Everyone tells Prashant he’s incredibly thorough. His decks are bulletproof. His analyses have no gaps. His due diligence is legendary. He has built an entire professional identity on being the person who catches what everyone else misses.
He was also recently passed over for a leadership role. The feedback: too deep in the details. Doesn’t delegate. Takes too long on decisions because he needs to verify everything personally. His thoroughness at scale becomes a bottleneck.
Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser’s research on leadership versatility identifies this as the “strength overuse” pattern. Every professional strength has an overuse zone where the same quality that made you effective begins making you ineffective. Thoroughness becomes micromanagement. Decisiveness becomes impulsiveness. Empathy becomes conflict avoidance. The strength doesn’t change. The context does.
Your strength becomes a blind spot precisely because it’s a strength. Nobody warns you about the thing that made you successful. They praise it until it breaks.
The mechanism is reinforcement. Early in your career, the strength produced outsized results. You got promoted because of it. You got recognised because of it. Every reward signal told your brain: do more of this. The brain obliged. The strength became your default operating mode. By mid-career, the default mode runs without examination. You’re not choosing to be thorough. You’re being thorough automatically, even when the situation needs you to be fast.
In Indian corporate culture the pattern has a specific amplifier. Indian professionals are often promoted for technical excellence. The best coder becomes the engineering manager. The best analyst becomes the analytics lead. The promotion rewards the strength. The new role requires the opposite. The manager needs to let others code. The lead needs to let others analyse. Nobody mentions this at the promotion meeting. The praise drowns the warning.
Prashant’s thoroughness will never go away. It shouldn’t. What needs to change is his awareness of when thoroughness serves the moment and when it’s the thing between him and the decision his team is waiting for. The strength doesn’t need to be eliminated. It needs a governor.
What is the quality everyone praises you for and when was the last time it got in your way?
Everyone calls Prashant thorough. The promotion committee called it a bottleneck. What do they call yours? careers.deliberx.com