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Three Approaches to Development
When I work with leaders, I tend to see them fall into one of two traps when it comes to developing their people. One is that they’re cheerleaders and the other is that they’re critics. As a leader, if you’re a cheerleader, basically you recognize people’s best selves and you try to harness their strengths. It’s also easy to be a critic. You identify people’s worst selves and you try to help them overcome their weaknesses.
I think the best leaders are neither cheerleaders nor critics. They’re actually coaches. They see people’s potential and they try to help them become a better version of themselves. I think the reason that matters is we’re all prone to just leaning too heavily into our strengths. My favorite definition of a weakness is a strength overused or misused. There’s good empirical evidence to suggest that when we become too comfortable with our strengths, we start to use them as a crutch, and they can even become career derailers.
So if one of your strengths, for example, as a leader, is charisma, you are at risk for under preparing when it comes to leading a meeting or giving a speech because you’re so good at improvising and speaking extemporaneously, you may not do your homework. Another common example is leaders who are highly assertive and are known for being good at persuading others to go their way often fail to listen and learn from the people around them. They frequently silence and squash the voices of the people below them.
So I don’t think you just want to be a cheerleader, because you are in danger of letting people turn their own strengths into weaknesses. I think the problem with critics is they often deflate the people around them. As a leader, if you are constantly criticizing, there’s a risk that people start to doubt their own potential. At some point, they begin to doubt whether they have any potential at all.
When leaders are great coaches, they allow people to recognize their strengths, but not get complacent around them. They allow people to see their weaknesses, but not get discouraged by them. And they remind people that, yes, you might be pretty good today, but you’re capable of becoming even greater tomorrow. And that energizes people to want to become better as opposed to being comfortable with where they are or completely incapable of growing from where they’re stuck.
Building User Manuals
Something that’s bothered me for a long time is that when you buy a piece of complex technology, it comes with a user manual. If you think about the last time you bought a computer or you leased a car, there was an owner’s manual to help you figure out how to operate it. Unfortunately, human beings do not come with these manuals. We should. We’re every bit as complex as the technology we buy, maybe even more so.
I think as a leader, one of the most valuable things you can do with your direct reports is you can actually help them build their own user manual. So I like to ask three questions as part of an owner’s manual. Number one: What are my strengths and how do I think about using them more effectively? Number two: What are my shortcomings and how might I overcome them? And number three: What are my blind spots and how can I understand what my gaps are in self-awareness? What do you know about me from working with me that you wish you had known on Day 1? What do you know about me that I don’t necessarily know about myself? When people write their own user manuals, they often miss out on critical information. It’s the people around them who are capable of holding up a mirror and helping them recognize their own potential for improvement.
So as a leader, I think you can help people write their own, walk them through that 360 process. As a leader, you also have a responsibility to ask people to write your user manual so that you can figure out what you’re doing well, what is not working, and how you might be able to keep on improving.