Your Greatest Strength Might Be Holding You Back as a Leader (Here’s Why): Developing Leadership in Edmonton
Introducing Adam Melnyk And Seeding The Lead
My name is Adam Melnyk, leadership coach and owner of Seeding the Lead. And today I’m going to teach you about why your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness.
I was working with one of my clients the other day and they were talking a lot about how they were doers. They were fixers. How they could get in there and fix any problem and yet they were working with a client, well specifically one of their employees, and they couldn’t get anywhere with this employee.
In fact, this employee was struggling at their workplace. They were struggling within their personal life. They were bringing a lot of baggage in from their personal life into the workplace.
And this manager was sitting down talking to them continuously about, hey, how can I help you out? How can we fix this problem? How can we work on this together so that you can live the life that you want to live so that you can be productive at the workplace? So that we can just stop having these meetings.
And in listening to this conversation, I remember thinking to myself, it doesn’t sound like you’re working on a problem. It sounds like you’re dealing with a dilemma. And that’s completely different.
See, when you’re working on a problem, a problem has a solution. It’s phenomenal. It’s great. You have problem, then you have solution.
When you have a dilemma, dilemmas don’t really have solutions. They just have outcomes that mile or range from awful to not as awful. And nothing is really good when it comes to these dilemmas. You just kind of have to choose which poison pill do you want to take? Which one is the least of all the evils that you want?
Problems, Dilemmas, And Leadership Frustration
When Fixers Cannot Fix The Situation
And in talking with this leader, I remember saying to her, “It sounds like you’re dealing with a dilemma. And when you’re dealing with a dilemma, one of your greatest strengths is going to be your greatest weakness.”
And she stopped and looked at me and she goes, “What do you mean?”
I said, “One of your greatest strengths, and I see this a lot with my clients, is that they are fixers. They are doers. They are individuals that can go in and get the job done. This is how they got into leadership. This is how they’re climbing the corporate ranks. This is why they’ve been picked for their position.
However, it is also your greatest weakness. And that is because as a fixer, as a doer, as somebody who’s trying to always solve problems, you will encounter things in your life such as a dilemma that you can’t solve, that you can’t fix. There’s no happy ending to this.
And when you are a doer and you’re trying to find that solution, you become frustrated and you become upset. And again, because there is no solution to this. There is no right answer. You are now officially in the land of the gray.”
And she took a minute and she had to stop and she thought about it and she said, “I think my problem is that I am trying to solve a situation that is unsolvable.”
And I said, “Correct.”
And because she came to that realization that, hey, this situation was no longer solvable, she could then start thinking about, okay, what do I need to do now to get to an outcome that is preferable for me?
And in this case, it was learning to take a step back and stop solving other people’s problems and help them solve their own issues, which is a huge frame shift.
The Weakness Attached To Every Strength
Fixers, Rescuers, Listeners, And Speakers
When I work with my clients, we often work in the land of the gray. I hate black and white. We, for example, we often think about our strengths being all good and there’s no bad attached to it. And that’s simply not true.
Every single one of your strengths has a weakness attached to it. I don’t care what strength it is. It always has a weakness.
For example, as a manager or in a leadership position, you are a doer. You are a fixer.
That fixer is such a great strength. But the weakness to it is again when you encounter a dilemma. Yeah, that strength is no good.
But on top of that, you’re often called upon to enter into the rescuer role in the drama triangle, which is a power game. It’s a power dynamic. As it the name mentions, the drama triangle is all about drama.
And as a fixer, you will always be asked to enter in as the rescuer to save the victim from an abuser. But little did you know, you are being manipulated. Because again, your strength has a weakness.
For myself, one of my greatest strengths is that I’m a great listener. And because I listen to people, I can understand them. I can understand their motives, where they’re coming from, uh why they’re doing things that they’re doing.
However, it has a great weakness, which means that I often excuse poor or bad behavior. I sweep things under the rug that shouldn’t be swept under the rug because again, I can understand why they’re doing the things that they’re doing.
It gives me great empathy. However, the negative side of it is sometimes people can get away with things that they shouldn’t be able to get away with.
And for myself, it’s understanding that if this is my strength and that’s the weakness attached to it, I need to understand that weakness and how to curb it so that it doesn’t become a glaring flaw in my personality.
Another example of a strength that I see time and time again is public speaking. So many of my clients are phenomenal public speakers. You can get them on stage and they can present like nobody’s business. They can convey information. And they can be engaging. They can be charismatic.
However, that strength of being a public speaker is also one of their greatest weakness because it means that they’re probably a terrible listener.
It means that they when you get them on stage will talk at nauseum to the audience, but they won’t let anyone from the audience talk to them. They won’t let a team member, a friend, a family, a co-worker talk to them about their issues or the problems that they see because they’re too busy trying to convey their own thoughts and ideas.
Finding The Blind Spots In Your Strengths
Coaching Through The Land Of The Gray
And again, it’s not shying away from that strength. It’s understanding that that’s your strength, but also understanding that weakness that’s a part of that strength and then learning to curb it.
Oftentimes we’re not aware of how the weakness of our strengths are causing us such grief and suffering within our lives.
And this is why when I work with many of my clients will build out what their strengths are and then for every single strength I’ll ask what makes this your greatest weakness and they’ll always stop and they have to think about it.
But when they stop and think about it, they can then understand and fill in that blind spot and say, “This is where I need to work on.”
I said, “Exactly. What do you need to do to ensure that that weakness is curbed so your strength continues to be your greatest strength?”
If you’re struggling to find your own personal strengths or discovering the weaknesses attached to those strengths, feel free to reach out to myself for a free one-on-one coaching session where we’ll sit down and look at what your strengths are, what are the potential weaknesses of those strengths, and how to overcome each weakness.
Otherwise, I’ll see you guys in the next video. Cheers.