When Your Strengths Become the Problem

Most senior leaders read that line as a call to improvement. There is a harder reading that becomes legible the longer one carries an institution's weight. Sometimes "knowing better" is not refining what already works. It is recognizing that what once worked has stopped fitting the role you are now in.

The session opened with what Georgia had been told most of her life was her greatest strength. Decisive. It came up in every executive assessment she had ever taken, in every 360 her direct reports had filled out. It was the first thing her board chair had said in announcing her hire. It was the second sentence of her CV.

I asked her what was hard about being a decisive leader. The question seemed to surprise her, less because it was difficult to answer than because no one had asked it that way before.

What surfaced over the next forty minutes was a pattern she had not put together. The decisions her senior team brought her were getting smaller. The strategic questions her position existed to weigh were being settled before they reached her desk.

Her senior team had grown accustomed to the speed of her calls. Over time they had built a habit of pre-resolving below her, partly out of efficiency, partly because the velocity of her decisions left little room for an idea that had not yet been worked out. The questions that needed the scope of view only Georgia's position offered were being answered at the operational level, at operational tempo, without the slower weighing the work actually called for. The strategic imprint Georgia had been elevated to provide was no longer landing on the decisions that most needed it.

Georgia had also organized around the strength. Decisiveness was the version of herself she had been refining since her first leadership role. She had grown into it inside the institution, and it had become her self-image. What the role now asked of her, sitting longer with ambiguity, holding a strategic question open across multiple leadership meetings, was a register she had not used in years. Her self-awareness had been calibrated for the leadership stage she had outgrown.

That is the structural feature of strengths most of the executive coaching market does not name. A signature capacity is not a fixed asset that you carry from one situation to the next. It is a competency that the system around you has learned to depend on, to defer to, and eventually to route around, and that the leader herself has organized her sense of competence around. The stronger the signature, the more decisively the system arranges itself around it, and the less feedback either the system or the leader gets that the strength is no longer the right tool for the work now in front of them.

Strengths-based instruments encourage a particular reading of this pattern: lean into your strengths, find roles that fit them, partner with people whose strengths complement yours. None of that is wrong, exactly. It is incomplete. It assumes that the relationship between a strength and the situation it acts on is stable. In senior leadership, where the situation changes faster than the leader's self-knowledge can catch up, it is not.

Georgia did not need to become less decisive. The work was not to turn her decisiveness down. It was to help her see when decisiveness was actually being asked of her, and when something else was being asked under that label. She also needed to bring back a capacity she had stopped exercising: the patient cultivation of the people around her, the deliberate building of their thinking. It had been central to her early years in leadership, when her work was as much about developing the people who reported to her as resolving questions herself. The institution had stopped rewarding it once she became known for the speed of her calls. The developmental edge was not a hidden weakness. It was a strength she had set aside, one the new context now needed.

This is the move good coaching makes that the assessment alone cannot. The self-awareness a leader develops on entering the role will not carry her across the role she actually grows into. It needs to be cultivated again every time the context shifts. We do not coach people away from their strengths. We coach them toward an ongoing relationship with them: one in which the strength is a choice rather than a reflex, deployed when the situation calls for it, and other capacities can come forward when the situation calls for something else.

That distinction is small in language and very large in practice. It is also why the leaders I work with who treat coaching as periodic, the way one treats primary care, recalibrate sooner than those who reach for it only when something has already gone wrong. The coaching relationship is the place where the leader's own self-awareness is re-fitted to a role that keeps changing.