Knowing your Strengths and Using Them

I’m good at analyzing patterns.

I’m not so good at negotiating.

So you can guess where the average boss would put the emphasis for my development: negotiation skills!

My daughter’s a superb writer.

She has time management issues.

For every time I nag her about not getting something done, I should notice the great work she does in her fiction and non-fiction 10 times.

Do you build on your strengths often enough, or are you constantly trying to shore up your weak spots?

David Zinger conducted a survey recently about how much time managers spend on their strengths. He reports that only three out of 10 of the managers he surveyed were working from their strengths the majority of the time.

This blows me away. When you hire a photographer, you hire them for the kind of photos they do best. Same thing with a designer, trainer, painter or ski instructor.

Yet, when it comes to managers, we assume everyone’s a generalist who has to be equally good at managing people, budgeting, negotiating, planning, etc.

Says Zinger:

“The list of their greatest strength at work was somewhat vague. Communication, organization, problem solving, and knowledge were most frequently cited strengths. I believe managers would benefit from more detail and a sharper focus on their strengths (see the list of strengths listed at the end of this post).”

It’s fine to work on the skills that aren’t your natural strengths. But not to the exclusion of the ones that are.

Photo by Lolly Weinhold via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence.