan and Robert
Kaiser have also shown in their HBR article “Stop Overdoing Your
Strengths,” your strengths can be overdone, and you can become
a lopsided and ineffective leader if you keep developing and push-
ing them to excess. It’s much better to work on creating a balance
between what you do well and not so well, and continue to solicit
feedback about “what should I do more of, what less of, to be
effective?”

• Go beyond your comfort zone. As we’ve said, learning and growth
come from being stretched and confronted with new and difficult
challenges. Be willing to engage in professional development where
you may not be the boss, where you hear things that might criti-
cize your style and performance, or where you are in unfamiliar
situations.
There are limits, however: beware joining programs to build
a skill clearly far beyond your current capability. You need to be
stretched, not broken or humiliated, to learn. Also beware of
would-be development programs that promise some kind of mysti-
cal self-understanding or that pose significant physical risk with a
false promise, for example, “walking on burning coals at our com-
pany retreat will truly teach you about self-control” (this was once
a real trend in team-building circles).

• Be intellectually humble and listen, listen, listen. Unless you

are open to new ideas and challenges, you will never grow. Too
many leaders suffer from overconfidence that closes their minds
to acquiring new skills and knowledge. So develop the habit of
erring on the side of listening to others and not always speaking
first.