Overused Strengths at Work: When More Is Not Better

Strengths are useful. That does not mean we need more of them in every situation.

• Confidence can help us make a decision.
• Perseverance can keep us going when something is difficult.
• Adaptability can help us respond to change.
• Collaboration can bring different perspectives together.
• Regard for Others can help us build strong working relationships.

But behaviour has context.

A useful behaviour can become less useful when we apply it more strongly than the situation requires, rely on it when a different approach would work better, or continue using it after its positive impact has begun to fall.

Importantly, overuse does not have to feel uncomfortable to the person using the behaviour.

A strongly used behaviour may feel completely natural. It may be consistent with someone’s personality, values, beliefs, habits, preferences or established ways of seeing the world. It may also have contributed significantly to their success.

The cost can appear somewhere else.

Other people may need to accommodate the intensity of the behaviour, compensate for what is missing, work around it, or have less behavioural space themselves.

At flowprofiler®, this is one of the most important ideas behind behavioural intelligence: more is not always better.

The aim is not to maximise every behaviour. It is to develop enough behavioural range to use the right behaviour, in the right amount, for the situation.

What are overused behavioural strengths?

When we talk about an overused strength, we are not saying that somebody has too much talent, capability or potential. We are talking about the way a useful behaviour is being used.

A behavioural strength can become overused when its intensity, consistency or application no longer fits what the situation requires. This, overtime could become stressful for the person and if not stressful for them the often those around them

Consider Self-Confidence. Confidence can help a leader trust their judgement, provide direction and make a difficult decision. Strong confidence may be entirely natural to that person. They may feel no internal discomfort at all.

But very strong confidence can also leave less room for questioning, challenge or alternative perspectives.

The leader may still experience themselves as appropriately confident. People around them may experience something different. They may stop challenging.

They may wait for the leader to decide. They may withhold information that contradicts the leader’s view. They may find themselves creating the curiosity and caution that the leader’s confidence has crowded out.

The strength has not disappeared. Its impact has changed.

Behavioural overuse is not simply about how a person feels about their behaviour. It is also about what the behaviour creates around them.

When can a strength become overused?

There are several ways this can happen.

Intensity

A useful behaviour is being applied more strongly than the situation requires. Confidence becomes certainty. Perseverance becomes relentless. Adaptability becomes constant change.

Fit

A behaviour that works well in one situation continues to be used when another response would be more effective. A highly collaborative leader, for example, may build commitment by involving people in decisions.

But not every decision requires consensus. If consultation continues after enough information is available, collaboration can begin to slow action.

Range

Strong reliance on one behaviour can leave less room for another useful behaviour. Confidence can reduce curiosity. Collaboration can reduce decisiveness.

Perseverance can reduce adaptability. Regard for Others can make necessary challenge harder.

The problem is not the original behaviour. The problem is that one response has become so dominant that behavioural choice begins to narrow.

Impact

Sometimes the strongest indication of overuse is found in the people and system around the individual. Others may compensate.

They may become quieter, more cautious, more dependent, more forceful or more accommodating in response. This is why behavioural intelligence requires us to consider not only intention, but impact.

The flowprofiler® zones

Traditional assessment thinking can encourage a simple assumption: Higher score = better.

flowprofiler® does not work that way. Our behavioural dimensions are interpreted across four zones.

Underuse: 1 to 2

The behaviour is not being activated strongly enough to fall within the effective range measured by flowprofiler®. Depending on the behaviour, role and context, increasing its use may create a development opportunity.

Solid base: 3 to 4

The behaviour provides a foundation to work from. Depending on the role and situation, greater activation may sometimes be useful.

Flow: 5 to 8

The behaviour is being used within the range we describe as flow. This does not mean that every score within the zone is perfect or that context no longer matters.

It means the behaviour is available within a range that does not indicate significant underuse or overuse, we’d typically consider this to be optimal. An active and sustainable use of the behaviour

Overuse: 9 to 10

The behaviour is being used strongly enough to fall within the flowprofiler® overuse zone. This does not mean that the person must experience the behaviour as excessive, uncomfortable or stressful. They may be entirely comfortable with it.

The behaviour may reflect long standing preferences, personality influences, values, beliefs, habits or biases. It may also have been reinforced by years of success.

The developmental question is what that intensity is producing.

• Is the behaviour still serving the situation?
• What effect is it having on other people?
• Does somebody else regularly have to provide the balance?
• Is another useful behaviour being crowded out?

These zones are not grades. A 10 is not better than an 8 because it is numerically higher.

A 5 is not automatically better than a 4.

The question is not: How high can I score? A better question is: How effectively am I using this behaviour for what the situation requires?

Five examples of overused behavioural strengths

Behavioural overuse can look different depending on the person and the situation. Here are five examples.

1. Self-Confidence

Self-Confidence helps people trust their judgement, speak up and act. Used very strongly, confidence can become certainty.

Someone may:

• dismiss alternative views
• stop checking assumptions
• make decisions before enough information is available
• interpret challenge as unnecessary resistance
• unintentionally discourage other people from speaking up

They may not feel overconfident. From their perspective, they may simply be clear and decisive.

The development goal is not necessarily to become less confident. It may be to create more space for curiosity, evidence and challenge.

2. Perseverance

Perseverance helps us continue when progress is difficult. That is valuable.

But strong perseverance can also make stopping, changing direction or letting go more difficult.

A person may continue investing time, money or effort because they remain strongly committed to the outcome. They may keep pushing a project after evidence suggests that a different approach is needed.

The person may experience this as determination. People around them may experience pressure to keep going.

The development question becomes: Am I persisting because this remains worthwhile, or has persistence itself become the default response?

3. Adaptability

Adaptability helps people adjust when circumstances change. But very strong adaptability can create instability for others.

Someone may:

• change direction frequently
• abandon an approach before it has had time to work
• introduce unnecessary change
• react quickly to each new piece of information
• leave others trying to provide continuity

The adaptable person may be perfectly comfortable with change. Their team may be working hard to create the stability around them. Adaptability works best when we can also recognise what needs to remain unchanged.

4. Collaboration

Collaboration can improve decisions, commitment and relationships. Strong collaboration can also create dependence on involvement or consensus.

A person may include more people than necessary, extend consultation, delay decisions or hesitate to take individual responsibility when agreement has not been reached.

They may genuinely value inclusion. Others may be waiting for someone to bring the discussion to a close. Sometimes collaboration is exactly what the situation needs.

Sometimes leadership requires listening carefully and then making the decision.

5. Regard for Others

Regard for Others helps us recognise the needs, perspectives and dignity of other people. It is an important interpersonal capability.

Very strong Regard for Others can also make necessary challenge more difficult. A leader may postpone feedback, avoid a difficult conversation or soften an important message until its meaning becomes unclear.

This may feel entirely consistent with their values. They are trying to treat people well.

The unintended consequence may be that somebody else has to deliver the challenge, performance issues continue, or expectations remain unclear.

The answer is not to care less. It is to recognise that regard and challenge can coexist.

Overuse is not the same as having a weakness

This distinction matters. If perseverance is one of your strongest behaviours and you overuse it, perseverance has not suddenly become a weakness.

You still have access to a useful capability. The development opportunity is to gain more choice over when, where and how strongly you use it.

That is a very different conversation from: “You need to stop being so persistent.” A more useful question is: “Where is persistence helping you, where is its impact changing, and what might the situation require instead?”

Behavioural intelligence is about increasing choice.

Six signs you may be overusing a strength

Overuse can be difficult to recognise precisely because the behaviour often feels natural. It may fit the way you see yourself. It may reflect deeply held values or beliefs. It may have helped you succeed.

So rather than asking only, “Does this feel like too much?”, ask some different questions.

1. Are you using the same behaviour in very different situations?

If very different problems repeatedly receive the same response, a strength may have become a default rather than a conscious choice.

The behaviour may still feel effective because it is familiar. That does not mean it is the best fit for every situation.

2. Is the impact different from your intention?

You may intend to be decisive but others experience little room to contribute. You may intend to be supportive but people experience a lack of challenge.

You may intend to involve people but decisions repeatedly stall. Intention matters. So does impact.

3. Do other people repeatedly accommodate or compensate for the behaviour?

This can be one of the most useful clues. If you push hard, does somebody else constantly restore calm?

If you change direction readily, does somebody else work to maintain consistency?

If you strongly protect relationships, does somebody else have to initiate difficult conversations?

If you prefer collaboration, does somebody else eventually force a decision?

Teams adapt around strong behavioural patterns. Sometimes the clearest evidence of overuse is visible in what everyone else has learned to do around us.

4. Is another useful behaviour being crowded out?

Confidence can crowd out curiosity. Collaboration can crowd out decisiveness. Perseverance can crowd out adaptability. Regard for Others can crowd out challenge.

Behavioural range allows us to access both sides of these tensions.

5. Does your behavioural pattern change under pressure?

Pressure does not automatically create overuse. Someone may already use a behaviour very strongly in their day to day state.

For others, pressure may amplify a behaviour, reduce it or produce an entirely different response. That is why flowprofiler® assesses behaviour in two states, day to day and under pressure.

Rather than assuming what pressure does to people, we measure the difference.

6. Are you achieving less by doing more?

More effort does not always create more value. A leader pushes harder to improve performance and people disengage.

A manager provides more support and inadvertently creates dependence. A team seeks more agreement and becomes slower.

A confident leader becomes more certain and receives less useful challenge. When more of the same behaviour produces diminishing or negative results, it is worth examining the pattern.

Overuse does not require pressure

This is an important distinction. It can be tempting to describe behavioural overuse as something that happens when people become stressed.

Sometimes it does. But not always. A person can sit quite comfortably within an overuse pattern.

Strong use of a behaviour may be consistent with their personality, values, beliefs, habits and previous experience. They may like this aspect of themselves. Other people may have rewarded it. Their career may even have been built partly around it.

The individual may experience no particular tension at all. The pressure may instead be experienced by the people around them.

That is why flowprofiler® does not treat the day to day state as the “good” version of somebody and the pressure state as the “bad” version.

We examine both. A behaviour may be overused in one state, both states or neither. Pressure may amplify a pattern, reduce it or change the behavioural response altogether.

The comparison gives us information.

It helps us move beyond: “This is my strength.” Towards: “This is how strongly I tend to use this behaviour, this is how that changes under pressure, and this is the impact it may be having.”

That creates development choice.

How do you reduce behavioural overuse?

Usually, the goal is not to suppress the behaviour. It is to use it more deliberately.

Spot the pattern

Identify the behaviour you may be relying on very strongly. Look at situations and outcomes rather than judging yourself globally.

Ask:

• When does this behaviour work well for me?
• When does its impact begin to change?
• What happens around me when I use it very strongly?

Pause before using your default response

When the situation matters, create a small gap between stimulus and response.

Ask: What does this situation actually require?

Not: What do I normally do here?

Look for the complementary behaviour

• If you are pushing hard, do you need to listen?
• If you are consulting widely, is it time to decide?
• If you are persisting, is it time to reconsider?
• If you are adapting, does something need to remain stable?
• If you are protecting a relationship, is respectful challenge now required?

Experiment with intensity

Behaviour is not an on or off switch. You can use slightly less of one behaviour without abandoning it.

You can activate more of another. Small changes in intensity can create a very different impact.

Ask about your impact

Other people often experience our behaviour differently from the way we experience ourselves.

Useful questions include:

• What should I do more of?
• What should I do less of?
• What should I continue doing?
• What do you find yourself doing because of the way I tend to operate?

Then listen for patterns.

Do not ignore the system

Not every apparent behavioural problem belongs entirely to the individual. Someone may strongly use perseverance because responsibilities are unclear and they repeatedly feel they have to rescue failing work.

A manager may become highly controlling because decision authority is unclear. A highly adaptable team may constantly change direction because organisational priorities are unstable.

Before asking someone simply to change their behaviour, look at both the person and the environment.

Our Triple A Framework considers:

Aptitude

Does the person have the capability required?

Attitude

Are they willing to apply it?

Approach

Are they choosing an effective way to respond?

The Enabling Four then examine the system:

Rules

Are expectations and processes clear?

Roles

Does everyone understand where they fit?

Responsibilities

Is accountability clear?

Resources

Do people have what they need to perform?

Sometimes individual behaviour needs to change.

Sometimes the environment is repeatedly encouraging, rewarding or demanding the same behavioural response.

Good development looks at both.

What does the research say about overused strengths?

There is an important distinction between strengths use research and research into the overuse of behaviour. They are related areas, but they are not asking exactly the same question.

Research into character strengths use generally examines whether people are able to apply their personal or character strengths at work.

Rudolph, Friedrich, Koziel and Zacher’s 2025 meta analysis found positive relationships between character strengths use and both work performance and employee wellbeing. Their analysis did not find evidence that increasing character strengths use followed a universal pattern in which more eventually became harmful.

Zhang and colleagues’ 2025 meta analysis similarly describes strengths use as proactively applying personal strengths to completing work.

That is useful evidence. It does not, however, test the same proposition as flowprofiler®.

flowprofiler® is not asking whether people should stop using their strengths.

It examines behavioural intensity and behavioural range across 18 workplace dimensions, measured day to day and under pressure.

The questions are different:

• How strongly is this behaviour being used?
• Does that level of use fit what the situation requires?
• What happens to other useful behaviours when this behaviour becomes dominant?
• What impact is the pattern having on other people?
• What impact is it having on performance and outcomes?
• Does the behavioural pattern change under pressure?

Other leadership research has examined this behavioural problem more directly.

Kaplan and Kaiser described leaders overdoing their strengths, showing how behaviours that contribute to effectiveness can become counterproductive when taken too far.

Kaiser and Overfield subsequently examined strengths overused and lopsided leadership, arguing that strong reliance on some leadership behaviours can be accompanied by insufficient use of complementary behaviours.

Pierce and Aguinis explored the broader too much of a good thing effect in management, where otherwise desirable factors can reach context dependent points at which greater intensity no longer produces better outcomes.

flowprofiler® contributes its own validated behavioural perspective to this question.

The principle is not: Every strength eventually becomes a weakness.

Nor is it: A person must feel stressed or uncomfortable before a behaviour can be overused.

The principle is simpler: Behaviour needs to be understood in context, at the intensity at which it is being used, and through the impact it creates.

The goal is behavioural range

Development is sometimes described as fixing weaknesses. That is only part of the picture.

A person can also become more effective by gaining greater control over the behaviours they already use strongly. The goal is not to become average.

It is not to make everybody behave in the same way. And it is not to suppress the qualities that make someone effective.

The goal is behavioural range. To recognise when a behaviour is useful.

To recognise when its impact is changing. To activate more when the situation requires more.

To regulate intensity when less would work better. To create space for complementary behaviours.

And to choose another response when the context changes. A strong behaviour used with choice remains an asset.

A strong behaviour used without enough regard for context or impact can become a limitation.

Understand how your behaviour changes under pressure

flowprofiler® measures 18 workplace behavioural dimensions across emotional intelligence, resilience and motivation.

Unlike approaches that assume higher scores are always better, flowprofiler® examines four behavioural zones:

Underuse. Solid base. Flow. Overuse.

It also compares behaviour day to day and under pressure.

This allows individuals and teams to explore behaviours that may be strongly used in either state, patterns that become amplified or reduced when demands increase, and the effect those patterns may have on other people and performance.

Behavioural intelligence is not simply knowing your strengths.

It is understanding how you use them.

flowprofiler® measures 18 workplace behavioural dimensions across emotional intelligence, resilience and motivation.

Unlike approaches that assume higher scores are always better, flowprofiler® examines underuse, a solid behavioural base, flow and potential overuse.

It also compares behaviour day to day with behaviour under pressure, helping individuals and teams explore where useful patterns may become amplified, reduced or less effective when demands increase.