Keeping Your Strengths From Becoming Liabilities

I believe everyone has certain strengths as well as weaknesses (sometimes referred to as development needs). Instead of getting overly focused on weaknesses, a strong leader will have the self-confidence to admit that there are certain areas that are weaknesses, and focus their attention on surrounding themselves with people that are much better than they are in those areas. That enables them to focus on their strengths, and maybe making the strengths even stronger.

While this approach may make sense, this is area where BALANCE IS KEY. WHY? …because overusing a strength can limit your perspective. True leadership requires balance, self-awareness, and valuing both hard and soft skills.

For a through discussion of this topic, see this link to my Forbes article as well as the complete article below.

Another wonderful experience this week was spending time with University of Chicago Booth MBA students to discuss faith and business.

I am often asked how one should separate their faith life and work life. In my opinion, and I stress opinion, if your faith life is important, I don’t know how you can separate it. For me, I will be extremely respectful of people with different faiths, or no faith at all. However, I am very comfortable to openly sharing my faith to the extent others are interested in understanding my faith while I take the time to understand their faith. The more open and respectful we are of one another, the more we can understand one another and help to create a less polarized world.

Keeping Your Strengths From Becoming Liabilities

From a young age, I excelled at mathematics. My proficiency in calculus and analytics led me to study economics as an undergraduate student and then to pursue an MBA in finance. In short, math was my natural talent I used every day in my job—analyzing, diagraming, and solving problems.

As a financial analyst at Baxter International, a $12 billion health care company where I worked for 23 years (eventually becoming chair and CEO), I became the go-to person on acquisitions. Based on future growth, profitability, and cash flow, I determined a company’s value and the expected return. To me, the numbers said it all.

A strength that’s overused to the extreme, however, can result in a kind of myopia. The danger is seeing an opportunity or a challenge through the familiar lens of a particular strength, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I found this out the hard way.

When I was promoted to a division president, I was not just analyzing acquisitions; I was making them in our part of the company. Given my background, I believed everything we needed to know about a company we wanted to acquire could be found in the numbers. To simplify an actual example of what happened, let’s say our analysis valued a company we wanted to acquire at $100 million. Our offer was $80 million, which meant we expected to generate $20 million in value. With full confidence in that analysis alone, I approved the deal.

What I neglected to take into account, however, were several factors that would have provided a much more holistic view. The biggest area I overlooked was the importance of ensuring that key individuals at the acquired company stayed on to run the business. This turned out to be a significant variable that would make or break the deal.

The acquired company’s product line was outside our area of expertise. When key people departed, productivity suffered, and that business ended up being worth no more than $30 million or $40 million. It didn’t take a math major to figure out that, having paid $80 million, we lost somewhere between $40 million and $50 million on the deal.

No matter how compelling the numbers appear, they tell only part of the story. The people dynamics are equally, and often far more, important. For example, are the cultures of the two companies aligned, allowing people to work well together? As McKinsey observed, during a merger and integration “talent deemed critical to the combined company’s future needs to receive special attention.”

That failed acquisition became a dramatic wake-up call about the importance of expanding my perspective with a balance of viewpoints and never overemphasizing any single strength. A balanced perspective—taking into account a variety of views and opinions, especially those that differ from our own—is also a principle of values-based leadership. If only I had brought that principle into my thinking about making acquisitions early in my career.

Some lessons are learned the hard way. Suffice it to say, I began taking a more holistic approach not only in M&A, but also when making important decisions that required the expertise of the entire team.

• Shift Your Thinking. The greater your strength in a particular area, the more you are likely to see yourself as a single contributor and, at the extreme, as the “be all and end all” of any project or endeavor. The key is to use self-reflection to identify your strengths and acknowledge your weaknesses (what I call having “true self-confidence” that comes from knowing yourself). With an understanding of your strengths, you can continue to do what you do best. (Some talent experts advise that it’s more important to focus on your own strengths than to try to overcome every weakness.) But you’ll keep your strengths in check by acknowledging your weaknesses and identifying the people with whom you need to collaborate. When others are strong in areas where you are weak, a team environment is created that enables you to best prepare for challenges, problems, and opportunities with a balanced perspective.
• Valuing Hard Skills And Soft Skills. Hard skills such as accounting and financial analysis matter. But soft skills such as collaboration, creativity, and communication are crucial to a healthy culture and a productive working environment. Brought together, hard skills and soft skills become parts of a much greater whole; for example, tapping the analytical skills of the finance team and the creative talents of the marketing team—as well as the expertise of the HR team to help motivate and align people across the organization.
• Balancing Every Perspective: As this discussion shows, a holistic perspective matters. But you can’t offset your own strengths by over-indexing on every viewpoint or opinion. In other words, if you’re financially minded you can’t suddenly disregard the numbers for the sake of putting more emphasis on creativity, marketing, or branding. A humorous story brings this point home. When I was at Baxter, a colleague came into my office, bursting with excitement about what he saw as a “very strategic” opportunity to increase our research in a new product. Intrigued, I asked him to describe the expected economic return of the investment. “This is going to be very strategic,” he repeated.

I acknowledged that he thought this opportunity was very “strategic,” but still needed to know about the economics. His opinion about what he saw as the marketing potential was not sufficient. “What is the net present value?” I asked him, referring to the value of this opportunity based on what it was expected to generate in the future. His reply was, “Harry, this is strategic—way beyond net present value.” Clearly, I needed to explain to him what I thought was obvious: “There is nothing beyond net present value, because net present value takes the future into account.” To punctuate the point, I explained, “If it is not economic by definition it is not strategic.” I wasn’t looking for my colleagues in research, product development, and marketing to come up with definitive numbers out to four or five decimals. But a holistic view—tapping the expertise of the entire team—is needed to determine whether an idea is truly “strategic.”

We all have natural talents, as well as capabilities we develop with time and experience. As much as we rely on these abilities to be successful, we cannot let those strengths become liabilities. Success comes from cultivating a balance of perspectives, for the broadest view.