The shadow side of playing to your strengths

EnneagramTeams

Sep 23

What if your strengths are actually showing up as weaknesses? 🫣

As a manager, you have to build your awareness of the things that make your team special. Those individual capacities that come naturally to people, that offer a unique perspective on how best to move forward.

In a world that capitalizes on self-help advice and convincing you that you are broken - it sucks that we spend so much time and energy trying to fix ourselves or mitigate weaknesses. It does distract us from the opportunity to do what you do best everyday. But it is also a problem that many people aren’t thoughtful when they do what they do best.

The intention of this series of images is to help you see the shadow side of your gifts and reframe them as a polarity to be navigated. (Not a switch that gets flipped.)

Aristotle argued that virtues lie between deficiency and excess - and there is more and more evidence that suggests that success doesn’t come from playing to your strengths. It comes from using your strengths in the right situations and the right times.

For example:

Ambitious managers tend to overdo decisiveness and underdo empowerment
Sensitive managers are too encouraging and not forceful enough.
Inquisitive managers overemphasize innovation and under emphasize results
Conscious managers are so busy trimming the weeds that they paid too little attention to the big picture

Confidence comes from recognizing your natural gifts, but real power depends on you knowing when and how to use them.