How To Fix It When Your Greatest Strength Becomes Your Biggest Leadership Liability

Photo by Entrepreneurs' Organization 

Years ago, I played in a band with a talented guitarist who cranked his amp so loud it was all anybody could hear. Every practice, every show. It drove me nuts. The rest of the band could be playing great, but none of it came through because his guitar drowned out everything else. What should have been his greatest contribution to the band became the thing that made us sound terrible.

I think about that guitarist often. After building and scaling several companies, including a successful exit, I notice this same pattern in leadership all the time. We know our weaknesses, and we plan for them. We get people around us who are stronger where we fall short, and we delegate. That is wise. But while we are focused on compensating for our gaps, we miss something that costs us far more: Our greatest strengths, turned up too high, get us in more trouble than our weaknesses ever will.

Research suggests that 90 percent of leaders believe they are self-aware, yet only 10 to 15 percent actually are. Most of that gap comes from strengths that have gone unchecked.

The Driver Who Drove Everyone Away

I know this pattern because I’ve lived it. I have a high drive for shaping outcomes, being in charge, and pushing things forward. When I’m in the right zone, I’m a good leader. I move things forward and push the envelope in healthy ways.

But when I turn the volume up on my drive too high, it turns into something else. Arrogance. Ego. Intimidation. Steamrolling. My team stops feeling like I value their contributions. The very quality that made me effective becomes the thing that makes people not want to work with me.

I saw this clearly when I led a nationwide company through a major growth phase. The business stagnated for over a decade before I came on, and we grew it significantly over seven years. But there was a period in the middle where momentum stalled. I had pushed so hard, so fast, that I alienated my own executive team. They started seeing me as a wild card jumping out of planes without a parachute, rather than a leader driving necessary change with calculated risk. My strength, overplayed, had become my biggest liability.

Overcorrecting

When I finally recognized what was happening, I backed off the gas and tried to become a different kind of leader. Six months later, my executive team sat me down at a quarterly retreat. I expected more feedback about softening my edges.

Instead, they told me I had swung the pendulum so far in the opposite direction that I was no longer serving anyone. They wanted me to lead again, just with more awareness.

The answer was learning when and how to turn the volume down.

It Shows Up Everywhere

Take the perfectionist. Their drive for high standards means they deliver excellent work. But when that drive gets too loud, nothing is ever finished because nothing is ever good enough, and the relentless self-criticism starts bleeding into shame.

Or consider the highly sociable person who loves people, needs affirmation, and is good at giving it. That’s a strength, but put them in situations where they should be saying no and they struggle. They do not have good boundaries, so they become people-pleasers who cannot make the hard calls that leadership requires.

Through my work at Aptive Index, where we measure the innate needs and drives behind behavior, I see this constantly. Leaders think their problems stem from weaknesses they need to fix. More often, the real issue is a strength turned up too high.

Data, Impact, Drive

Recognizing this pattern requires a deeper kind of self-awareness than most of us practice. Most people think self-awareness means being able to name behaviors. “I’m a perfectionist.” “I’m a driver.” But that is just data. Putting it in a spreadsheet will not help you change anything.

Real self-awareness requires understanding the impact of your behaviors on the people around you. Once you see the impact clearly, you have motivation to change.

But real lasting change means understanding what is driving the behavior in the first place. If you skip this and just try to squash the behavior, you could end up in a shame spiral, seeing yourself as a bad leader or a “difficult person.” Those are identity statements, and are not helpful.

When I understood that my steamrolling came from a deep need to shape outcomes and move things forward, I did not have to abandon that need. I could find different ways to fulfill it. Instead of walking into meetings with all the answers, I learned to cast a vision and then ask, “How do we get there?” I started getting buy-in, hearing challenges to my assumptions, and letting the best idea win.

The Challenge Network

Even with this awareness, self-regulation only goes so far. The people I surround myself with now serve as what I call my ‘challenge network.’ Their role is to push back on me, sharpen my thinking, and make sure we are not just executing Jason’s plan at every turn.

Conflict still happens. It just becomes healthier. Sometimes I do not like what I am hearing but I know it is right, so I pivot. Other times I push back. We have accepted that the person doing the challenging does not always get their way. Iron sharpens iron.

Find the Right Volume

The real insight is that strengths were never the point. We gravitate toward certain behaviors because they fulfill deep needs, drives, motivators — and likely they are things we are naturally good at. What matters is learning to fulfill those same drives in ways that actually serve the people around us.

That guitarist I played with had all the talent in the world but he never realized when his volume was drowning out everyone else. It did not make for good music. Leadership works the same way. We have to play in a way that makes the whole band sound better.

Contributed to EO by Jason P. Carroll, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Aptive Index, where Joe Wargo (EO Idaho) serves as a strategic advisor. Aptive Index is an AI-powered behavioral assessment platform that helps companies hire, build teams, and develop self-aware leaders.