Career Articles

Your Greatest Area of Growth is in Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

By Faith West, International Leadership and Peak Performance Coach

Nancy spent three months planning a meeting with the major thought leaders in cancer treatment. She created a Needs Assessment with these physician thought leaders, the sales team, and her marketing colleagues to make sure that all the participants would come away with the feeling of having made a contribution and that something good had been accomplished in the meeting. The evaluations were in. The meeting was a success. The physicians loved it and some even requested a follow-up meeting. Nancy was ecstatic. Her hard work had paid off. Her enthusiasm lasted only until she got back to the office where her manager said, “That was the best meeting you have run to date but you chose the wrong hotel.”

Nancy was deflated. All the energy was knocked out of her celebration with that one word, “but”, and the negative message that followed it.

Nancy is an expert at what she does, having risen to her position over the past 20 years from being a sales representative to marketing executive at a major pharmaceutical company. She loves her job. She loves her customers. Yet every day it gets harder and harder for her to make the forty-five-minute drive to work under the eyes of a boss who manages to always zero in on her weak spot and magnify it so that it overshadows all of Nancy’s success.

In spite of her success with her clients and her peers, the cushy paycheque that is deposited into her bank account every two weeks, and the bonus she receives at the end of every year because of her successful marketing campaigns, Nancy is ready to leave this job.

She is being driven out by a boss who is compelled to point out her weaknesses, on every occasion, with the mistaken belief that this will give Nancy the motivation to eliminate them. It is highly likely that she believes that she is doing the best for Nancy, that by pointing out Nancy’s weak spots, she is revealing “areas of opportunity” for growth.

In truth, her tactics are accomplishing the opposite effect – sucking the joy out of Nancy’s work and crushing her incentive to perform.

To be fair, Nancy’s boss has not come to this way of thinking on her own. As Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton points out in their book, Now Discover Your Strengths, “Most organizations take their employee’s strengths for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses.”

Nancy’s boss has risen to her position as manager with an approach that has been drummed into her by those who trained her to look for weaknesses and drum them out of their direct reports.

Buckingham and Clifton say that most companies operate under two flawed assumptions: “Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything, and each person’s greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness.”

Most organizations spend an exorbitant amount of time and money in trying to fix weaknesses with the belief that anyone can learn to be competent in anything. They also build their reward system and promotions around the belief that those who learn and apply this lesson are the most valuable. While, a well-rounded employee with lots of experience is vital to a company’s success, it is not true that every employee can do everything or even needs to be able to do everything.

Companies that operate in this weakness-oriented mode end up with mediocre performance and profits as well as high turnover rates due to disgruntled employees. Buckingham and Clifton say, “As long as an organization operates under these assumptions, it will never capitalize on the strengths of each employee.”

To change this focus and move toward stronger companies and happier employees, companies need to change their assumptions and focus on the two principles that “guide the world’s best managers: Each person’s talents are enduring and unique, and each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.”

Nancy is not waiting for her employer to discover her strengths and help her work on them. She knows that there is very little likelihood of this happening. She is doing the work herself with the help of a coach.

While she is still working under the handicap of a manager who is operating in weakness mode, Nancy has opened up a whole new path for her future by starting a quest to discover her talents and strengths and stimulate her growth. Now, when she hears the “but,” she chooses to focus on what comes before the “but”, and not take offence at the words that come after it. With this new attitude, Nancy is able to deal more effectively with her manager, while she makes a decision on whether to stay or go.

 

Do you have a story of the practical application of values at home or at work? How have you been inspired by a leader? Contribute your inspiring story of leadership and let Faith West of Higher Ground Coaching know if you would like her to write about it.  E-mail to: highergroundcoaching@ns.sympatico.ca.