Patrick Diogenia Introduces Strength Overshoot and New Leadership Assessment

PHILADELPHIA - Aug. 13, 2026 - PRLog -- A new leadership framework called Strength Overshoot proposes that leaders are often undermined not by an obvious weakness, but by a response that became successful enough to be trusted after its usefulness began to expire.

Introduced by Patrick Diogenia in the Medium essay The Strength Overshoot, the concept is defined as a context-dependent failure of leadership calibration in which a normally adaptive behavior persists or intensifies after changing conditions call for a different response.
The idea builds on an established body of leadership and organizational behavior research, including Pierce and Aguinis's "too-much-of-a-good-thing" effect and the work of Robert Kaiser and colleagues on overplayed strengths and leadership versatility.

Strength Overshoot asks a more focused question: Why does the leader keep using the old response after the situation has stopped rewarding it?

"The problem is not simply having too much confidence, empathy, analysis, or determination," Diogenia said. "It is that success teaches us what to trust. When circumstances change, the behavior may lose its usefulness before the leader loses faith in it."

The essay develops the idea through Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, examining how connection, conviction, and integration could function both as genuine leadership assets and, under different conditions, sources of miscalibration.

A companion Strengths Overshoot Scale (SOS) is now in development. The experimental, research-informed instrument is designed to examine both recurring leadership patterns and mechanisms that may make those patterns difficult to change, including prior success, identity, pressure, feedback barriers, and difficulty deploying a counterweight.

The SOS will initially be treated as a developmental research instrument and will require empirical testing before claims of psychometric validity can be made.

The essay is available at: https://medium.com/@patrick.diogenia/the-strength-oversho....

About Patrick Diogenia

Patrick Diogenia (https://www.patrickdiogenia.com/about-patrick-diogenia/) is a strategy, loyalty, and lifecycle marketing leader with more than two decades of experience across marketing, customer strategy, technology, and organizational leadership. At Comcast, he held senior management roles spanning omnichannel enablement, MarTech strategy, and product management. Prior to Comcast, he founded and led a boutique advertising agency and consultancy serving SMB and Fortune 1000 clients. He holds dual MBAs from Indiana University and Alliance Manchester Business School (UK), and a bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a graduate student in Communication Studies at New Mexico State University, where his research examines organizational judgment, leadership communication, and customer strategy. The publication represents the author's analysis and does not imply endorsement by any university or employer.