2013
This book takes on the "play to your strengths" fad to show how your strengths can actually betray you.
Once you've discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you. You can have too much of a good thing.
Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, and they see it in others. But they don't see it as clearly in themselves. Mainly, they think of leadership development as working on their weaknesses. No wonder. The tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths. Nowhere in most assessments is there language or diagnostics that can reveal when someone is overdoing it-when more is not better.
Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths are betraying them. They draw on their data to identify four fundamental leadership qualities, each positive in and of itself but each of which, if overemphasized, can seriously compromise your effectiveness. Most leaders, they've found, are "lopsided"-they favor certain qualities to the exclusion of others without realizing it. The trick is to keep all four in balance.
Consider Steve Jobs, who was fired from Apple because of his lopsided emphasis on grand strategic vision. It was when he returned and corrected that lopsidedness-exemplified in his mantra "real artists ship"-that Apple became the powerhouse it is today.
Fear Your Strengths provides tools to help you become aware of your leadership leanings and excesses and provides insights for combatting the mindset that encourages them. It offers a practical psychology of leadership, a better way for leaders to calibrate their performance, one that is truer to the realities of managerial work.
Heroic male partnerships are a staple business success story, but female partnerships rarely get the same kind of attention. Power Through Partnership is a call for women to recognize and build on the inherent strengths that make them uniquely able to create successful, trust-based professional relationships. Polk and Chotas demolish the myths that keep women from collaborating and then offer readers advice for handling potential challenges like finding the best partner, dealing with conflict, facing fears, taking risks, and knowing when to let go of a partnership.
Featuring lessons learned from women partners in all kinds of industries, this book shows that when women collaborate " combining complementary skills, pushing ego aside and supporting each other " they can work as full equals to achieve something that's exponentially greater than the two alone.