Do You Develop Your Strengths and Starve Your Weaknesses?

I as soon as labored as a companion in a worldwide consulting company. As a part of that assignment, I helped executives learn to suppose strategically. Strategic questioning and strategic making plans are wonderful but equally essential disciplines. While strategic plans are regularly and inappropriately linear extrapolations of the beyond, real strategic questioning requires vision and creativity - "what if" questioning.

In the one's days, I forever took customers via a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) evaluation. Executives detail their organization's contemporary strengths and weaknesses as well as contemporary and prospective competitive, financial and regulatory possibilities and threats. The ultimate goal is to broaden plans that will leverage strengths and improve weaknesses, at the same time as exploiting opportunities and alleviating threats.

During crowning glory, executives, first of all, centered on weaknesses, their thoughts being: "Why must we spend our time doing whatever approximately our strengths? They're already strengths!"

Here's why!

Peter Drucker once stated, "The number one activity of a manager is to make energy efficient." Most executives spend an excessive amount of time enhancing weaknesses and no longer enough time leveraging strengths. With the speed of competitive exchange that exists nowadays, by the point an enterprise builds a new center competence, it's going to in all likelihood be beside the point. Leveraging current strengths is also a less high priced proposition than building or buying new ones.

Today, I spend plenty of my time helping character executives broaden and enforce actions that'll propel their very own overall performance. The challenge is comparable. People nearly continually want to consciousness on improving their weaknesses. I constantly listen to feedback just like the following: "My organization's CEO thinks I'm a clearly terrific innovative thinker. She does not accept as true with that my "comply with-through" is as good as it needs to be."

This individual's usual technique would be to craft a development plan that specializes in improving comply with-thru. Here's the problem: Depending on how large the deficit, this character's follow-thru competencies may additionally simplest become marginally better after which handiest with a variety of work. Both the organization and the individual might be higher off figuring out ways to leverage his strengths.

I'm now not advocating the overlook of talent deficiencies. What I am saying is that organizational leaders and their pals commonly deplete too much energy and money on deficiencies and attend insufficiently to augmenting or leveraging present talents.

Next month, I'll take this examination one step similarly. Even whilst humans sufficiently acknowledge and exploit their strengths, they do not often integrate an equally vital consideration: What are they truly obsessed on? Being skilled and being excited are equally crucial dimensions of personal effectiveness.