The Dark Side of Your Strengths
Photo by Andrew Hughes on Unsplash
You’ve been asked these questions in an interview or performance review setting:
What are you really good at? / What’s your superpower? / What are your strengths?
What’s a growth area you’re working on? / What would you like to get better at? / What’s your biggest weakness?
You likely have an easily-accessible list of your strengths and weaknesses. Yet there is a symbiotic relationship between your biggest strengths and the dark side of these strengths when they’re overused, also known as your weaknesses. The traits that you’re most inherently good at can be celebrated and propel you forward, or these very same traits can be overused or abused to self-sabotage your progress.
I’ll give you some examples.
Quality <> Perfectionism
I’ve been lucky enough to manage, lead, and coach hundreds of designers. For some of them, their superpower is an intense attention to quality, craft and detail. This superpower lovingly creates the overall quality of the end-to-end product experience; the minute UI details of corners, line-width, shadows and overlays; and micro-interaction transition moments of delight when you touch something on screen. When you experience a well-crafted, high-quality product, there is a feeling of perfection and ease, that all your needs are taken care of.
Yet one dark side of this attention-to-craft can often be perfectionism. When quality is taken to the extreme and becomes overused, there is a sense that the design always needs something more. There’s more time needed and infinite rounds of iteration to explore each change to further improve the detail and quality. It can feel like nothing is ever good enough. And leave you with a hollow unattainable feeling.
Collaborative <> Indecisive
One of my former clients leads a large team of product managers at a tech company. She is known for being flexible and collaborative. People want to work with her because of her empathy and her ability to pull teams together. She is known for listening to everyone’s perspective and people feel heard on her teams.
Yet one dark side of this collaboration is that she can be hesitant to confront problems head-on. Her preference is working behind the scenes to build consensus and agreement. When this collaborative strength is taken to extremes, she avoids conflict and wants to make sure that everyone’s opinion is taken into account. The dark side of being collaborative is that she can lack a strong leadership voice and perspective of her own. When she values people’s opinions to the extreme, she’s viewed as indecisive and bending in the direction of the loudest voices.
Visionary <> Impractical
One of my clients is a startup founder who’s known for being the visionary. He is madly creative. He is brilliant at predicting trends and dreaming up new features to enable the company to become the product leader 2–3 years in the future.
When he is solely focused on looking far out, the dark side of his strength is that he misses the details of this month’s sales figures or this quarter’s road map. This can be frustrating for his team who needs his attention on today’s operations and tradeoffs. His team is discouraged by what they view as impractical, future-facing long-term visions rather than what’s needed for this month.
Passionate <> Difficult
I’ve written and spoken often about difficult people, being one myself and also a defender and coach to many difficult people. The strength here is being passionate and fierce, including having many ideas, opinions, and suggestions. Taken to the extreme, when the ideas and the controlling need to win takes over, then you develop a reputation as a difficult person. When the need to be right becomes more important than the people and relationships, there is a negative obstinacy and stubbornness that prevails. These negative feelings come from the dark side of being passionate, and overusing that strength.
Try Something Different
Three keys to working with the dark side of your strengths.
Name it to tame itEvery time you celebrate a strength, ask yourself if there might be a dark side. Consider what that strength taken to an extreme state of overuse might be. Ask yourself if you are feeling positive emotions such as flow, ease, inspiration, and collaboration with others while using this strength. If you feel those positive emotions, that’s great! However, if you’re feeling negative emotions such as stress, anxiety; or if the impact on others is frustration and conflict, consider if you’re using that strength to the extreme and crossing over to the dark side. Start to recognize the instances when this happens.
Context: People & SituationsYou’ve used your strengths throughout your life and career. Now consider the context—the people & situations, that you’re interacting within. Will the impact of your strength with those people or in those situations be positive?
Consider the visionary founder example I talked about. He can amplify his strengths when working with people such as his design team or board of directors. Yet, he may mitigate it more when chatting with the head of operations or finance department. Situationally, a sales kickoff may be the perfect place to inspire and paint a vision, whereas that vision could be toned down more in a roadmap prioritization meeting where features need to be cut.Range
How might you play with the range of your strength? On a scale of 1–10, consider the number that represents how much you’re exercising that strength right at this moment. What would happen if you turned that dial up to a 10? Is it too much, or just perfect? Would it work better if the dial was at a 4? Play around with that number. Experiment and find out what your sweet spot is for different contexts.
Bottom-Line
We all have natural strengths and talents that we’ve honed with practice and experience. Consider that each of our strengths, when taken to the extreme and extensively overused also contains a dark side, a weakness that causes negative emotions for us and the people around us.