WMBA 6605 Week 7 Strengths Overuse Audit Example

When Order Becomes a Bottleneck and Checking Becomes a Cage: An Audit of Two Strengths, the Mechanism That Makes Each Expensive, Who Pays and the Signal That Tells Me It Is Happening

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6605: Finding Your Inner Leader

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

When Order Becomes a Bottleneck and Checking Becomes a Cage: An Audit of Two Strengths, the Mechanism That Makes Each Expensive, Who Pays and the Signal That Tells Me It Is Happening

Two Strengths, Not an Inventory

The feedback I gathered in August from seven colleagues at Brookfield Dairy Cooperative, the composite Wisconsin dairy co-op whose books my team closes each month, agreed on two strengths. I build structure where a process or a disagreement lacks it, and I check work carefully enough that errors rarely leave my team. This audit takes each strength in turn, describes where it was demonstrated and then examines when it becomes costly. The premise comes from Kaiser and Overfield (2011), who found that overused strengths are a common and distinct source of leadership problems, and from Pierce and Aguinis (2013), who reviewed evidence that many generally beneficial conditions in management turn harmful past an inflection point.

Strength 1: Building Structure

In behavioral terms, I turn a loose process into named steps with owners and dates, and I turn an open argument into a page listing each side's view and the evidence that would reverse it. The clearest demonstration was the 2025 rebuild of our close calendar into 142 tasks, which cut the close from eight working days to five. Another came in March 2025, when a one-page summary ended a three-day standoff over a $410,000 hauling accrual.

The Audit

The mechanism that makes this strength expensive is that structure, once built, becomes something I defend. A 142-step calendar works because nobody improvises; the same feature means that any change to a step feels to me like a threat to the whole. When a proposal touches a process I designed, I evaluate it against the structure rather than against the outcome the structure was meant to serve.

The cost was paid in late 2025. A staff accountant proposed combining two reconciliation steps that, in practice, reviewed the same accounts twice. I asked her to document the proposal in the calendar's format, then asked for a month of parallel runs. The change took effect in March 2026, four months after she raised it, and saved about six hours each close. Over the delay, that was roughly twenty-four hours of her and her colleagues' time spent on duplicate work.

Who Absorbs the Cost

The people who absorb this cost are the ones closest to the work, usually junior staff, because they see the inefficiencies first and have the least power to override the structure. They also absorb a less visible cost: learning that suggestions take months, they stop making them. One accountant put it plainly in August: switching takes far more than it should.

Strength 2: Checking Thoroughly

I review my team's work in detail, and I personally check every farm payment run before it goes to the bank. Errors in our member payments have been almost nonexistent for three years, which matters, because a mistake reaches 312 farms and the cooperative's credibility with its owners.

The Audit

The mechanism here is that checking substitutes for building others' capability. Each time I check the payment run myself, I confirm that it is right and also confirm that nobody else can be trusted to say so. Grant and Schwartz (2011) described many positive traits and practices as following an inverted U, beneficial up to a point and harmful beyond it, and checking fits that shape well. A second reviewer improves accuracy; a single reviewer who must review everything creates a dependency.

The cost was paid in January 2026, though I did not see it then. When the payment run failed the day before payment, the decision about how to respond ran through me because I was the one person who knew the run end to end. Had a senior accountant owned the review, she might have caught the protein pricing error earlier, or at least I would have had a second person who could weigh the options with me.

Who Absorbs the Cost

My senior accountant, Dana, absorbs this cost most directly. She is capable of reviewing the payment run, but she has never been allowed to own it, so her development stalls and her role stays smaller than her ability. The cooperative absorbs a risk cost: if I am out on payment day, nobody else has done the review recently enough to do it with confidence. Two respondents in August said I should delegate the review, which suggests the team sees the dependency even if I had not.

Why the Two Strengths Feed Each Other

The two strengths reinforce each other in a way that makes both harder to change. Structure creates processes that only I fully understand, and checking keeps me the only person who verifies them. Each makes the other seem necessary. When I consider handing over the payment review, the complexity of the structure I built becomes the reason nobody else can do it; when someone proposes simplifying the structure, my role as the final checker makes me the person most reluctant to change what I verify. Breaking the cycle requires acting on both at once, which is why the resolutions below come as a pair. Working on one alone would leave the other to rebuild it.

The Signals and What I Will Do

For structure, the signal is the phrase "put it in the format." When I ask a team member to fit an improvement into my structure before I will consider its substance, the strength is flipping. My resolution is that any proposal from the team gets a decision within two closes, either a trial or a written reason for declining, and that I will ask "what does this save?" before "how does this fit?"

For checking, the signal is being the only person who has reviewed a process in the past three months. My resolution is that Dana will own the farm payment review starting with the first September cycle, while I check her work for the first three cycles and afterward only on exception. If I find myself re-performing her review rather than reading it, the strength has flipped again, and I will say so to her directly.

References

Grant, A. M., & Schwartz, B. (2011). Too much of a good thing: The challenge and opportunity of the inverted U. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 61-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610393523

Kaiser, R. B., & Overfield, D. V. (2011). Strengths, strengths overused, and lopsided leadership. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 63(2), 89-109. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024470

Pierce, J. R., & Aguinis, H. (2013). The too-much-of-a-good-thing effect in management. Journal of Management, 39(2), 313-338. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311410060