There’s a powerful tendency to associate improvement with improving our weaknesses.

From our earliest days we have been conditioned to focus attention upon our weaknesses. Whether it is our studies, sports, or our careers, we ‘know’ that success is closely linked to concentrating on overcoming our weaknesses.

Yet over the course of working with chief executives and senior leaders in a wide variety of fields I’ve come across a quite unexpected discovery.

The Ceannas Leadership Index allows leaders to gain an accurate and detailed picture of their full range of leadership assets.

Rather than concentrating on identifying weaknesses our conversations with leaders focus on how they apply their strengths.

The outcome of these conversations is the identification of a marginal leadership gain, which forms a personal leadership strategy.

The surprising outcome, when reflecting on over 1000 Ceannas marginal gain strategies, is that some of the most successful and powerful have been where the individual has concentrated on ‘turning down the volume’ on their greatest asset.

What I mean by this is that such is the dominance of their strength, that it drowns out other lesser assets, which might, if allowed to be heard, have a remarkable impact on the leader’s effectiveness.

By ‘turning down the volume’ I don’t mean that the leader ignores or never applies their strength, but simply that they become self aware that it might not be their immediate ‘go to’ behaviour.

Our commitment to confidentiality prevents me from describing actual examples, but without exception the outcome of such strategies have provided the leader who applies such a focus with exceptional results.

However, I urge some caution before applying this at a personal level, for identification of the specific leadership behaviour to ‘turn down’ lies at the heart of this approach. Turning down the wrong one can have a disastrous outcome.

Nevertheless, this approach has much to commend it, albeit it runs in direct opposition to our deeply held belief that improvement only comes about through focusing upon our weaknesses.