Every strength has multiple facets that can be expressed through either healthy, or unhealthy behaviors.
Both the healthy and unhealthy expressions are two sides of the same coin–you cannot focus on surgically and completely removing your faults without suppressing your strengths, minimizing key elements of what make you who you are.
While settling into a new role, junior leaders tend to spend time focused primarily on damage control, reacting to negative behaviors as they pop up, and mostly telling their team members what to stop doing–without realizing how discouraging this approach alone can be.
A more nuanced challenge for a leader that is still learning about their team comes in identifying the underlying strength that an unhealthy or undesirable behavior is driven by, as this behavior is almost always an OVER-expression of a key strength.
When we first recognize this strength, help the team member re-frame it in a positive light, and spend more time nurturing this strength toward a helpful direction, this presents a few key opportunities:
1) We allow this person to live a fuller version of themselves, without attacking their pride or suppressing their sense of self, while also making it clear how these behaviors impact others around them
2) Living in this fullness increases the overall trust and safety on a team, allowing for a freer exchange of thoughts and ideas that lead to better decision making
3) Net creative energy flows outward from this individual to the team, rather than inward from others, leading to better outcomes/output of the team as a whole
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Do you have a team member that interrupts and talks over others in meetings?
What about an individual that abrasively calls other people’s ideas stupid, or questions even the most minute details of every decision?
Ever met an engineer that is so involved in the weeds that they’re constantly missing deadlines?
Or a project manager that asks their project team to deal with cost overruns by charging a portion of project labor to overhead?
A leader who starts sprinting with their team in the wrong direction with 10% of the information they need, expending an unnecessarily excessive amount of energy/resources?
Can you identify an underlying strength in each of these behaviors? And if so–how could you verbally acknowledge and honor these individuals’ strengths, while guiding these individuals toward more useful expressions of these strengths?