How to Choose What to Improve as a Leader

A common question in many leadership roles is where to spend limited development time. Should you get even better at the things you already do well, or focus on fixing areas where your performance falls short?

This choice shapes how teams operate and how decisions get made. Many leaders rely on instinct, leaning into familiar skills or reacting to urgent feedback without a clear way to determine where their effort will have the most impact.

Anderson-Finch, Lenniger, and Watkins argue that this framing misses the point. The better approach starts with diagnosis.

By grounding development choices in role expectations, honest self-assessment, and situational factors, leaders can direct effort toward the areas that most affect outcomes.

Why It Matters: When development effort is misdirected, inefficiencies at the leadership level spread into how teams operate. Priorities lose clarity and execution becomes uneven as people compensate in different ways. Over time, this erodes decision quality and creates drag that is hard to trace back to its source.

• Start with Diagnosis Through Four Key Questions: Effective development begins with clarity about the role and its demands. What does success require in this position today, not in the last role? How do current capabilities map to those expectations? Which gaps can be handled through support, delegation, or hiring? Where is there unused capacity to grow into new areas? This sequence introduces discipline into what is often a reactive process. It also surfaces differences between self-perception and how others define success, which is especially important when expectations change across levels.

• Focus on Three Priority Areas That Drive Improvement: The framework narrows attention to superpowers, dangerous derailers, and untapped potential. Superpowers are strengths that consistently produce strong outcomes and can be applied in higher-impact situations. Dangerous derailers are patterns that create friction, weaken trust, or limit team effectiveness. Untapped potential highlights capabilities that have not been explored, often because existing strengths have been sufficient up to this point. Treating these categories differently prevents overinvestment in low-impact improvements.

• Distinguish Between Manageable Gaps and Limiting Weaknesses: Not every shortcoming requires direct intervention. Gaps tied to tasks or domain knowledge can often be addressed through team composition or collaboration. In contrast, gaps tied to leadership behavior tend to persist and affect others. Recognizing which weaknesses fall into each category helps avoid spending time on areas that will not materially change outcomes while ensuring critical issues are addressed.

• Context Shapes Priorities Across Roles, Levels, and Transitions: Development priorities change with role and timing. Early in a career or role, strengths are often enough to drive results and build momentum. As responsibilities grow, expectations expand, and gaps that once went unnoticed start to affect performance. In a new role, strengths help establish credibility, but over time it becomes important to address the gaps that could limit effectiveness.

• Progress Depends on Deliberate Trade-Offs and Sustained Focus: Improvement comes from selecting a small number of priorities and committing to them over time. This may involve finding new ways to apply a strength where it influences larger outcomes, addressing a derailer that affects team trust, or developing a capability required for future roles. The discipline lies in choosing what not to work on, while maintaining enough awareness to revisit priorities as conditions change.

Go Deeper -> Should You Develop Your Leadership Strengths—or Fix Your Weaknesses? – Harvard Business Review