Keeping Your Strengths From Becoming Liabilities

Overusing a strength can limit your perspective. True leadership requires balance, self-awareness, ... More and valuing both hard and soft skills.
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From a young age, I excelled at mathematics. My proficiency in calculus and analytics led me to study economics as an undergraduate student and then to pursue an MBA in finance. In short, math was my natural talent I used every day in my job—analyzing, diagraming, and solving problems.
As a financial analyst at Baxter International, a $12 billion health care company where I worked for 23 years (eventually becoming chair and CEO), I became the go-to person on acquisitions. Based on future growth, profitability, and cash flow, I determined a company’s value and the expected return. To me, the numbers said it all.
A strength that’s overused to the extreme, however, can result in a kind of myopia. The danger is seeing an opportunity or a challenge through the familiar lens of a particular strength, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I found this out the hard way.
When I was promoted to a division president, I was not just analyzing acquisitions; I was making them in our part of the company. Given my background, I believed everything we needed to know about a company we wanted to acquire could be found in the numbers. To simplify an actual example of what happened, let’s say our analysis valued a company we wanted to acquire at $100 million. Our offer was $80 million, which meant we expected to generate $20 million in value. With full confidence in that analysis alone, I approved the deal.
What I neglected to take into account, however, were several factors that would have provided a much more holistic view. The biggest area I overlooked was the importance of ensuring that key individuals at the acquired company stayed on to run the business. This turned out to be a significant variable that would make or break the deal.