Earlier today, I was reading a Gallup post  by Brian Brim that asks whether a person’s talents can in some cases alienate colleagues and hurt your organization.

Mr. Brim applies Gallup’s definition of a strength: the ability to consistently produce a nearly perfect positive outcome in a specific task, then goes on to argue that when one’s key strengths are applied in a way that produces less than nearly perfect positive outcome(s), it just means that person has not yet learned how to apply their strength correctly.

I am a big proponent of the strengths based approach to management, and it is true that those who practice this approach can learn how to hire, develop and deploy people in ways that help them maximize their innate talents. But as to whether strengths have a dark side, I have to challenge Mr. Brim’s conclusion.

What I have seen working with top leaders in many organizations is that on the flip side of most strengths lies what John Maxwell calls a Blind Spot.

The Johari Window is a useful tool to frame what we and others know about ourselves. By definition, a blind spot is something that is seen by others, but not by us. This is often true of the dark side of a strength, others see it, but we can’t! This presents both bad and good news. The bad news is that if we have a blind spot, we probably can’t “fix” it on our own. The good news is that we can often infer what some of our key blind spots might be by looking at the back side of our strengths. Once we’ve done that, we can use Feedforward (see Marshall Goldsmith) to get constructive input from others as to how we might mitigate the negative manifestations of our Blind Spots.

Remember the recent movie “The Blind Side?” In the same way that every quarterback needs someone like Michael Oher to protect his blind side, each of us needs someone to help us with our Blind Spots. If you and your team can learn to leverage strengths and mitigate individual and collective blind spots, you’ll be on the road to that next level of excellence.

By Andrew Ranson