Annie: Welcome to Knowing Kenning. I’m Annie Howell and I’m a partner at Kenning Associates and this is our firm’s podcast where we get to discuss our favorite topic of leadership development. As you listen to our many podcasts on our website, you’ll find that each of our Kenning partners wants to share their insights about helping leaders to deepen their practice through meaningful work. Today I am excited to talk with my partner at Kenning Associates, Jen Lachance.

Jen: Hi, Annie. It’s nice to be here.

Annie: I know that you’ve been noticing something very cool in your coaching practice with leaders when you ask them in a rather provocative way to quote, beware of their strengths. So I’m excited for you to share with our listeners who may recognize these tendencies in themselves, if they’re clients or if they’re coaches out there and they want to tune their ears to when offering support. I think this is going to be a really helpful topic for them. First though, I think that it’s helpful to set the foundation for us, which is at Kenning, one of the capacities, the competencies that we want leaders to build is increasing self-awareness. can you say more about that skill, Jen?

Jen: Yeah, for sure. start with just why we work with people around self-awareness, and that’s because leaders who are more self-aware tend to be better able to understand how they’re showing up in various situations and then how others are also experiencing them. you know, they mean to come across as confident, but instead their colleagues experience them as domineering.

Or they automatically default to saying yes to their manager’s request, but rather than being seen as the team player that they’re aiming for, they come across as unsure or lacking credibility, or do they try to be understanding and accommodating of others’ viewpoints. But their peers see them as conflict averse and unwilling to make hard calls.

These are all examples of where we might have really good intentions, but if we’re not self-aware, we don’t know how we’re coming across. And I should mention that all of those are examples from coaching clients that I’ve had. but once you’re more self-aware, once you can start to see those things, you can start to make some intentional choices about how you react in different situations, which is a really powerful moment in your leadership journey.

That’s probably an episode of the Knowing Kenning Podcast in and of itself, but I want to give that little bit about why it’s important to become aware of your strengths and your areas of growth specifically.

Annie: Yeah. I know that this is one of the core competencies, and as I said before, capacities at Kenning. So there are many, many layers of self-awareness that we would love to talk about and maybe we’ll come back on and talk about those in a different podcast as you suggested, but I want to help you to focus on what I think is this cool topic. It’s a very deceivingly, simplistic breakdown of strengths versus weaknesses. So what have you noticed when you’re working with coachees as one of the first instincts for the leaders as they delve into their development?

Jen: Well, in this process of becoming more self-aware, people will often come to coaches because they want to get clearer on and improve their areas of growth. Most people’s default is where are my weaknesses? How do I overcome them? And that’s definitely an important part of a leader’s growth and process.

But as you are pointing to, what we’ve talked about before, this is that this other area that’s neglected often is where are strengths are in overdrive. So there’s this quote that I like, very simple, that any strength overused becomes a weakness.

And so things like somebody who’s really diligent in following through with people, that’s a strength. But when you’re in overdrive, they might be experienced as a micromanager or somebody that’s really highly efficient, focused on driving for outcomes, right. Leading to impact, that’s such a strength. But in overdrive, they might skip the part of getting other people on board, which then hampers their ability to achieve the outcomes they’re going for.

And again, these are more examples of actual clients I have had. We see these spaces where we default to asking about our weaknesses, but sometimes our strengths are in overdrive and there can be a leading edge on those that we want to be careful of.

Annie: Yeah, I mean, this really resonates with me. I actually had a coaching call earlier this week where somebody was discussing this very topic. So I recognize some of those examples. His was a little bit different than what you just described, but my guess is that there’s a lot of listeners who are resonating with this in the same kind of a way, recognizing this overdrive to the strength. But I’m wondering if you can get kind of personal with it, with an example, like be even more specific so that people can see it in action.

Jen: Yes. Besides just those one-line descriptions of some past clients. Yeah. One person comes to mind in particular, let’s call her Sarah. She had this strong belief in creating space for her direct reports to experiment and grow. So she was really committed to the idea that people learn better through making mistakes in a safe environment, and she wanted to create that environment for her team so they could learn.

When I first heard her philosophy around this in our first call, I thought, this is amazing. This person allows folks to make mistakes, encourages their learning, reinforces the growth mindset. This is fabulous, right? This is such an incredible strength because honestly, that’s a behavior I’m often working with coaching clients to work towards.

But what shocked me, when I then went and talked to her team, was that the way Sarah provided a space for growth and experimentation was actually really overwhelming for them. So there were no, no boundaries set whatsoever. And so the team often felt like they were sort of an island on their own.

And if you imagine that island in the middle of the ocean, they sometimes felt like there were sharks in the waters around them. And so there were times and contexts in which Sarah’s approach was actually hampering them, and that more direction and structure would actually better support them to take a few of those risks and learn some more.

So I was incredibly shocked by this at the moment. I remember being like, wait, what? This isn’t always a strength, because Sarah was exhibiting this classic strength, but she had gone so far with it that we were into the space of overuse to the extent that her team actually felt paralyzed.

Annie: Yeah, I mean, I can see that happening. You know, I can see why Sarah was doing what she must’ve felt was really good for her, a strength of hers, to be open. And, as you said that coaches might actually even encourage that. So I can see why she was doing that, and I can also see why she might’ve been initially blind to the strength, and why it needed to be right sized for her colleagues’ needs.

I can imagine lots of reasons, but Jen, you were the one who worked with Sarah more in depth. And so what do you think that Sarah, or others, why they might not be as aware of the overuse of their strengths?

Jen: I think it’s this very rational process for most people, which is that we tend to overuse our strengths because we get positive feedback around them. So if I’m good at something, I get positive feedback around it that might be explicit, like somebody saying, Hey, great job over there, or might be implicit, such as a new opportunity. So all of a sudden my boss is giving me new opportunities or expanded responsibilities or some sort of promotion, and folks rationally like to repeat things that bring good results. So they’ll keep repeating that behavior so that they keep the positive feedback loop happening. What happens often is that we get so comfortable with that behavior, we forget that we might actually hit that point of overuse. So we miss the signs that we’ve gone too far with it.

So I shared earlier, I’ll come back to Sarah in a minute, but I shared earlier an example of a manager who’s so diligent in following through with people that they are experienced as a micromanager. For that person, it started in really small ways early in their career as a manager. In their first job as a manager, they would follow up with their team on things and get the positive outcome that their team became known for delivering well and on time, which then got them promoted. So they kept doing that thing; that’s rational.

But fast forward a few years now they’re managing managers and sometimes it’s three levels. And for them to get into the weeds on individual tasks and like following through with individuals on tiny tasks is just seen as annoying micromanagement. So that’s kind of how it develops.

Annie: Yeah. I think it’s really helpful for people to go back in time to recognize when it started for them, and do the history of that because it is just like you said, people start out with the best intentions. They kind of hook onto something that’s really good for them. and that retrospective that you did with, your other clients or that you’re noticing is really helpful.

And I’m wondering, did Sarah ever get to the point where she recognized where it started for her?

Jen: Oh yes. That is a great question because Sarah and I spent some time kind of interrogating this a bit, so she had a journey, right? It didn’t just start out with her just saying, I’ll just let my team run wild and see what happens. So. Sarah and I kind of unpacked it, and we took some time with this earlier in her career, Sarah had a manager who leaned more into the micromanager space, which at first was really comfortable for Sarah when she got her like first role out of college. She wanted that specific direction and follow up because she had a lot to learn. But then over time with that manager, she started to notice that she wasn’t feeling like she could figure out the path on any project without her manager giving her specific direction.

So she got really stuck. She felt like she wasn’t growing, and she started to get really frustrated. And then as happens, teams got reorganized, she got shifted around and she had a new manager, and this manager had a really different approach. Instead, this manager didn’t give Sarah specific directions on any task, and instead just said, here’s the definition of success. This is what we’re aiming for. You have the latitude to figure out how you want to get there.

And in that moment, that contrast stood out for Sarah quite a bit, and she found that she was really developing a new muscle and her confidence was growing at the same time. She made some mistakes, right, as happens, and then her manager helped her reflect and learn from them, so she knew what to avoid, and so she really felt like she was on this growth path and it made a really huge impression for her. That was kind of the history of Sarah’s experience through this, of where did this muscle come from?

Annie: And I know you well enough to know that that kind of coaching of getting to the heart of it and the history of it is an important part of the work for somebody to recognize that it did serve them and they did feel good at one point. So I can see how it’s good for someone like Sarah to have had different models of leadership, from micromanagers to those who believe in people development, like her second colleague or her second boss.

And what I hear you saying is that Sarah almost imprinted on this second manager and hence adopted this more sort of open stance as the way to manage. And perhaps she got a lot of really good feedback about it right away, even though she was experimenting with it strategy became the way that she was when she was manager.

Jen: That’s exactly, I love this word imprinting because that’s kind of what happened. it really made an impact and she knew when she became a manager, she wanted to replicate that for her team to be the kind of leader that she had really appreciated for herself. and Sarah’s just one example of many folks who have done that, right? We replicated behavior for that good reason and good intent. And then in Sarah’s case, she started to overdo it. And many of us may find ourselves in that pattern where we’re comfortable with the strength and we just keep repeating it.

And so in my coaching work, I’ve just started to notice this more and more, people over leaning on strengths, especially as I’m doing like 360 interviews.

Annie: Can you share at a really high level what a 360 interview is for our listeners?

Jen: Okay, a 360 assessment is, an assessment where a coach will get feedback on a person from a range of people they work with, from senior colleagues like you might get through your normal performance evaluations, but all the way through to peers and junior colleagues as well.

And so we think of that as 360 because we get the full picture around you of how you’re showing up. It’s common to kick off a coaching engagement with one of these. And we frame them around strengths and areas of development, right? Areas of growth. So when we talk to folks, we’ll say, what are somebody’s strengths and where are their areas of growth?

Most people like to dive in with strengths because it’s comfortable. And they’ll often give me a lot of good stories about all the positive things going on. And then before getting to areas of growth, though, I take this little detour and after strengths I’ll ask them, are any of those strengths in overdrive?

And I’ll preface it with something like, you know, many of us will use our strengths more than we realize or intend, and sometimes we can go too far with them. Does that ever happen with this person? And what started to really stand out to me is the reactions I got. It was like I had found some release valve.

People would laugh and say, oh yeah, or something like that. Or they might some sort of like, whew, letting out the steam, some few feeling. And then they’ll get into a lot of details about where some of those strengths have delved into that edge of overuse.

And that’s where I learned, in Sarah’s case, about the empowering others. I don’t think it would’ve come up otherwise. But in that case there were two managers. There was Sarah and someone else, and the other one was a micromanager. And so folks, when I asked about strengths would really talk about how much they appreciated that Sarah gave them some latitude. And then I asked, and does it ever go into overdrive? And every single person went, oh, well, yeah, absolutely. So then we were able to dig in and find this different area that probably wouldn’t have come up otherwise.

Annie: Yeah. I had a similar experience, you know, where a client was reading their report earlier, this month, and they also don’t do that translation, so I don’t do it as well as you do. Like, your idea that you ask the respondents to say, can you say more about that strength and is there an overuse of it?

I love that because that can really be baked in very explicitly into the 360 report. But I have clients, so I write my report and I do strengths at the top of the report and then areas for development at the bottom of the report. And I find that clients oftentimes when they’re reading the report, just say something like, yeah, yeah, yeah. The strengths. The strengths. Like that’s all nice, people like me, I get it. And they don’t really want to pay any attention to the strengths. They just want to go directly to the bottom of the report where there are areas for development. So it takes some unwinding and sort of some, like some deepening of the conversation to go to the strengths and to say, how can you either lean into these or are you over leaning into them in the way that you’re talking about? So that really makes sense for me.

Jen: Yeah, I will say that realistically I have the same reaction. All of my clients have the same reaction, and even in my own space, when I get feed back. I’m like, yeah, yeah. Get through the good stuff. Tell me, tell me where I, what I need to work on. I feel like it’s a very human reaction. and when we can pause sometimes and say, first of all, can I own the strengths that I have?

Because there’s a lot in there that we don’t want to overcorrect around. And then beyond that though, can we help someone see something they hadn’t seen before about those strengths or just being aware of the edges of those strengths? I think that can be a really powerful moment for folks.

Annie: Okay. So how might a client who might use a 360, how might they become self-aware of overusing their strengths? If there are listeners out there who want to try this for themselves, and they may not know that they’re overusing their strengths, how might they become more aware of it so they have more choices on how they’re, showing up?

Jen: I would say a 360 is certainly one way, and it’s a great way that I would advocate for, right? Because your coach can ask directly about this on your behalf. But there are other ways to do that as well. And one option that’s great is self-reflection where you can take a little time to build a wider perspective, which involves owning what your strengths are, right? Where do you think you’re the strongest? And then sort of doing that interrogation of them. Is there any way that that might be getting in the way of your ultimate goal?

Annie: So in that sort of that self-exploration that you’re talking about, are there any specific questions that you use Jen in your coaching that they could ask themselves to become more self-aware? Especially if they don’t have a coach that they could hang on to and use in their becoming more self-aware.

Jen: Yeah, definitely. Okay, so let me break down. I’m going to make it a little more concrete, like I think of it in two steps. The first is name your strengths, so the questions you might ask yourself are, where do you feel you’re the strongest? What are the things that make you feel distinctive in your work?

You might have some insights into that from past performance reviews, feedback you’ve gotten from colleagues, things like that. But beyond that. you might just have a sense of your where you think you really bring strengths into your work, and it’s really important to own those. I will say this will be easy for some folks and really difficult for others.

And if it’s difficult for you, ask folks around you for input. Where do they see your strengths? What do they think makes you distinctive? So that’s the first thing, is just kind of a name and own your strengths.

And then the second is then to do that interrogation with them. And what we really want to get to there is understanding the question, is there a way this strength could be limiting me or our team, or our broader goals? I would say there’s two good ways to get into this. One is to reflect internally. Take a minute to say, where does this strength stop helping and start getting in my way or in the way of others? That might be hard to see if you’re really, like in Sarah’s case, really committed to this idea of empowering others.

It might be hard for you to see some of those spots, but questions like that are what might unintended impact, could this have, were there times in the past when this might have gotten in my way? What would I have done differently? What would this situation look like? I love this one: If I dialed the strength down by 20%, what would that look like? So those are kind of those internal reflection questions.

And then externally. The other side of it is you could look externally, look at other people with similar strengths. It might be easier to recognize overuse in them and kind of notice and see like, what is it that I think, where do they get into that space of overusing it? Or ask someone you trust, what are some of those strengths? Do I over index on them?

And Annie, I just want to say one important part of this. I’m not suggesting that anyone should avoid their strengths or not celebrate their strengths. I want people to really take ownership of them, but I want them to expand them in a way where they bring more intention, right? Use your strength with intention and just be aware that you are over leaning in on it.

Annie: Jen, most people know of you as a great cheerleader and support and advocate for people. So I don’t think that we’re going to be just completely glass half empty here and, only focus on weaknesses, even though this is called Beware Your Strengths, because I do agree that having this opportunity to celebrate your strengths is something that we we want to do too,

But, okay, so going back to it, I think that one of the things that we do as coaches and that you’re doing and you’re describing right now is becoming aware of it. So there’s like an awareness step, which is huge for people. The concept of it that you’re talking about, but then even personalizing it and just becoming aware of where you might overuse your strength. But then what do you do about it? That’s the second part of coaching the action, the experimenting. What do you do about it?

Jen: Yeah. Okay. First you have to become aware, but then you don’t just want to sit with that awareness. You want to do something about it. So the first thing is do what Sarah did and take some time to understand where the strength came from and how it’s impacting you now. What’s its origin story? What are some of the assumptions you make about it? Why does it matter to you? And how is it getting in your way? Can you recognize where it’s coming from? Just that it might have an overuse side.

Then you want to notice each time you lean on the strength, just don’t even make any changes. Just look and notice it. Sometimes that can be eye-opening. Wow, I really do this a lot. And then at some point when you’re noticing it happening, pause ever so briefly. It doesn’t have to be a long pause and ask yourself whether you want to use the strength right there. Your instinct initially will be yes every time, but if you can find one time to try a different approach, that is a huge window for growth.

And then you can start to notice what happens when you take a different path. What did you learn? Did you gain something? Did you lose something? What did you learn about the best use of that strength? And then the spaces where it’s like, oh, maybe that was too much. And you just start to iterate over time, a coach can help you through this. But also just taking the time to kind of think through those steps can be really helpful.

Annie: Yeah. So I know, that Sarah gave us permission to talk about this with each other when we were leading up to this conversation, when we thought that it was a really neat concept and she’s also giving us permission to talk about it much more widely and publicly. But when we talked about Sarah, you shared with me how the two of you used these steps in your coaching sessions. So can you talk through Sarah’s example one more time just to make it more specific?

Jen: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we followed what I just went through, but I’ll break it down in Sarah’s case.

So first, understanding the origin story, right? We talked through the origin of her strength around empowering others. So the managers, the two different managers and that helped me understand the backstory. And then based on the 360 feedback, we saw that there was a direct line from that strength to how it was hampering her team. And in the process of debriefing the 360, Sarah shared with me that she always knew where the guardrails were for her team. If the team was on an island, she knew where the sharks were, and she knew she would intervene if needed. But she hadn’t shared that with the team because she really wanted them to feel ownership. She was so committed to this idea of ownership, and so the team’s perspective was new to her. She had never imagined that they could feel stymied or afraid to take risks when it wasn’t explicit that there was a safety net for them. So that was a major unlock, first of all, just understanding the impact of it on the team.

And then we went into that next part around like notice when it happens. The homework that I gave Sarah was just start to notice every time you’re giving a team member a new project, what’s your instinct there? And so she did, she shared that almost every time her instinct was, go run with it. That’s what she wanted to tell her team. So she came back at one point, was like, I didn’t realize how often I did that.

And then we tried something new. And so the first thing was just to practice pausing. Sarah needed to pause, take a beat before she said, go run with it, and ask herself, should I tell this person that I know what the guardrails are and they’re nowhere near them. And initially she resisted this because her instinct told her that that wasn’t the way to do it. But with some pushes, she tried it out a few times to see what would happen, and something interesting happened that wasn’t exactly what we expected. Sarah noticed that when she told her team members that she had their backs, they relaxed a bit, but not entirely.

As we were iterating on experiments, she began noticing that over time, she found that the team needed to know two things. One, they needed to know that there were guardrails that Sarah was watching, that she was aware of those sharks in the water. And two, they knew what the guardrails were. They had to understand it wasn’t just, don’t worry, I’ve got your back. You’re fine. They needed to know, these are the guardrails you’re working within. And once they knew what those guardrails were, then they started becoming much more open to learning and making mistakes. So it was knowing Sarah was actively involved and then they were in this kind of container that felt safer for them.

After that, interestingly, their growth accelerated quite a bit, so that over time Sarah was able to say to them, I’m extending the guardrails this time because you’re ready for it. You’re ready for a little more empowerment on this and that ended up increasing not only the outcomes, but also their learning in the process. So this way of being aware of it actually allowed Sarah to lean more into that instinct, but in a really intentional way.

Annie: Yeah. It goes back to when we started talking and the idea of right sizing your strengths, you know, and adapting it in that kind of a way to the audience. I think that the other thing is oftentimes being aware of the context. So what you’re talking about it seems is the colleagues’ development and their own capacity to be able to take that on and her being aware of that. And I think that she could also be aware of different contexts needing that.

Jen: Exactly. And for me, one of the exciting things was here was coming back to that point of like, I didn’t want Sarah to not use this strength. And again, that’s never what I’m going to say, don’t use your strength. But instead that it allowed her to see how to use this strength for even more impact for her team and for others.

Annie: All right. Jen. I’m so glad that we got to talk about it a little bit more publicly. I love talking about coaching work with you and the nuances of it and how we can strengthen our own practice and how we can strengthen our clients’ effectiveness and their work and their, in this case, self-awareness. There’s so much more to explore, of course, and helping people with self-awareness.

But I really want to just echo or emphasize your point that you could lose a really important opportunity for growth if you just focus on what the person calls weakness, without turning over these nuances of strength. So, you know, going back to the title of this podcast, Beware your Strengths as you say. And, and thanks for sharing that. I love it.

Jen: Yeah. Thank you for having me.