CHAPTER 5
Leveraging Your Gifts and Addressing Your Gaps

When I was in college, my friend Tony and I spent our spring break on a backpacking trip in the Escalante River wilderness in southern Utah. It was a five-day adventure through one of the country’s most beautiful—and desolate—regions, characterized by striking red rock desert landscapes with scarce water and unrelenting sun inhabited by only the most resilient of plants and animals.

To survive our journey, we had to carry all the essentials—food, water, shelter—on our backs. We spent months preparing, making countless trips to the local outdoor gear store to make sure we had what we needed: tents, sleeping pads, cooking stove, pots and pans, water purifiers. We packed everything.

Everything, that is, but a map.

We had a guidebook with some written descriptions of the route, accompanied by some simple sketches of trail branches and landmarks; and in our youthful arrogance, we thought that was sufficient. The trip route followed a single, winding river at the bottom of a deep canyon most of the way. Why would we need a map for that?

The problem, as we discovered on day five of what, up until that point, had been an extraordinary trip, was determining just where we were supposed to climb our way out of the canyon in order to take the proper trail back to our car. The Escalante River is a winding maze of sharp, 180-degree curves, nearly every one of which looks the same. So when it was time to figure out just exactly where in this unending string of curves we were supposed to exit, our vague guidebook descriptions were insufficient and left a lot to guesswork.

We, of course, guessed wrong, and exited the canyon twenty miles away from our car. And since we didn’t have a map, we didn’t know we’d made the wrong decision. All we knew is that we were looking for a road, which we couldn’t find. It was 95 degrees, there were no trees to offer shade, and we were draining our water supply quickly. We had filtration pumps, but we needed a source of water. There were plenty of creek beds to be found, but they were all dry as a bone!

As the afternoon progressed, things went from bad to worse. Our water ran out, Tony began to hallucinate from heat exhaustion, and we were no closer to finding the road. I started to panic.

And out in the wilderness, panic can be life-threatening. Just as things were about to get really grim, I caught a glimpse of light out of the corner of my eye. It was the reflection of sun on water—a puddle in an otherwise dry creek bed. Tony and I sprinted down the bank, threw off our backpacks, and feverishly pumped water through our filters. To this day, it remains in my memory as the sweetest drink of water I’ve ever had.

The rest of the story is, as they say, history. With our hydration-inspired clarity, we were able to climb to a nearby high point and spot a road far off in the distance. From there, we were able to flag down a lone vehicle and hitch a ride back to our car. We survived—barely—in spite of our navigational arrogance, and learned a valuable lesson about the importance of having an accurate map of the territory before beginning any journey.

You may be wondering why I’m telling you this story. Well, the truth is, many of us make the same mistake as Tony and I did, only instead of being unprepared out in the wilderness, we are without a map of the uncharted territory that is our own inner self, the very one that we’re embarking upon changing when we decide to engage in the process of leadership development. The map needed for leadership development is not one that someone can just hand over to you. It’s not like buying a street atlas at the gas station: Your map will be unique to you. Why? We all have different strengths that we can leverage to become more effective leaders, and we all have particular weaknesses that we need to become aware of and improve upon in order to unleash our potential. So, how are you going to evolve your capacities as a leader? You need a plan. You need a map; you need to know where you are, and where you’re trying to go. And in order to develop that plan, it’s absolutely crucial that you get clear about your own strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders in a coaching capacity, and you’d be surprised at just how inaccurate are most people’s sense of their strengths and weaknesses. There are a lot of reasons for this. Some have never really taken the time to look at what they are good at and what needs improving. They’re busy people and don’t necessarily see the ROI on this kind of self-assessment. Even if they’ve thought about it themselves, many have never sought genuine feedback from friends, peers, or family, so their sense of themselves isn’t objective. And sometimes, when they have sought feedback from others, those giving it were too shy to be honest, and so they didn’t receive an accurate picture.

That’s what this dimension of Intelligent Leadership is all about. “Leveraging Your Gifts and Addressing Your Gaps” focuses on helping you get the most accurate possible picture of yourself, and then learning to use that information effectively to improve upon yourself as a leader—and as a human being.

Mindset Applied

In Chapter 4, I talked about how the first three dimensions of IL all work together to form a foundational mindset of great leadership. Thinking differently, cultivating vulnerability, and embracing a duty mindset work together to help us achieve the perspective we need in order to develop as leaders. As we move into the fourth dimension, we begin to make the shift into applying the perspective we’ve been cultivating to the concrete, nuts-and-bolts mechanics of great leadership.

This starts with leveraging your gifts and addressing your gaps, which is, in many ways, the crux of human development. It’s where we identify the ways we need to improve, embrace the areas in which we already shine, and then put those all together to unlock our leadership potential.

Developing an accurate “map” of yourself, as we discussed above, is the first step in this process. But it is equally important that we use this information correctly. For example, as we’ll explore later, many of the leaders I work with tend to undervalue their strengths—to take them for granted in such a way that they limit their own potential. The same goes for our “gaps.” Many people tend to overreact to any negative feedback they receive because they don’t see their flaws in the proper context. So as we move forward in the chapter, we’ll create our maps by evaluating our gifts and gaps, and we’ll also focus on how we respond to the information we’re receiving from others and discuss how to best apply it to our lives and work.

Before we go any further, let’s do a preliminary exercise. I want you to create two simple lists. The first should include your five biggest strengths or gifts as a human being and a leader. What are the qualities that you think others admire in you? What are the areas where you feel the most confident, and that you feel make the biggest contribution to those around you? Your second list should include the five areas where you think you could improve—qualities that, if developed, would make the biggest impact on your life. We’ll return to these lists later in the chapter to get a sense of just how accurate your assessment was, and how you can best leverage your gifts and address your gaps moving forward.

The Negativity Bias

In the work that I do with leaders, we spend a good chunk of our time together assessing strengths and weaknesses (see the MLEI and Figure 1.2 on page 13). And I’ve noticed an interesting trend. People tend to be far more interested in their weaknesses and what they can improve upon than they are in what they already do well. Most people, it turns out, have a kind of unconscious preference for hearing what’s bad about them over what’s good about them. This is the case even among extremely confident people with a high self-concept. A common response I get when sharing any feedback is “Okay, great. I get that I’m good at __________. But tell me more about the things I’m not good at.” It’s as if the positive feedback bounces right off and they can’t wait to hear the bad news.

Is this case for you? When you completed the exercise above, was it easier for you to find and relate to your weaknesses than to your strengths? Was your list of gifts shorter than your list of gaps? And do you find yourself far more interested in exploring the latter?

This bias toward the negative can be puzzling at first, but is quite natural. In fact, some researchers suggest that our preference for critical feedback might actually be a kind of evolutionary adaptation in the human species. In his book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Dr. Peter Diamandis (chairman and founder of the XPrize) cites a wide range of evolutionary psychology research that explores what is known as the “negativity bias.” The theory goes that the human brain evolved in an environment where those individuals who could seek out danger and anticipate harmful situations were better suited for survival. Imagine living on the African savannah where predators lurked around every corner and you had to literally fight for every meal. If you could anticipate the hyena attack, you’d be more likely to survive! That was the environment in which our brains developed, and even thousands of years later, we still have a bias toward seeing the potential harm around us. Except now it’s not lions or drought we’re afraid of; it’s subtler fears like being fired, paying the bills, or not living up to our potential.

The Abundance Mindset

Dr. Peter Diamandis’s book Abundance provides some very interesting insights into the negativity bias, but the main focus of the book—and what makes it so relevant to Intelligent Leadership—is what is possible when you overcome the bias and adopt a more fundamentally optimistic view of yourself and the world.

The world we live in today, while not completely devoid of danger, is far “safer” than the world in which our ancient ancestors evolved. Think about it. Many of us spend most of our lives in protected environments where our physical survival is not at risk—living in air-conditioned homes, transporting ourselves with vehicles, having access to advanced medicine, and eating any kind of food we have a hankering for, easily available just down the street at the supermarket. Even many marginalized populations have access to government support and amenities that the nomadic tribes of prehistory could never have dreamed.

While our world isn’t perfect (and there are very real problems and dangers that we need to pay attention to), it is also overwhelmingly abundant compared to the past. And yet we don’t act like it. We don’t take advantage of the extraordinary gifts and opportunities that are all around us—and inside of us—because we are still so focused on problems. We’re wired to think that way.

But imagine if you could deeply internalize just how much abundance and opportunity is all around you? When you can identify just how irrational are many of the subtle fears and self-imposed limitations that you walk around with, you start to get in touch with what I like to call an “abundance mindset.” This perspective opens you up to a realm of possibilities and creative solutions that you just can’t see when you’re only focused on problems and what might go wrong.

In my experience, negativity bias is even stronger when we engage in any kind of personal or professional development work. It makes sense, right? When you’re looking to improve, you want to find the things that you need to improve upon. There’s a natural tendency to want to find out what’s holding you back. Many people think of their strengths as things they’ve already mastered, and so don’t need to spend a lot of time working on them. They mistakenly think that if they can simply address their weaknesses—their bottom line—then everything else will improve as a result.

While there is some truth to this, and while it is absolutely crucial to zero in on your gaps and address them, you also need to give as much or more attention to the areas in which you are already strong. In my sessions with executives, I ask them, “Have your gifts and strengths served you well so far in your life?” Their answer, of course, is always “yes.” And my follow-up question is: “Then why can’t we focus on making them stronger than they are today?” These gifts, in my experience, can not only help you to better address your gaps, but can carry you to heights that you could never achieve by just improving your weaknesses. As the old sports aphorism goes, sometimes the best defense is a good offense. The key to unlocking our development may lie in unearthing and accentuating what we already have within us, more than adding new capacities and skills.

For example, one of my clients—a COO at a Fortune 500 company—was having a difficult time motivating her team to deal with an organizational transition that she was tasked with spearheading. We’ll call her Rose Marie. She was a shy person by nature, and had been given feedback for years about how motivating people wasn’t her strength. Rose Marie was great with numbers and logistics, but had trouble bringing others on board with her ideas and galvanizing them into action.

In her mind, Rose Marie thought the key to being a good motivator was delivering inspiring speeches during meetings, but she was terrified of public speaking, even in small groups. So she worked on her verbal communication skills, rehearsing what she would say to her team in front of a mirror before morning meetings, and even signing up for a Toastmasters class. Although she did experience a nominal improvement, all that work didn’t really get her the result she was hoping for.

When Rose Marie started working with me, the first thing I did was to dispel the notion that somehow she needed to become something she was not: a great speaker. At this point in her life, she just wasn’t ever going to be a Tony Robbins type. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t become a great motivator. I asked her to think about what had made her successful thus far in her career, her greatest strengths. The first thing that came to mind was that Rose Marie had a natural gift for taking complex problems and distilling them into easy-to-understand models, and creating step-by-step plans for addressing them. This is what had led her to become such a successful COO.

We explored how she could leverage this gift to better motivate her team. It turns out that people actually respond quite positively to her ability to simplify complex situations. So she really leaned into it. She spent the entire weekend developing a beautiful map of the organizational transition plan. Another of her strngths was her ability to identify with the particular circumstances of each individual, so she made sure to include the key roles and responsibilities of each team member.

When it came time to meet on Monday morning, Rose Marie unveiled her plan to the team and walked them through it step by step. Everyone was blown away. The clarity she brought to the situation—and the care that she gave to helping each team member to understand their particular role—turned out to be a great motivator for everyone involved. And she didn’t even have to give a dreaded motivational speech.

In the example above, we identified one of Rose Marie’s “signature strengths,” as my colleague and fellow executive coach Avra Lyraki calls them. These are the innate abilities that each of us possess that have made us who we are today. They are usually responsible for the majority of the successes we’ve experienced in our lives, and yet they are so “us” that we often don’t even acknowledge their existence or value. But buried within each of these signature strengths—underneath our deeply ingrained bias toward what’s wrong with us—is an untapped potential.

The key is to identify these signature strengths, and then—like my client—lean into them and see how far they can take us. The best leaders, the truly great ones, are able to do this, and you can too. If you can overcome your negativity bias for just a moment and allow yourself to be even more of who you are, to add more weight to the extraordinary parts of yourself, I promise you’ll be surprised—and pleased—by the results.

Now that we’ve explored the importance of leveraging your strengths, I’d like you to return to the list you made earlier. Are there innate strengths you’d like to add that you may have overlooked? Can you envision ways to better leverage your strengths in the future?

Mind the Gap

Now that you’ve thoroughly explored your strengths, you should be in the right mindset to take a look at your weaknesses. Your gaps, as I like to call them, are simply the areas where you could really use some improvement. They could be skills that are underdeveloped, like strategic thinking, communication, or attention to detail. Or they might be character flaws, like having a hot temper or being too self-obsessed. Your gaps may be obvious to you—the kind of things you’ve gotten feedback about for years. Or they might be more subtle—issues that you need some help to unearth.

The key to identifying your gaps is seeking out the “limiting factors to growth.” We’re not looking to identify issues just for the sake of understanding yourself better (though that is a noble pursuit). We are shooting for results. We’re all busy people, and we don’t have time to improve on every single element of ourselves. I have a weakness for ice cream, but working on that is not likely to help me to be a better human being or be better at my job. So we want to find the areas that would have a significantly positive effect on everything else in our lives if we were to improve in them. These are the issues that, when combined with leveraging your gifts, will have the biggest impact on unleashing your potential.

My colleague Paul Cortissoz, founder of HR Soul Consulting, shared with me an example from his work of how zeroing in on a key weakness unleashed significant growth in one of his executive clients, Jason, the CMO of a big company. Like Rose Marie in the example above, Jason was having trouble motivating his team. Unlike Rose Marie, Jason was a brilliant visionary and had a penchant for getting his team fired up in meetings. But for some reason, the energy that he was able to inspire in meetings wasn’t translating into real results. His team was chronically underperforming, in spite of having a lot of talent, and he was beginning to get frustrated.

As is common with many visionary types, Jason was having a hard time seeing his own responsibility in his team’s performance issues. He was a very competent individual, and he felt like he was doing everything he could to fire people up. They were just falling short. Paul persisted, and was able to get Jason into a vulnerable enough state that he could start to consider the possibility that there might be something about his leadership style that was contributing to his team’s lack of follow-through.

It turns out that Jason was a classic “big picture guy” and that he had a real aversion to getting into the details. By being vulnerable, Jason was able to solicit honest feedback from his team members, and they painted a picture of an environment where they felt inspired, but also somewhat abandoned by him. Jason would get things moving and then leave the details to everyone else. He didn’t make the effort to at least familiarize himself with the more logistical side of their work and listen to the issues his team was facing. This meant that Jason’s “big picture” thinking wasn’t informed by the very concrete implications of putting that vision into practice. It also meant that his team didn’t feel any sense of empathy from him, and that hampered their desire to perform for him, no matter how inspiring his talks could be.

So, with Paul’s help, Jason began taking a much bigger interest in the day-to-day operations of his team. He established daily check-ins with all the key stakeholders, making the effort to appreciate the specifics they were dealing with in each of their roles. He didn’t abandon his big picture thinking—that was one of his greatest gifts—but added a much-needed element of embracing the practical implications of those ideas.

Jason’s newfound attention to detail didn’t become a signature strength, but it was no longer something that was holding him back. Even more, it actually accentuated his other strengths. Embracing the practical implications of his “big picture thinking” made it stronger, more rooted in reality. As a result, Jason’s inspirational talks stopped falling on the deaf ears of his team members. They trusted him more, because they could see that he was making the effort to take their particular circumstances into consideration.

Going on to Perfection

Facing your own flaws can be one of the most difficult aspects of the leadership development process. It’s hard to admit your imperfections, and it’s even harder to start to address them. One of the biggest reasons for this has to do with the mindset that we bring to the self-assessment process. And I believe that if we want to be able to respond to our “gaps” in the most constructive way possible, we need to cultivate a more fluid perspective on ourselves and our imperfections.

Most of us tend to view ourselves as static entities, with our flaws as symptoms of how we are falling short of some idea of perfection that we’ve had our whole lives. But the truth is, we are much more dynamic than we tend to think, and our flaws are a natural part of our growth as human beings. There’s a phrase from John Wesley, an eighteenth-century British theologian, that I’ve always found compelling. He describes the human journey as one of “going on to perfection.” In other words, no one is perfect, but we can always be striving for perfection.

I believe that all of us—no matter how flawed or extraordinary—are works in progress. There is always room to improve, and therefore there are always “gaps” to address. From this perspective, a weakness isn’t so much a “flaw” or a mistake. It’s an opportunity for growth. It’s the next challenge we can take on to move ourselves closer to perfection.

Believe it or not, viewing ourselves as a work in progress is connected back to the duty mindset that we explored in Chapter 4. Remember, the “duty mindset” we are striving for is essentially remaining in touch with the truth of how deeply interconnected we are to the matrix of relationships that make up our lives. When we make the effort to improve upon an element of ourselves, like Jason did in the example above, it has ripple effects on those around us. We start to see ourselves not so much as static individuals who are “falling short” of perfection, but as facilitators of growth. Our gaps, then, are not just our own. They are gaps in the entire complex system that we belong within, and are opportunities for us to improve the lives of everyone around us.

Now that we’ve explored the concept of “gaps” more deeply, let’s take a moment to reflect. What would you say are highest-leverage areas of improvement for you? What are the weaknesses that you feel are holding back most of your energy and inhibiting improvement? This is a good time to reach out to your trusted peer network. Are they bringing new issues to the table that maybe you weren’t aware of?

Remember, as you begin the process of addressing your gaps, I suggest that you strive to be an “on to perfectionist.” Avoid perfectionism! Cultivate a mindset of constantly striving for improvement, while not being disappointed, shocked, or intimidated by the fact that you are full of flaws. That’s the only healthy way to address your gaps, and the only way you’ll be able to truly improve upon them.

Striking the Right Balance

Remember the analogy of the map from the beginning of this chapter? As you create the map of your inner territory—your strengths and your weaknesses—it is imperative that you strike the right balance. I want to reiterate just how important it is that as you begin to assess your gaps, be very light with yourself. Don’t get too bogged down on any one thing, and try to keep your emotions out of it. Approach your gaps as a scientist would: objectively and analytically. Think of your personality as something to be studied and improved upon. In short, don’t take it personally. However, on the flip side, avoid getting carried away with exploring your strengths. It is very easy to overlook some of the “downsides” that come with both our strengths and our weaknesses.

For example, say you’re discovering that you have a talent for strategic thinking that you haven’t been leveraging. You can often see the “forest” when others are focused on the trees, and start to be more assertive in the big-picture thinking that comes naturally to you. That’s great! But in the process, you don’t want to get a big head about it. You don’t want to now overlook the importance of a more detail-oriented perspective and become overconfident in your own view. You also don’t want to mistake any of the progress or success that you experience from leveraging your strengths to make you think that you have somehow “arrived” or achieved some kind of perfection. Even LeBron James, arguably the best basketball player on earth, works on new skills every year. There is always further to go.

No matter how great you are, there’s always room to improve. And even if you are a deeply flawed individual, there are untapped potentials that you may not be seeing.

Zeroing in, Moving Forward

When you truly master the art of leveraging your gifts and addressing your gaps, you will develop a natural preference for having the clearest picture possible of yourself at all times. You’ll always want to be gathering as much feedback as you can so you can be sure you know what you need to improve on—because you’ll continually want to be changing and developing. Having that goal will enable you to handle all feedback with maturity and to take action to address what you find without overreacting.

Keep in mind that even the most mature leader will sometimes have difficulty naturally embodying this dimension. From time to time, she will need to manually get herself into the right mindset to seek and respond to feedback. All of us need work in this dimension, and there are very concrete things that we can do to start the process of self-assessment. Below are a series of exercises and behaviors that you can use to put this dimension into practice.

A 360-Degree View

The first step in the process of mastering this dimension of Intelligent Leadership is to get what I call a “360-degree view” of yourself. This step involves assessing both your strengths and your weaknesses. It also includes seeing both gross and subtle aspects of your behavior or character—a combination of obvious characteristics, like your communication habits, and harder-to-see elements, like how you perceive yourself as a leader. When I help clients to develop their own 360-view, we use a combination of self-assessments (with tools like the MLEI; visit johnmattone.com/booktools for free access) and outreach to their peer network. This way we get a full-spectrum view of each person, using subjective and objective feedback. You can use these tools, too, to help you develop your own 360-degree view of yourself.

I use a medical analogy to reinforce to leaders how vital it is to be extraordinarily accurate about what our strengths and gaps are. In medicine, there is a common adage that “prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.” Any doctor who prescribes medicine without having utilized multiple diagnostics to determine an accurate and clear diagnosis will prescribe the wrong medicine, the wrong dosage, and the wrong care plan. Think of the ramifications in such a scenario. There is no room in medicine for any doctor not to have completed a thorough diagnostic. The same is true in the world of leadership and personal development. In order to create an effective plan for improvement, we need to have an accurate diagnosis!

This takes a lot of vulnerability, especially at first. You have to be willing to be brutally honest with yourself. And you have to humble yourself enough to ask the key stakeholders in your life to share their unvarnished perspective. But what almost everyone finds when they engage in this process is a profound increase in trust, confidence, and clarity. I suggest that you take some time at this point in the process to do your own 360-degree assessment. Make a list of both your strengths and your weaknesses, then reach out to your peer network to get their feedback.

Ask for Go-Forward Suggestions (GFS)

As you review your 360 results and any other feedback you have received in the past, it’s important to recognize that whatever happened in the past—happened in the past. It cannot be changed, and there’s no value in dwelling on old mistakes. One way to help keep your mindset more future-oriented is to reframe the way you go about seeking feedback. Instead of asking others to simply tell you about things they think you do or don’t do well, consider asking them for what I call “go-forward suggestions” (GFS). For example: “Mary Lou, what are some go-forward suggestions you have for me to consider in order to improve how I communicate?” The GFS approach is powerful because it will implicitly address your past mistakes and flaws, but do so in a way that doesn’t make you defensive or regretful. A GFS focuses on solutions and potential, which is what Intelligent Leadership is all about. We don’t want to know ourselves simply for the sake of having more self-knowledge. We want to improve and become better leaders and better human beings. Seeking GFS keeps you and those you seek feedback from aligned with this results-oriented mentality.

Make a Plan, Keep It Simple

Once you’ve gotten a clear sense of your gifts and gaps, it’s time to make a plan for how to address them. For your gifts, you want to focus on how each one could be given greater focus in your life. For your gaps, you should look for ways to improve upon weaknesses and curtail the negative consequences of behaviors that aren’t serving you. Remember, it’s not possible to become a new person. Your gaps will always be there. But you can become aware of them and develop strategies for making sure that they don’t wreak havoc on yourself or those around you.

As you develop your action plan, make sure to keep it simple. You want one or two strategies for each quality you’re tackling. Keep those strategies concise. For example: I will improve my ability to lead constructive team meetings by a) spending at least an hour preparing for each meeting, and b) getting more input from stakeholders beforehand. Make sure that you include target dates for each, and share your plan with someone you trust who can hold you accountable.

Finally, don’t bite off more than you can chew. You should never be working on more than two strengths and two development needs or gaps at a time. Start small and then build on your successes by adding new elements to your plan. It’s better to succeed initially with a lighter plan than to fail with a more ambitious one.

Become an Expert in Yourself

The end goal of this process is for you to become the world’s foremost expert on yourself. You want to know, more than anyone else, the ins and outs of your strengths and weaknesses. If others know you better than you know yourself, you’re bound to cause problems. You’ll be like a bull in a china shop, and you probably won’t even know it. But if you muster the courage and vulnerability to study yourself, using the feedback of others, you’ll know your own shadow and you’ll perceive your impact on the world, both positive and negative. This self-knowledge is priceless.