Play to Your Strengths

When you think about planning your personal development for the coming year, what are the first skills you think about developing? If you’re like most people, you think about your weak skills. From an early age, we have been programmed to focus our attention on overcoming our weaknesses.

There has been an unwritten code of expectation that we need to be good at everything – and great at some things. Clearly this is an unreasonable expectation. And over the last several years, personal development theory has begun to recognize that fact.

In their groundbreaking book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, authors Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton say that across all ages and cultures, people are more concerned about their weaknesses than their strengths. We believe that our weaknesses matter more in holding us back than our strengths matter in advancing us.

Buckingham and Clifton disagree with that commonly held belief. In their provocative theory, they suggest that the better strategy is to play to your strengths, building upon your core talents, and work around your weaknesses. You can work to add skills and knowledge to increase your performance in any area, but unless you are building upon one of your innate talents, your efforts won’t produce exceptional results—some results, yes, but not dramatic improvement.

“Unless you have the necessary talent, your improvements will be modest,” write Buckingham and Clifton. “You will be diverting most of your energy toward damage control and very little toward real development.”

They do agree that there is a need to minimize some of your weaknesses—specifically those areas where your lack of talent actually get in the way of your performance.

“Managing Around” a Weakness
Instead of trying to overcome your weaknesses by brute force—and at the expense of diverting that energy away from growing your strengths—they offer five strategies for what they call “managing around” a weakness:

Get a little better at it. In some cases, your weakness is only moderately impeding your peak performance in other areas. While it may never contribute to your success, by improving the weakness a little, it may no longer be an active detriment.

Develop a support system. This is the proverbial string tied around the finger to remind you of something. If you can automate or systematize the tasks you underperform at, you can side step any harm the weakness could potentially cause.

Study your prospects. Most tasks can be approached from different angels. When you know your strengths, you can tackle tasks that are in your areas of weakness from the perspective of your strength. For example, if your skills tend toward the analytical and you are facing a task that requires strong people skills, start by analyzing the best way to connect with the people’s interests and map out a systematic way to address them.

Find a partner. This may be the best approach for small business people and “solo” practitioners. Go into partnership discussions with a clear-eyed understanding of the strengths you bring, and the strengths you need from your partner. Don’t be shy about your strengths—the whole point of this is to create a world in which you get to do what you are really good at. And be open-minded about what a partnership looks like. For some solo practitioners, a virtual assistant or a marketing consultant could be all the partnering you need.

Just (Don’t) Do It. The last option, say Buckingham and Clifton, is just don’t do the things you are weak at. In a corporate setting you might get away with this, particularly if you are a high-performer in the areas of your strengths. If you’re a small business owner and your organizational chart tends to have “me” written in most every box, not doing something may not seem like much of a choice. But keep it as a goal and continue to work toward the day when you can contribute to your business exclusively from the place of your highest strengths.

Remember, the point is to capitalize on and continue to build your strengths while minimizing the impact of your weaknesses. Here’s to your growing success!

I invite you to share your thoughts and perspective on this article. What are your strengths? How do you manage your weaknesses? To join the discussion, simply leave a comment.