Tempering Your Strengths to Become a Better Leader

What kind of leader are you?  Skilled interventionist?  Great communicator?  Arrogant?  Nurturing?  How do you think other people view you?  For after all, what people think of you when you are trying to lead them is even more important than how you view yourself.

Casting aside self-awareness when intent on getting a job done is not making the most of your strengths.  Never having time to lead an examined life will produce insensitivity and a tendency to use people to gain your ends.  You can only bring out the best of your team by seeing how they view you and what they base that on, because you are then able to temper your strengths.

Temper strengths?  Does that mean not use them?  Or use less of them?  Why would you want to do that?

Consider if a football team used the same play every time.  Consider if a piece of music consisted of a single note plinking repeatedly.  In their overuse, they have rendered themselves irrelevant.  We've all seen leadership become arrogance, or a nurturing humility become martyrdom.  Creativity can become impractical farce and a laser vision can become an obsession.

The four dimensions of a good leader are: confidence, enabling, planning and operating.  So what do you consider your natural talent when it comes to leadership?  If you easily identify a talent in one of these areas, the more likely you will be to utilize it, and thus overuse it.  Therefore, you must assess the situation and see if your strength is the best answer, or if you need to choose a different strategy.  Soft music may be the best fit for the baby's quiet naptime, not rock music, even though we may like rock music.  Forceful commanding might not be the best approach when handling a wedding or a funeral.

In calibrating which approach is most effective, and going with that even though it may not be our greatest strength may lead us to discover that our underused talents improve with time, thus giving us a greater return on our leadership.