Build on Your Strengths Or Tackle Your Weaknesses?

Improve on your weaknesses or build on your strengths:  Which one would you focus on to achieve greater success?

If, like 59% of people surveyed by Marcus Buckingham, co-author of First, Break All the Rules, you chose "work on your weaknesses," you're wasting your time, says Buckingham.  At best, focusing a critical eye on your weaknesses might help prevent failure; but it will never help you attain excellence.

More importantly, the same goes, in spades, for people you manage.  What makes a great manager? 

• The ability to find, and then capitalize upon, employee's unique traits.
• The knack for finding an employee's talent and turning it into performance.
• Playing "chess, not checkers"—knowing that employees work differently and have different "moves."
• In short, knowing that you don't have a dozen associates working for you; you have a dozen individuals.

What exactly are an employee's, or an associate's, "strengths and talents?"  Actually, it's not a metaphysical question; it's an empirical exercise.  What are they good at?  What do they seem to enjoy?  What do they learn quickly?  What assignments do they feel are intrinsically rewarding?   Give them more of those things, and less of other things; in other words, capitalize on their natural proclivities.  Swim downstream, not upstream.

How intuitively sensible is this?  Plenty:  Haven't you experienced in your own career the sense that at times you were shadowboxing with cotton wool?  That you couldn't get traction, couldn't be effective, couldn't figure out what you were doing wrong, and at some point didn't even want to know?  (If you've never been there, would you kindly email me the special recipe for your coffee in the morning?)  But at other times you've been in the flow, challenged but not overwhelmed, engaged but not enervated, learning but not struggling. 

Assume others are no different.   As a gross generalization, litigators and deal lawyers have different personality types.   Forcibly transplanting an individual who has found his  niche from one practice to the other will almost surely be an excursion into the veil of tears.

Taking matters a step further, what distinguishes a manager from a leader? 

Let's grant that leaders are fundamentally different than managers.  Buckingham believes the key distinction is that leaders:

• are focused on the future, not the present
• are almost maniacally, unshakably optimistic
• have tremendous confidence in their own suitability for the role as leader, and
• rally people behind a "universal truth."

The "universal truth" must be embraced, above all, with pellucid clarity. 

So, for example, when Rudy Giuliani assumed the mayoralty of the famously ungovernable New York City in 1993, he did not attack problems with the schools and the parks and the municipal unions and crime and the budget, although any and all of these were certainly deserving of SWAT-team interventions:  He focused on reducing crime and improving the overall quality of life by starting with a crackdown on almost perversely minor offenses, from turnstile-jumping and graffiti in the subways to "squeegee men" in the streets. 

And Giuliani consistently tied it all back to a vision of a future New York City—a safe, clean, civilized one.

As Buckingham puts it:  "When you want to lead, start with the future.  Get specific. And get vivid."