When your greatest strengths become your biggest weakness

Opinion | Future of Talent and Leadership Week in Focus

The value of personality frameworks is in providing a language for understanding your natural preferences, your strengths and, more importantly, your blind spots, Lisa Morgan writes.

I am a Red. For anyone familiar with colour-based personality profiling, that probably tells you quite a lot about me already.

I like pace, I like progress, I am results-focused, decisive and comfortable taking responsibility. Give me a problem and my instinct is usually to solve it; give me an opportunity, and I would rather move than spend too long debating whether we should.

There are plenty of advantages to being a Red leader. At our best, we create momentum. We make decisions when others might hesitate. We bring clarity, energy and ambition. We are prepared to have difficult conversations, challenge the status quo and push for a better result.

Those characteristics have undoubtedly helped me throughout my career. But I have increasingly recognised that the characteristics that make you successful as a leader can also hold you and your team back.

The Colour Works describes Fiery Red energy as action-oriented, determined and focused. However, under pressure, these same qualities can show up as impatience, rigidity, heightened demands, and a reduced ability to listen. That distinction, between intent and impact, is a very important one.

A language for understanding

Over the years, I have used various personality and behavioural frameworks personally and with our team, including Myers-Briggs, colour profiling and DiSC. I do not think any of them should tell us who we are or become an excuse for our behaviour. “I am Red, that is just how I am” rather misses the point.

Their value is in providing a language for understanding your natural preferences, your strengths and, perhaps more importantly, your blind spots. The Myers-Briggs Company makes a similar point. Knowing your personality type is the starting point. The useful part comes from applying that awareness to communication, listening, decision-making, feedback and adapting to other people.

For me, that is where the real leadership development happens. Self-awareness allows me to recognise when my natural Red instinct is exactly what a situation needs.

Sometimes people need someone to provide direction, make the call, and create momentum. Other times, my job is to say less, listen, ask a question, and, rather than provide the answer, give someone more time to think. The objective is not to become less Red. It is to lean into a broader leadership repertoire and better understand those around you.

There is another, often overlooked benefit of personality profiling. Understanding yourself helps you understand why other people are not like you. Some leaders mistakenly assume that what motivates us should motivate everyone else. It does not.

Some people want autonomy. Others need reassurance. Some are energised by a stretch target. Others want to understand the purpose behind it. Leadership therefore becomes less about treating everyone equally and more about understanding what each person needs from you to perform at their best.

Be brief, be bright, be gone

For a Red leader who instinctively wants to drive the car, sometimes that means getting out of the driver’s seat. Your job changes as you become more senior.

Someone once said to me, ‘You are paid for what you do, then paid for what you know and then paid for what you think.’ As your responsibilities grow, success increasingly comes from what you can enable other people to deliver. That transition requires self-awareness.

I still value my Red traits, summarised by “be brief, be bright, be gone”. But leadership maturity is knowing when those strengths are useful and when you need something different.

Sometimes the organisation needs Yellow: “Involve me”; sometimes it needs Green: “Show me you care”; or sometimes it needs Blue: “Give me the detail”. 

The power of personality profiling is not discovering what colour you are. It is recognising that being a great leader requires knowing your natural colour, understanding its impact on others, and learning when to reach for the rest of the palette.

Lisa Morgan is managing director at Generation Media. Read her monthly column for The Media Leader on the first Thursday of each month.