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CHAPTER FOUR

From Strength to Growth

Most people spend their whole lives using their strengths to cover up and hide their weaknesses. But, if you surrender to your weakness, therein lies your pathway to genius.

—Moshe Feldenkrais

Cheryl had a knack for social media, an invaluable skill-set for a modern marketing team. She was a natural at coming up with new initiatives and seeing patterns in the results so we could adjust strategy. But Cheryl was not a good teammate. She was constantly pushing deadlines, increasing the scope of projects at the last minute, and she tended to dominate team meetings with her ideas, which shut down others in the process. She wasn’t mean about it, the team generally respected her and looked to her for guidance. But the grumblings were there. People dropped hints to her about the way they felt bullied into agreeing with her. Cheryl wasn’t picking up on the hints.

I wasn’t either. Team members would complain in off-hand comments here and there. It was nothing blatant, but a little bit of having to cover for her here, a little bit of extra work because of her there. It didn’t seem like that big a deal. Of course, I see now, it was very much a big deal. But I wasn’t listening. If I had been, I would have done something. I even remember thinking things like, “What can I really do? I’m not her therapist, I’m her boss. And who will pick up the slack if she gets upset and walks out? Anyway, let’s see what happens, if it comes up again I’ll talk to her.” Can you spot a few of the the Employee Engagement Myths in action? All of them?

Somewhere around that time I started waking up to a similar theme in my own life. It turned out that when it came to blind spots, Cheryl and I had more than a little bit in common. I was ten years older, we’d come from entirely different backgrounds, but in the thing that mattered—in our relationship to our work—we were birds of a feather. As long as I remained blissfully ignorant of my version of the blind spot, I couldn’t help her with hers. I literally couldn’t see it—they’re not called blind spots by accident.

It was then that I had my window. The quiet grumblings had turned into two identical flare-ups within a matter of days. Twice Cheryl had failed to communicate scope changes to her teammates, and each time they’d had to spend an extra two days re-working something they had already crossed off their list. The grumblings bubbled over when her behavior started screwing with with her teammates’ day, making it harder for them to do their work, and I had a steady stream of people coming by my office to let me know about it.

It’s worth a brief detour for a moment. A great thing to do is to take a kind of personality inventory of your team. You don’t need any fancy diagnostic tool. Just look around. Go by what you know of them. Who is like you? Who has a style that is more like the opposite of yours? You may be surprised to discover how likely it is that you’re able to put everyone on your team into one of those two categories. As a leader, you’ll tend, whether you realize you’re doing it or not, to draw two kinds of people to your teams: those who are like you, because it’ll be easy for you to relate with each other; and those who are diametrically unlike you, because they’ll be able to fill in gaps created by your style.

As I’m sure you’ve already concluded, this book would caution you strongly against the wisdom of that approach—that is, trying to make up for your weaknesses through other people. But not for the reason you might think. It’s not because there’s no merit to that line of thinking, or because you should focus on your weaknesses instead. It’s because thinking about it in linear terms of strengths/weaknesses is far too simplistic for human beings. Sometimes our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness. And what’s more true, in my experience, is that the strongest people you’ll ever meet are the ones who’ve made peace with their weaknesses—our central topic for Part III.

This dynamic—the interplay between strengths and weaknesses—was causing problems for Cheryl’s teammates. Not to mention for me. There was only one person who wasn’t feeling the impact: Cheryl. This is how I was failing her as her manager. I wasn’t helping her make the connections. I was too willing to benefit from her strengths, too reluctant to see the impacts of her not knowing how to use them in a collaborative way. And those impacts took the form that they take for all of us: the micro-behaviors that drive the people around us crazy.