Yesterday in a conversation with my friend and Internet Guru, Miguel Lucas, he told me about an interesting questionnaire that looks to identify your general strengths so that you can build on those. As the creator of the questionnaire Tom Rath argues, identifying your strengths and building on those is a far more likely to bring you more benefits than identifying your flaws and invest your precious time in improving them.

This reminds me of what Peter Drucker used to say to his clients, telling them that they basically had two choices, either they work on improving what they had identified as their weaknesses and in this case with years of work they might arrive one day at being mediocre, or they could focus on improving at what they knew they were good at and work at that, an effort that might perhaps lead them to be world beaters.

Myers Briggs

Another example of this approach is Isabel Myers who worked tirelessly for forty years to build a questionnaire based on Carl Jung’s theory of type with the idea of helping people to know what their natural preferences were so that they could choose jobs that were in line with them, probably leading to more satisfying careers and a happier life.

Getting the most out of your feedback

Over the years working with 360º Feedback I have seen the same pattern of behaviour working with managers, everybody seems to be obsessed with finding out and then later working on all those areas that people tell them they are not particularly good at. They virtually ignore all those areas that people say they are good at and build their development plan around improving all of their weaknesses. If you think about it, it’s crazy and yet this is what people do.

As Rath points out in his book, our culture is full of stories about the underdog beating the odds to finally achieve their goal. What these stories leave out of course is that if they had concentrated on areas in which they actually had some natural ability, perhaps they could have been successful in a quarter of the time and probably been much happier along the way.

Concentrate on your strengths doesn’t mean ignore your weaknesses

I am not saying that we should just pass over the bad feedback, we need some strategy in order to neutralise things that are getting in the way of us being successful. We may indeed need to work on them in order to have a reasonable level of competence, but we can also delegate or change some aspects of our role. What I am saying is that if we build on what we are already good at, become even better at it, leverage it, then that is going to be much more effective than focussing on what we are bad at.

How do you build on your strengths?