3 Ways to Leverage Your Leadership Strengths

Brief 

Fixing weak spots in your leadership is a worthwhile process, but don’t miss opportunities to make the most of your strengths by amplifying them when necessary and applying them to different aspects of your job, writes Scott Eblin. “What I know now after coaching so many leaders that I didn’t know back when I was an executive is that your strengths are typically where most of the leverage is,” Eblin writes.

Insight

Between the leaders I’ve worked with in our Next Level Leadership® group coaching program and the individual executives I’ve coached over the last 20 plus years, I’ve delivered around 2,000 colleague feedback reports.

And there’s one thing I’ve seen again and again in so many of those feedback conversations. High achieving, ambitious leaders want to blow right past the strengths that have enabled their success and dive right into what they need to “fix.”

Big mistake.

Having once been a high achieving, ambitious leader myself, I get it. “Yeah, yeah, all those positive comments are nice, but just tell me what I need to fix to be better.” What I know now after coaching so many leaders that I didn’t know back when I was an executive is that your strengths are typically where most of the leverage is.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in the camp of it’s all about your strengths and you should focus on finding roles that allow you to just optimize them. That’s a path to limiting your opportunity to grow and take on leadership roles that don’t just play to your strengths. That’s why the core premise of my book, The Next Level, is that there are behaviors and mindsets that leaders need to both pick up and let go of as their scope increases.

But, if all you focus on is “what you need to fix,” you’re missing a lot of the opportunities available to you by leveraging your strengths. Based on my coaching experience, here are three ways to leverage your strengths to be a more effective leader.