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Peter Drucker and other leadership thinkers have long argued that leaders should focus on strengthening their strengths. How should they do that? Improving on a weakness is pretty easy and straightforward: you can make measurable progress by honing and practicing basic techniques. But developing a strength is a different matter, because simply doing more of what you're good at will yield only incremental improvements. If you are strong technically, becoming even more of a technical expert won't make you a dramatically better leader. If, however, you use what the authors call "nonlinear development"-similar to an athlete's cross-training-you can achieve exponential results. Your technical expertise will become more powerful if, for instance, you build on your communication skills, enabling you to explain technical problems both more broadly and more effectively. The authors, all from the leadership-development consultancy Zenger Folkman, present a step-by-step process by which developing leaders can identify their strengths (through either a formal or an informal 360-degree evaluation), select appropriate complementary skills (the article identifies six to 10 for each core strength), and develop those skills to dramatically improve their strengths, making themselves uniquely valuable to their companies.

Poor leadership in good times can be hidden, but poor leadership in bad times is a recipe for disaster. Looking at 360-degree feedback data for more than 11,000 executives, the authors identified 10 leadership shortcomings, among them not walking the talk, failing to learn from mistakes, and lacking clear vision and direction.