If you’ve been reading my recent posts, you know that I am becoming a bit obsessed with the idea of discovering your strengths, both personally and organizationally and using them as the building blocks for growth. Seems pretty obvious. But we continually focus on our weaknesses, beating ourselves up over them, and spending inordinate amounts of time trying to shore them up. At what cost?
Yesterday I had coffee with a cohort who is an expert at improving performance, both with individuals and organizations. Here are a few quotes from our conversation that ring home with me and gave me some insight into why we shouldn't get so worked up about our weaknesses.
“No one ever beats the competition by getting good at what they do. You beat them by getting better than they are at what you are good at.” That’s quite a mouthful. Especially when you consider this next quote.
“You only have the capacity to be good at a few things. When you spend time working on improving a weakness, you end up weakening an existing strength. That strength just might be foundation of your current success.” Ouch!
I’m still thinking through all of this. One can’t just ignore our weaknesses and the strengths of our competitors. We need to be aware of them. But I am more convinced everyday that the way to address them is to work harder on what are strengths are.
Comments?
Wednesday, February 28, 2007The Risk of Working on WeaknessPosted by Michael Synk, In-Synk/ Inner Circle of the Mid-South at 8:29 AM Labels: msynk, Overcoming Obstacles
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1 comment:
I agree that we earn the greatest return by investing in our areas of strength, and I’m glad to see it is becoming “conventional” wisdom.
I just read an interesting caveat on this topic from Marshall Goldsmith who wrote What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. He says there’s one class of weaknesses that cannot be ignored: interpersonal weaknesses.
So while it’s futile to focus on developing skills that aren’t natural to us, you don’t get a free pass on breaking bad habits (or poor manners). Examples include dropping too many ideas on those who work for you, saying anything in anger, keeping secret what others need to know and favoring those who agree with you.
Bad habits, especially those that are tied to relational flaws, need attention — even if they are ingrained in your personality.
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