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The Strengths Trap: How Overplaying Your Strengths Harms Trust (Part II)

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Part I of this blog described how over-emphasizing the trust-building factors in the Trust Equation without balancing your self-orientation can actually hurt your trustworthiness. It also identified many internal and external triggers that might increase self-orientation.

In this post, we explore specific actions you can take to avoid over-playing your strengths.

The Goldilocks Effect

Source: “Stop Overdoing Your Strengths,” Kaplan and Kaiser, HBR Magazine, February 2009

In a Harvard Business Review article, “Stop Overdoing Your Strengths” (HBR Magazine, February 2009), authors Robert E. Kaplan and Robert B. Kaiser explored the impact of the leadership trait forcefulness on leaders’ overall effectiveness.

The plotted results of their research shows that overplaying a strength can be just as dangerous as underplaying it.

When it comes to being trustworthy, optimizing the trust equation may seem akin to the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears: what’s too little, what’s too much, and what’s just right?

Self-orientation is an important counterweight to overplaying our trust-building strengths.

The key is balance: being able to demonstrate your strengths while keeping your self-orientation low so your overall trustworthiness increases.

Managing Self-Orientation

Lowering self-orientation to combat over-playing our strengths starts with self-awareness, noticing when internal or external pressures trigger us to focus on ourselves. Internal pressures include things like ego, fear, complacency, and personal agendas. External pressures include things like deadlines, sales and performance targets, distractions, and issues at work or home.

The antidote to overplaying our strengths is lowering self-orientation, first by recognizing when your self-orientation is high, then shifting your focus to something other than yourself.

While it sounds simple, this takes ego strength.

Once you are aware of what triggers your self-orientation to go up, you can adapt your behavior. Here are some tips to avoid over-playing each trust-building strengths:

Counter arrogance with humility.

Humility is often interpreted as timidity, but a more appropriate interpretation is recognizing how you fit into something larger than yourself. Two ways to practice humility are:

  • Open-mindedness – hear others out fully and without judgment before proposing a solution. Respect their knowledge and contributions and consider their inputs. People will see your open-mindedness as increasing your credibility.
  • Curiosity – explore their point of view with them before offering a different perspective. A great opening phrase might be, “Help me understand where you’re coming from.”

Counter control with tolerance.

Tolerance means accepting something you don’t agree with; it also means enduring something that feels unpleasant. When we are fully committed to one particular way of doing something, it’s hard to accept – or even see – viable alternatives. Two ways to practice tolerance are:

  • Check your perspective – when you find yourself struggling because things aren’t happening the way you think they should, pause and ask yourself if your approach is the only valid one. If the overall goal is being met, even if it isn’t how you expect or want it to be, then consider changing your perspective instead of trying to change to situation.
  • Grace – give others (and yourself) grace to make mistakes, to change the plan, and to be able to achieve the goal in their own way. Trusting others requires relinquishing some control. If you never give up control to someone else, what might they infer about how much you trust them?

Counter appeasement and intrusiveness with sharing.

When our natural tendency is to create connection with others, we may push too hard for them to share with us, or we may feel pressure to agree with them (regardless of our point of view). Two ways to practice sharing are:

  • Go first – To avoid appeasing: if you tend to keep quiet when you disagree with what someone says, consider sharing your point of view before others share theirs so you don’t have to worry about seeming disagreeable if your point of view differs. To avoid intrusiveness: before asking someone to share something personal, share something about yourself so they feel more comfortable sharing in return.
  • Create context – it’s easy to forget that others don’t necessarily know what we are thinking. Create context by framing your perspective or questions in a positive way, focusing on the mutual benefit to you and the other person. It will feel less threatening to you and to them.

To borrow from a famous C.S. Lewis quote on humility, low self-orientation is not thinking less of ourselves; it is thinking of ourselves less.

How will you lower your self-orientation to let your trust-building strengths shine through?

Trust-Based Resources to Maximize Your Team’s Potential:

The Strengths Trap: How Overplaying Your Strengths Harms Trust (Part I)

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Playing to our strengths can be seductive. We all want to feel we are presenting our best selves, and that naturally leads us to emphasize those things at which we excel. It’s often how we define our professional roles, our careers, even ourselves.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Some modern psychometric tools are built around the idea that individuals are more successful and fulfilled when they focus on developing their strengths rather than trying to fix weaknesses. Gallup’s CliftonStrengths©, for example, claims that, by identifying and leveraging their strengths, individuals can “enhance their performance, engagement, and overall satisfaction in various aspects of their lives.”

That may be good advice in general. But is it possible to rely too much on our strengths?

When we’re talking about building trust, the answer is a clear, “Yes.”

More Is Not Always Better

Over-emphasizing or relying too heavily on a single factor to build trust can become a liability. To understand why, we need to explore the relationship of each trust-building variable with self-orientation.

In the Trust Equation (source: The Trusted Advisor by Maister, Green, and Galford, The Free Press, 2000), the factors in the numerator (Credibility, Reliability and Intimacy) build trust, while the single factor in the denominator (Self-Orientation) inhibits or diminishes trust.

The Trust Equation: Trustworthiness equals the sum of credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, divided by self-orientation

In this equation, when numerator – the sum of the factors that build trust – increases and the denominator is constant or decreases, trustworthiness goes up.

It’s when we start to separate out the factors in the numerator that we can identify the risk. Although the Trust Equation is a heuristic and not a strict mathematical formula, we could rewrite the equation as the sum of each numerator over the single denominator:

The Trust Equation: Trustworthiness equals Credibility divided by self-orientation, plus Reliability divided by self-orientation, plus intimacy divided by self-orientation.

Simple common sense tells us that relying too heavily on a trust-building strength can backfire, with consequences for our own behavior and how others may perceive us:

  • Over-playing Credibility can lead to intellectual rigidity; others may perceive you as arrogant or closed-minded.
  • Over-playing Reliability can lead to overcontrolling; others may perceive you as domineering or overly-focused on details.
  • Over-playing Intimacy can lead to emotional exhaustion or appeasement; others may perceive you as intrusive or, at the other extreme, lacking ambition.

Why It Happens

It would seem that increasing each of the elements in the numerator would increase trust. But that only works if we lower or keep constant the denominator, self-orientation. The more we focus on our strength, the more our self-orientation increases, which diminishes the trust we are working to build.

Remember that when we have something that works well for us, it’s natural to fall back on that strength. When we’re under pressure, whether internal or external, it triggers an increase in self-orientation, which heightens the instinct to flex our strength.

The table below lists some likely internal triggers for each trust-building factor; the external factors are potential triggers regardless of the trust-building strength. The internal triggers typically fall into three categories: fear- or ego-based (concern about what they think about you), complacency (over-confidence in your strength), or achieving your agenda (getting what you want from the situation).

Common Triggers of High Self-Orientation

Self-Awareness: The Antidote to Self-Orientation

The presence of any of these triggers should be a warning sign that self-orientation might be on the rise. Once you recognize that a trigger is present, you can take action to lower your self-orientation to build trust, or at least to avoid diminishing it.

In Part II, we’ll explore what actions you can take to avoid over-playing your strengths.

Resources to Build Your Trust Skills: