"How to Overcome Your Strengths", FAST Company, May 1999

FAST Company May 1999

"How to Overcome Your Strengths"

Michael Kaplan writes about "How to overcome your strengths". Kaplin through three interviews with management executives believes it is not your weaknesses that can trip you up on our way to the top, it's your strengths.

Kaplan categorizes people like this the perfectionist team leader who won't delegate, the detailed-obsessed finance wig who can't see the big picture, the super geek who alienates everyone. Lois P. Frankel, a business coach and senior partner at Corporate Coaching International, based in Los Angeles says, "people rely too heavily on the skills that contributed to their early success. As a result, they fail to develop new skills when problems arise and they revert to the same old tactics and then wonder why those don't work.

In Extension, we have personnel who are simply brilliant in their own disciplines and areas of expertise especially at the campus and research centers. Many times, they fail in technology transfer because they fail to build the networks, relationships and teams needed for effective program and information delivery.

Charles Martin is a Fox Family executive who found that being nice was a liability. Whenever someone disagreed with him, he backed down. He spent too much time helping others and not himself. With help from a survey by Frankel, Martin was considered too passive and wasn't a take charge leader type.

--James B. Nesseth (jnesseth@extension.umn.edu), October 14, 1999

-- Anonymous, October 15, 1999