Play Strengths, Not Weaknesses

Our impulse is that we should improve upon our weaknesses, whether they are yours or your teammates. Sometimes our impulses are wrong.

From early on in life, we are often encouraged to shore up our weaknesses, minimizing their impact. As leaders, we tend to try to improve upon our team’s weaknesses. While moderating weaknesses can be a somewhat fruitful endeavor, I find it far more effective to focus energy on playing to strengths.  Let us explore why.

We often become aware of our weaknesses because someone criticizes us for them.  Or we try to accomplish something and fail due to a critical weakness that prevents our success.  It is easy to feel bad in response to failure or criticism, and immediately jump to the idea that we will not experience that bad feeling if we fix the weakness.

Reflect for a moment on where weaknesses come from. Significant weaknesses may be rooted in our personalities, our history of experiences, or the influence of our relationships. Regardless, significant weaknesses are areas undeveloped over likely a long period of time and that our natural tendencies reinforce.  That means that simply resolving to be better in an area often means that we have to swim upstream against many countervailing forces.  Of course, if the weakness we are talking about happens to be a minor, not well-entrenched one, we can certainly take some steps to moderate it a bit. Maybe put a few guardrails in place or try to invest a bit of time and energy in learning the missing information that could make an incremental difference.

However, I suggest that it will be far more fruitful to focus on playing to your strengths.  Know your own strengths.  Know your team’s strengths.  And play to those. This strategy works well because when you play to strengths, you can often overcome critical barriers to progress.  In addition, people often enjoy using their strengths. The consequence of this positive cascade is that people tend to grow stronger and stronger in their personal areas of strength over time.  The enjoyment of success entices us to continue to grow and get better, and often our strengths are rooted in our natural personality tendencies. 

As a personal example, I remember people commenting even when I was a young child that I was prone to “taking over groups” and displaying strong leadership tendencies. These characteristics were part of my core makeup as a person. As I grew up, I revealed a continuing fascination with reading books about leadership, watching and learning from other leaders, and practicing leadership in a wide variety of contexts. I was not particularly conscious of the process for many years, but in hindsight, the pattern is clear that my natural personality and tendencies led me down that path. Now, decades later, I leverage that deep well of experience to lead in many different situations.  In fact, it is such a deeply ingrained habit that if I am in a situation where I want not to be leading, I have to quite consciously and intentionally stop myself from exercising those tendencies. This same pattern is also true in some of my other areas of strength, and I have observed the same patterns in others that I have known well over long periods of time.

The concept of playing to strengths extends beyond just what we choose to develop and exercise personally. As a leader, I find it more effective to be always on the lookout for the areas in which my team members are strong and then look for opportunities to give them work that plays to their strengths. Our team’s likelihood of success is far greater when I am organizing the work so that team members are contributing their individual strengths to accomplish the group’s goal.  And my team members are far more likely to succeed when working in their areas of strength.

Over the years, some of my greatest partners and teammates have displayed a wide disparity between their strengths and their weaknesses.  They had epic strengths and equally spectacular weaknesses, and yet they moved mountains when they engaged those strengths. In successfully leading and managing them, I have often been confronted by others on the team who want me to “fix” this or that weakness that one of these amazing people displays.  “Why can’t you get him to communicate the plan to the rest of us proactively?” “Why can’t you get him to handle multiple priorities simultaneously rather than getting so singularly focused?” “Why can’t they just conjure up the first draft of our document?” The reality is that these talented individuals are unlikely to change so dramatically, and it will just be damaging and disheartening to try to get the leopard to change his spots.  So, while I might try to help someone mitigate the impact of their weaknesses a little bit or at least help them become aware of them, generally, I find it is far better just to structure the work assignments such that it plays to that individual’s strengths. When I am assembling the team, I surround talented individuals with others who have complementary strengths. This is a team/systems approach to solving the problem of how to best get the work done. It focuses on assembling and aligning peoples’ strengths together to be more effective than any individual because the team can leverage strengths in multiple areas.  This is an excellent example of how a team can accomplish more than an individual.

For instance, in building businesses, my teams are often confronted with the need to produce documents of various sorts, whether fundraising documents, marketing documents, regulatory documents, product design documents, or other documents.  Some of us are great at taking a blank sheet of paper and creating the first draft of the message, generating that initial burst of content fodder.  Others are great at refining and editing the messages into something tight, accurate, and precise.  Still others are great at making sure that the final draft is fully polished and the details are followed through on.  When someone good at editing or polishing tries to get into the initial content generation blast, it is often frustrating for all involved.  Similarly, if those who excel at that initial brainstorming phase are responsible for making sure the final draft is precisely written, we often miss critical details. This is where a collaborative team effort, where each team member is playing to their strengths, means that we get the work done better, more efficiently, and with more fun along the way.

To apply these concepts to yourself, make sure you know your areas of strength.  If you are not sure, ask those who know you well to identify your strengths.  Notice that you have probably already been building on your strengths over time. If you can, try to invest even further in building those strengths. Your goal is to overwhelm your weaknesses by playing to your strengths and look to complementary partners to produce great results.

As a team leader, extend the concept further by becoming very conscious and aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your team. Now, focus on combining various team members’ strengths and weaknesses in a way that creates a stronger whole. Do not sap your team’s energy by asking people to do work in areas of weakness unless you absolutely have to.

Sometimes you may find that someone’s weaknesses dominate their strengths in the context of your team.  That is when you need to consider if it is time to change up your team.  Otherwise, as you have opportunities, be mindful of what areas your team is weak in and intentionally look to build up those areas by hiring people with strengths in the needed areas as the opportunities present themselves.

You will find an easier, more fun, and more fruitful path to success by playing to strengths.