Sunday, August 31, 2008

The Fallacy of Strengths-Based Leadership

This blog can also be a space to voice critical opinions about strengths-based management and leadership or to send links to such opinions. I found this blog post of Dan McCarthy  as well as this one of Breanne Potter very interesting (which does not mean that I  fully agree with them as you can see in my comments).

5 comments:

Breanne said...

Thank you for the link to my blog! It is wonderful to have a healthy debate and I enjoy learning from someone who is passionate about an assessment! I look forward to learning more from you through this blog.
I will admit that after I wrote my original post I decided I needed to learn more about Strengths-Based initiatives. There certainly are many advocates of the theory. I am still learning...

Matthias said...

Hi Breanne

I am also still in a steep learning curve with regard to strengths and especially to what this means for management. That is one of the reasons why I created this blog. One important learning from this blogging is that there are many ways to define and look at "strengths". The Clifton StrengthsFinder is a good starting point, but is not the only "way to Rome"!

Dan McCarthy said...

Matthias –

Thanks for stopping by. I see from your blog and profile that you are a strong supporter of the strength movement, and I do appreciate your views.
The discipline of leadership development has never been black and white, so there will always be room for new approaches and different opinions.

As for your question “What advise would you give to identify "the most critical leadership skills"? In your experience, on what factors or circumstances does it depend whether one skill is more necessary than another?”

My approach is to develop a leadership competency model where the most critical competencies are determined by the current and future needs of the business. So it’s all about what the role and environment demands, and will vary. But at the end of the day, leadership is leadership, regardless of the role. Company specific models just help us prioritize.

Matthias said...

Hi Dan

thanks for your comments! I am very interested in the area of matching leadership competencies (or strenghts or styles) with the necessities of organizations.

What book, authors, concepts would you recommend me to study in order to learn more about this?

Dan McCarthy said...

Matthias -
I’d recommend anything on competency modeling.