As a leader, your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, but they tend not to accept it in practice. And the tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths. Nowhere in most assessments is there language or diagnostics that can reveal when someone is overdoing it—when more is not better.

The authors help trace individuals' leadership behavior back to the "crooked thinking" and "trigger points" that can throw it off kilter. They identify four different overarching qualities of leadership and describe the damage that results when each is taken to an extreme, and how to get them back in balance. This work offers a practical psychology of leadership—a better way for leaders to get a reading on their performance, one that is truer to the realities of managerial work.