Are Your Strengths Holding You Back?

How Overused Green Zone Behaviours Create Hidden Risks

Most leaders know their strengths. They've relied on them to succeed. They've used them to build teams, drive results, and earn trust. But what many don't realise is that those very strengths can sometimes become their biggest stumbling blocks.

A leader who values precision can become overly controlling. Someone known for empathy might avoid hard conversations. A natural problem-solver may take over instead of coaching others to find solutions. Rather than intentional missteps, these are common patterns. And they often go unnoticed because they come from a positive place.

That's what makes them tricky. These behaviours aren't wrong in and of themselves. But when they're overused or applied in the wrong context, they can limit growth, create conflict, and damage team dynamics. Leaders keep leaning on what has always worked, even when it's no longer working.

Understanding when a strength becomes a risk takes more than self-reflection. It requires perspective. You need to step outside your own frame of reference and examine how your behaviour shows up in different contexts. Tools like the Leadership Growth Profile can support this process by revealing patterns that are hard to identify on your own.

In this article, we'll explore how leadership strengths can become derailers, why self-awareness alone isn't enough, and how structured feedback helps leaders move from unconscious habits to intentional leadership.

Green Zone Behaviours: What They Are and Why They Matter

Green Zone behaviours are intentional, values-aligned actions that underpin effective, human-centred leadership. These behaviours support trust, clarity, and performance, especially in high-pressure environments where default patterns can take over.

They're not soft skills. They're strategic leadership capabilities that drive outcomes across performance, learning, and culture.

Green Zone leadership is built on intentional practices. These are patterns of thinking and action that promote trust, learning, and high performance. They include:

Each practice is expressed by specific, observable behaviours. These are the things people actually see and experience day to day. For example, "Regulate Reactivity" includes behaviours like staying calm and considered in a crisis, or responding constructively when challenged.

These behaviours don't emerge by accident. They require awareness, intention, and practice, especially when under strain. They are central to the Leadership Growth Profile, which assesses how often and consistently leaders demonstrate these behaviours in real work settings.

More than individual strengths, Green Zone behaviours are essential infrastructure for the Triple Goal: Great Performance, Great Learning, and Great Workplaces. They help leaders deliver results, adapt under pressure, and build cultures where people and ideas thrive.

Overuse in Action: Why You Can Have Too Much of a Good Thing

Great leadership isn't just about doing the right things; it's about knowing how much is enough. The very behaviours that build strong performance and trust can, when overused, become counterproductive.

This is where many leaders get stuck. They keep doing more of what once worked, unaware that the volume is too high. These behaviours still look positive from the inside. But for the team, it can lead to hesitation, second-guessing, or unclear priorities.

Here are three common examples drawn from the Leadership Growth Profile:

These overextensions often fall along a familiar leadership tension: being too tough or too nice. Both are strengths, but only when expressed in the right zone.

Tough and Nice: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Great leaders aren't either tough or nice; they're both. But it's how those traits are expressed that makes the difference. The most effective leaders know how to hold the line with clarity and show care with integrity. That's the balance the Leadership Growth Profile helps to develop.

The key is knowing which zone you're leading from — and whether your actions are building performance and trust, or quietly eroding them. That's where structured feedback and self-regulation come in. They help leaders notice when a strength is tipping into overuse, and choose how to recalibrate.

The challenge is that these overextensions often go unnoticed. They feel like "good leadership" in action. But over time, they create misalignment between intention and impact. In turn, this erodes clarity, trust, and momentum.

The Leadership Growth Profile helps leaders spot these patterns before they stall progress. Because when you see what's happening, you can choose how to respond.

How Do You Uncover an Overused Strength?

Most leaders don't deliberately overuse their strengths. They're usually unaware it's happening because to them, the behaviour feels constructive. It's rooted in values. It's gotten results in the past. It doesn't feel like a problem.

Self-assessment has limits. So does positive feedback. Even well-meaning praise tends to focus on outcomes, not patterns. And because many overused behaviours look like good leadership on the surface, they rarely get flagged in real time.

That's where structured feedback plays a different role.

The Leadership Growth Profile collects input from multiple rater groups (peers, direct reports, and managers) and compares those perspectives against the leader's self-view. It reveals not just what others see, but how consistently they see it, and how it differs from the leader's intent.

When one group sees a behaviour as empowering, while another sees it as disengaged, that's a signal worth exploring. These nuanced gaps often reveal blind spots leaders can't catch on their own.

This kind of feedback brings clarity to areas where perception matters most. It also helps leaders stop guessing — and start growing — with better data.

This is why structured, behavioural feedback matters. It provides the insight leaders need to make changes that actually stick — grounded not in opinion, but in shared experience.

Realignment: How Leaders Can Course-Correct With Insight

Overused strengths don't need to be abandoned; they need to be recalibrated. When leaders recognise that a well-intentioned behaviour is veering off course, the next step is not to correct for flaw, but to develop with intention.

This shift starts with clarity. Once a behaviour is identified as being overused, the goal isn't to suppress it, but to restore balance. For example, a leader who pushes for collaboration may need to experiment with clearer decision-making boundaries. One who prizes curiosity might focus on asking fewer, more focused questions.

The process of change works best when it's deliberate and supported. Structured coaching helps leaders interpret feedback, uncover what's driving their patterns, and identify what a more balanced approach could look like in practice.

Once you know where you're overextending, you can shift toward more intentional leadership. The Leadership Growth Profile plays a key role in this. It provides the behavioural data needed to understand what's happening, plus a common language for working through it with a coach or team.

These aren't one-off actions. They're part of a broader development mindset. When leaders approach their growth this way, they don't just manage behaviour. They change how they lead.

The Payoff: Strengths That Stay Strengths — Without the Side Effects

When leadership strengths are used with balance, they deliver powerful outcomes. These results don't just apply to the leader, but the entire organisation. These behaviours build clarity, trust, and momentum. They create the conditions for great performance, ongoing learning, and workplaces people want to be part of.

This is the essence of values-aligned leadership. It's not about perfection or performance theatre. It's about using your strengths in ways that serve the team, not just the task. That means knowing when to lean in, when to pause, and how to adapt without losing who you are.

The benefits of this approach are measurable. Leaders who know how to manage their strengths — rather than be managed by them — drive stronger results, build more resilient teams, and stay grounded through complexity.

These are the kinds of behaviours that fuel the Triple Goal:

The Leadership Growth Profile helps leaders get there. By revealing patterns and providing the structure to develop with intention, it ensures strengths stay strengths and don't quietly become liabilities.