Manage your weaknesses but focus on your Strengths

In Go Put your Strengths to Work Marcus Buckingham persuades us that it is vitally important to our happiness and success at work to understand clearly what our strengths and weaknesses are.  Nothing new here, you might think.  The crucial difference between Buckingham's (and the rest of the Strength's Movement) approach and the conventional business approach is that once we have that information, we start to focus most of our energy and attention on our strengths, and less on our "development areas".

Traditionally, it is held true in the business world that in order to excel in our work, we need to know what areas we are weak in so that we can plan a necessary training and development programme to overcome those weaknesses, and over time be able to add them to our list of strengths.  Buckingham argues this is a fallacy.

"The point is simply that you will not learn and grow the most in your areas of weakness.  Instead you will learn and grow the least .. and what learning and growth you do achieve will be hard won."

It makes far more sense to concentrate your energy on your areas of strength, because that is where your development will make leaps and bounds, and in applying your strengths you can make the most positive contribution to your company.

"You will be most optimistic, most courageous, and most ambitious when playing to an area of strength.  And when you hit resistance or obtacles to your goals, you will bounce back fastest when those goals centre on one of your strengths."

Buckingham works with another key difference in the traditional approach to strengths, and that lies in how we identify what our strengths and weaknesses are: you are the best judge of your strengths and weaknesses, not your boss, and not some objective third party who applies a series of test measures.  The reason being that your strengths and weaknesses are clarified by your feelings about different activities, and only you can know how you feel. 

Profile tests such as Myers Briggs can help you to identify your talents, but a strength combines talent, skill, knowledge and appetite.  Something you're good at, but for which you have no natural inclination to do, is not a strength. 

"Your strengths are those activities that make you feel strong.  It's not that these are activities without effort.  There is almost certainly effort, but it is, seemingly, effortless.  You feel challenged, but in just the way you like to be challenged."

When working with your strengths you are completely focussed, naturally curious and want to learn more, you find yourself in a natural flow where time flies by, and you're creative, productive and effective.

By contrast, when working with your weaknesses you struggle to concentrate, time drags, you're bored/frustrated/irritated (or all three), and your productivity levels sink.  Why then would you deliberately spend time working on these areas?  Obviously, it won't be possible to stop doing everything in your job description that weakens you, but it might be possible to stop doing some.  It is certainly possible to find ways to manage these areas so that you spend less time on them, and have more time to spend on your areas of strength.

Buckingham outlines some strategies to both FREE your strengths and STOP your weaknesses, and he argues that attending to both sides of the equation are equally important.

FREE your Strengths

Focus - identify exactly how and where each strength helps you in your current role. 

• When do you get to use this strength at work?
• In what activities?
• How often do you get to use it?
• When and how has it proved really helpful?
• What feedback have you received about it?

Release - find the missed opportunities to leverage each strength in your current role. 

• What new situations can you put yourself in to use this strength more?
• Can you change your work schedule to put yourself in these situations?  Do you need to talk to anyone to make this happen?
• What new systems or techniques can you try to accelerate this strength?
• How can you measure/track how much you use this strength?
• Are you struggling with any of your current job responsibilities?  Which ones? How can you use this strength to help you overcome this?

Educate - Learn new skills and techniques to sharpen each strength

• What new skills can you learn to leverage this strength?
• What actions can you take to learn these skills?  Books, classes, online research?
• Who can you job shadow?
• Who can you talk to about how to use this strength more effectively? 

Expand - Build your job toward each strength

• How can you share your best practices around this strength with others?  When can you do this?
• How can you expand your role to make better use of this strength?

STOP your Weaknesses

Stop doing the activity and see if anyone notices or cares

• Is this activity/weakness critical to your success on your job?
• If so, how can you reduce the amount of time you spend on it?
• If not, is there a way you could just stop doing it?
• Who would you need to talk to, if anyone, to make this happen?

Team up with someone who is strengthened by the very activity that weakens you

• Who do you work with that really likes to do this activity?
• How can you arrange to swap activities?
• Who could teach you a trick or technique for how to do this activity more quickly/efficiently?
• How can you make this activity more fun for you?

Offer up one of your strengths and gradually steer your job towards this strength and away from the weaknesses

• Which of your strengths can you use to get this activity done more easily?
• How can you gradually carve a new role for yourself by regularly volunteering your strengths?

Perceive your weakness from a different perspective

• How can you shift your perspective on the way you do the activity?
• Would it be helpful to do this activity at a different time of day?
• How can you look at this activity through the lens of one of your strengths?
• How will doing this activity support you in maximizing your strengths?
• What connection, if any, can you make between this activity and something that interests you or is really important to you?

Obviously, before you can start to implement any of these strategies you need to first get clear on what strengthens and what weakens you.  Buckingham proposes a three step process:

1) Capture - over the course of a working week, anytime you catch yourself feeling:

Powerful – Confident – Natural – Smooth - On fire - High – Great – Authentic – like “That was easy” – or “When can I do this again?” – or “I can so do this”

interrupt yourself for a minute to record what you were doing and how you were feeling at the time.

Similarly, anytime you feel:

Drained – Time dragging - Unable to concentrate – Frustrated - Wiped out – like you’re forcing yourself – Irritated – Bored - Fed up

again, stop and record what you were doing and how you were feeling.  Special sheets are provided for this at the back of the book - green for "I liked it when..." and red for "I loathed it when...".  But you could use a pocket sized notebook and assign the front to the activities you enjoyed and the back to those you hated (but be sure to use just one leaf per activity, not one page).

2) Clarify - after a week, take your bunch of "green" and "red" statements and order them according to preference.  Then take your top 3 favourite activities and your top 3 hated activities.  With each activity in turn, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does it matter why I do this activity?
• Does it matter who I do this activity with/to/for?
• Does it matter when I am doing this activity?
• Does it matter what this activity is about?

With the insights from answering these questions, you then carefully craft a statement for each activity that begins with "I feel strong when.." or "I feel weak when.."

Here's an example of one of each of my statements:

“I feel strong when  writing material that conveys a message that is meaningful to me, and which I believe to be of value to others, and which I feel inspired to write.”

“I feel weak when forcing myself to write something I don’t feel like writing, just because I feel I should, or because I made a commitment to do so.”

Notice the specific detail that separates a weakness from a strength around the acitivity of writing for me.  The same activity could strengthen or weaken me depending on the context in which I undertake it.  So it is very important that you get your statements just right for you.

3) Confirm - Buckingham gives a process to help you be certain that your statement is bang on the money for you.  You may have noticed by now that he likes working with acronyms, and here he gives us the SIGNs that we've got our statements right:

Success

• Have you been really successful at this type of activity?
• Have other people often told you you have a gift for it?
• Have you received prizes or recognition for doing this type of activity?

Contrary to what you might think, this is the least important sign that you have accurately identified a strength.  Your lack of "success" in this area may merely be down to a lack of experience in it so far.

Instinct

• Do you do this type of activity every day?
• Do you often find yourself volunteering for this type of activity?
• Is this type of activity a gut reaction for you?

Growth

• Do you pick this type of activity up quickly?
• Do you find yourself thinking about this type of activity every day?
• Are you impatient to learn new techniques for doing this activity?

Needs

• Do you always look forward to doing this type of activity?
• Is it fun for you to think back to when you were doing this kind of activity?
• Is doing this type of activity one of your greatest personal satisfactions?

The above questions are designed to confirm you've got your strengths statements right.  To do the same for your weakness statements, flip the questions around (eg S: I have tried this type of activity repeatedly with little success; I: I look for ways to avoid doing this type of activity etc).

Once you've reached this point, it's time to choose your FREE and STOP strategies.  In order to help you focus on this, Buckingham recommends you make a Strong Week Plan every single week.  Every Friday evening or Monday morning, take fifteen minutes to identify two specific actions to free your strengths and two more actions to stop your weaknesses.

Does this all sound like too much work for you?  Remember, the purpose behind all of these processes is "to turn the best of our job into the most of our job".   Getting to this point will take some time and determination, but the pay-off is to experience a sense of flow, enjoyment and (oh-my-God!) actually being happy in your work.  And if those benefits aren't enough in themselves, as Chief Happiness Officer Alex Kjerulf keeps telling us, happiness at work leads to increased productivity, creativity and effectivness- all pathways to that highly coveted destination: "success".

I'm more into journeys than destinations myself, but either way you decide to approach this process, you only stand to benefit from it.  This is a doing book, and it's more than worth the investment of your time.

To read more about this book visit the latest post on it at Joyful Jubiliant Learning, which has at the bottom links to all other posts as part of the project.