MIXED BLESSING

In the workplace today, people constantly bend and flex in new directions as a response to changing technologies, merging businesses, stiff competition, and an uncertain economy. It is difficult to play to one's strengths in such an environment because a strength can be a mixed blessing. A strength in one situation (for instance, a no-nonsense approach to cost cutting in a mature market with eroding margins) isn't necessarily a strength in another (a start-up venture selling a new product in an emerging market). Leaders routinely flex the wrong strengths; not knowing their strengths, they are prone to rely on them at the wrong time and to the wrong degree, at the expense of complementary skills that also have their time and place. ...

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