“Focus On Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses.” – Gary Vaynerchuk
by Guy | Jun 9, 2021 | Business - General, BusinessFitness, Excellence, HR & Personnel, Leadership, Motivation, Productivity | 0 comments
Challkboard with LEADERSHIP and an outline sketch of a muscular bicep representing strengths
It seems to be human nature to look at our areas of weakness and then focus attention on trying to eliminate these as far as possible, rather than focusing on our strengths. But is this really an effective use of our time and energy?
Marcus Buckingham, best-selling business author and speaker, says that focusing on your weaknesses is wrong, as they only drain you. You should focus on your strengths and build on them. It is a myth that your greatest potential for growth is your areas of weakness. Focusing on them will demotivate you while focusing on your strengths will help you feel more positive and so give you energy.
But don’t confuse strengths with what you’re good at. Just because you’re good at something, it doesn’t mean you enjoy it. As Buckingham says, strengths “make you feel strong.” If something you do, no matter how well, drains you, rather consider it a weakness and focus on things you are good at, and you enjoy.
However, you can also have too much of a good thing. Robert Kaplan & Robert Kaiser, in their book, “Fear Your Strengths,” make the point that most leaders overplay their strengths and so undermine their effectiveness. They cite numerous examples, such as CEOs that are great public speakers, but don’t know when to stop, as well as real-world examples such as the executives that caused the collapse of Enron.
All agree that the key to success is listening to feedback. Find ways – often involving third parties, like coaches – to get feedback from your team on what they see as your strengths, and where you are prone to over-use any of these. Although it might be unsettling to learn that you need to restrict the use of what you see as a significant skill, as one executive in “Fear Your Strengths” said, “I don’t have to give up my fastball. I just don’t have to throw it all the time.”
Seek out ways to focus on the things you not only are good at, but enjoy, and enhance your business in this way. Or, as Ryan Kahn says, “Master your strengths. Outsource your weaknesses.”
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Focus on strengths not weaknesses but don’t overdo it
When we focus on our strengths and those of the people we manage, we get the best
Over the last several years, the strength-based movement has picked up momentum. And that is for good reason. In fact, the focus on strengths that people bring to work, rather than the weaknesses, has its origin in positive psychology. For a very long time, as managers we were brainwashed by B-schools and thereafter in many training programmes, to believe that achieving excellence is about overcoming our weaknesses.
However, positive psychology has a radically different point of view. For example, there are over 40,000 books on depression and very few on happiness. Psychologists for a very long time (and some of them, even now!) studied divorces to understand how to lead a happy married life! The focus tended to be on the “dark side” of the personality to understand and achieve the “bright side”.
Secret sauce
Way back in the 1960s, Peter Drucker highlighted the need for focusing on strengths to get the best out of people. Drucker was emphatic when he wrote, “Focusing on strengths is development, whereas focusing on weakness is damage control.” He further went on to even state that “to focus on one’s weakness at work is misuse, if not abuse of the person”. Thankfully over the years, the excessive focus on “fixing the weaknesses” as the secret sauce of exceptional performance has changed. Understandably, no one is an “allrounder”. We are all a package of our unique strengths and weaknesses. Later studies too indicate that people become better at what they are already good at.
So far, so good. The strengths narrative also needs to be understood for its totality. Without any doubt, when we focus on our strengths and those of the people we manage, we get the best. However, there is a caveat. What if we overuse our strengths? Can there be some “side effects”? The answer is again a resounding “yes.” Let’s see a few examples:
Micromanagement is no good
*You have an eye for details and so you pay a lot of attention to getting things executed flawlessly. However, when one overuses this strength to the other extreme, one’s style tends to become that of “micromanaging”. And, as we all know, micromanagement does no good to us as leaders, nor to the people we manage - except leaving them demotivated.
* Humility is a prized quality as we all know. However, when displayed in excess may let people to take you for granted. Healthy assertiveness is not necessarily the opposite of humility, but a complementary cousin that keeps your effectiveness high.
Therefore, aspiring leaders are advised to continuously reflect if they are lopsided in using their strengths to its extreme. Most often that not they discover, much to their surprise, they have become a lot less effective or even less inspiring. Not only do those who embrace their strengths do so as the only truth, but they consequently ignore an equal and opposing point of view!
To conclude, it is worth remembering Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote, “You must stand in terror of your strengths!”
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Focus on your strengths, focus on success
Curt Liesveld, renowned learning and development senior consultant for the Gallup organization, often explained to leaders, managers, and employees that “you cannot be anything you want to be, but you can be a whole lot more of who you already are.” Conventional wisdom has alleged, for many years, that your weaknesses represent your greatest opportunities for development. Employees have long focused on fixing weaknesses to increase chances of success. But recent research suggests that this long-standing advice may not be the best coaching. In fact, when leaders, teams, cultures, and individuals focus on strengths, they have a better chance at winning than if they focus on improving deficiencies. This same research shows that empowering, successful cultures are those that engage employees and capitalize on individual capabilities.
Earlier this year, CNBC published an online article by Author, Motivational Speaker, and Management Consultant Marcus Buckingham entitled “Three Simple Things You Can Do to be Successful at Work.” Buckingham believes that employees should seek out activities that they receive great satisfaction doing—the things that fill them up and strengthen them intellectually as these tend to be the things they are most effective at. He goes on to explain that when we are involved in an activity using our strengths, it feels natural to us, and we are more inclined to experience accomplishment. Employees should determine what their natural tendencies are, where their natural skills and advantages lie, and cultivate those. “Learning is like new buds on an existing branch,” says Buckingham. “If you want to win, if you want to excel, if you want to stand out, you’re going to have to take the few unique things about you that are beautiful and powerful, and take them seriously, and turn them into contributions.”
Buckingham also notes that things that drain our energy, though we may excel at them, tend to inhibit our learning. Brain science indicates that we shut down our capacity to learn something new from the experience because we have a very low energy level to complete the exercise. Staff members should nurture and promote what they do well so they can maximize their contributions and continue to feel good about what they’re giving and receiving every day. Here is some advice on how best to put your strongest qualities to work for you:
1. Identify your strengths, name them, and concentrate on them.
Employees are encouraged to solicit input from others and identify the core strengths that make them unique, valuable, and passionate about their work. There are robust ways to discover your unique talents, abilities, and ways of thinking by talking with your manager, mentors, peers, or a career coach. Try them all and see what works. Online options such as Myers Briggs or Gallup Strengths are available and can be helpful in naming strengths. Self-understanding and self-support is key. Concentrating on your strengths brings a better sense of fulfillment and forward progress.
2. Don’t compare yourself with others, but approach people who inspire or even challenge you for your growth. It’s a whole new world and we have so much to learn from each other; explore the sides of yourself that you may not even think existed. Consider aligning yourself with people you may feel competitive towards and give yourself permission to learn.
3. Offset your development areas by capitalizing on the strengths of others.
One of the greatest values of having a team and coworkers is the variety of perspectives, talents, and skills to get the job done successfully. While we cannot be experts at everything, we typically are surrounded by others who have the know-how to get things done successfully. Learn from those around you. Capitalize on the strength of others, and while the work is ongoing, use the experience as an opportunity for observation and personal progress.
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LEADERSHIP
Why Leaders Should Focus On Strengths, Not Weaknesses
Motivating others is one of the most significant issues we face in leadership. Strength-based approaches can be a powerful tool for increasing motivation and performance. Comparing the impact and the cost of it, I believe strengths-based strategies are a worthy investment for leaders, yet it seems this approach does not get as much space in leaders repertoire as it deserves. In this article, I'll be delving into two issues: what makes a stengths-based strategy so impactful and the ways leaders can better leverage the strength-based approach in the workplace.
The Impact Of A Strengths-Based Strategy
Based on Martin Seligman's work with positive psychology, the VIA Institute on Character and Gallup have done research on strength-based approaches in the workplace. In one of the studies, Gallup found that employees feel more confident, self-aware and productive when focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses. In turn, this leads to higher employee engagement, increased performance and significantly lower attrition rates.
The research results make more sense when we analyze the outcomes of our relationship with strengths. Our strengths are great resources for increasing our energy and making us feel dynamic. It's not uncommon to lose track of time when focusing on an area where our strengths shine — it's an experience you may recall from your youth. Usually, these are remembered as joyful moments. The result of putting our strengths into what we are doing is joy, energy and feeling alive.
So, why do we accept the loss of joy? The answer is so familiar: While living in a "fixing" environment, we focus on our weaknesses to fix, rather than the strengths we alread have and can act on. Author Marcus Buckingham puts it another way in his book Now, Discover Your Strengths. He asked which grade parents would focus on when their kids bring home their report card if it showed an A in English, an A in Social Studies, a C in Biology and an F in Algebra. The majority of the parents (77%) said they would focus on the F in Algebra. This illustrated how, unfortunately, we are so used to focusing on our weaknesses since the very beginning of our learning journey. There is a common belief that we have got to fill the gap. Otherwise, we will be weaker. It's the idea that only if are weaknesses could be corrected, we could be fixed and feel complete!
The problem is this mindset causes a definite feeling of insufficiency. This sense of "I'm not enough" invites other negative emotions, like anger, fear and anxiety, which do not help us to get motivated or boost our creativity so that we can better think of solutions to the problems that we face.
We all know that it takes a lot of energy to "fix things" and minimize our weaknesses. The painful part of this approach is that while we have so many valuable resources, we spend a vast amount of our energy trying to get a little bit better on our weaknesses. Making weaknesses the center of attention starts at home and school at an early age, and consciously or subconsciously continues at work and in every part of our lives. Therefore, the most outdated approach in leadership is to focus on weaknesses and fixing them instead of giving some of that space to strengths. Focusing on weaknesses instead of strengths is a disadvantageous attitude.
How Leaders Can Leverage A Strengths-Based Approach
There are many effective tools that can help leaders capitalize on strengths at work. The most significant step in transforming from a weakness-focused mindset to a strength-based approach involves two things. First, the leaders' intention to focus on strengths. When leaders identify and concentrate on well-articulated strengths in the given context, employees will likely view their managers as resources that bring motivation, success and life into the workplace.
Second is the ability to develop awareness and competencies for assessing strengths before putting them into practice. The more we infuse these into our daily routines, the fastest it soaks into the work culture. These assessments could be practiced in daily, weekly and monthly meetings or retreats. You could design a project or group exercise to be completed as a team that involves various kinds of tools and methods, like peer group work, coaching dyads or similar workgroups. In my decade of experiencing coaching groups, I've had the opportunity to witness excellent examples of groups working with strengths, harnessing the power to increase motivation, the level of communication and trust within the team.
Leaders could also add KPIs to performance appraisals, depending on the strengths employees could put to work and the actions required to follow through. At the team level, the team could decide on their strengths and could have a list of competencies that they will put into action. Leaders could organize a specific workshop after a team assessment for strengths, focused on the actions that they can take to implement those specific team strengths on a regular basis. On both the individual and team level, it helps to focus on the strengths and action plan at certain times, like at the beginning of the meetings or at the retreats, to specify the intentions of how to put specific strengths into action.
Leaders often look for better ways to elevate leadership skills to achieve more significant goals. Strength-based management is one of the most critical leadership approaches that can motivate followers. In my experience, you will reap the rewards of this transformation, and it will significantly contribute to a healthier work culture in your organization.
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