Strengths Over Weaknesses: Where Leaders Should Focus
As leaders, one of our greatest responsibilities is seeing the potential in our team members and helping them grow into great leaders themselves. But when it comes to their personal and professional development, too many leaders focus on improving weaknesses rather than fostering strengths.
Every single person you’ll work with during your career will excel in some areas over others. It’s natural, and it’s why collaboration is such a powerful tool in life and business. We can’t all be great at everything, and we don’t have to be. Instead of demanding perfection, focus on the areas where your team members are already talented.
Prioritizing strengths over weaknesses has many benefits, including:
Faster Growth
Imagine that you’re a strong but untrained swimmer. You’ve also never played baseball, and you’re clumsy with hand-eye coordination. What do you think would take longer, learning the backstroke or learning how to pitch a curveball?
Most likely, you could polish up your swimming skills and see great results with just a little bit of practice. On the other hand, you’d probably have to practice for weeks to throw a half-decent curveball.
Leaning into your team members’ strengths produces faster results than overcoming their weaknesses. When you want them to level up their leadership skills, enhancing and expanding upon their existing competencies will take you much further — in a much shorter timeframe — than building skills in areas where they struggle.
Faster growth is helpful for your business, yes. But more importantly, it’s empowering for the team member in question. It’s discouraging to dedicate lots of time to something and see very few results, but witnessing your own improvement is a thrilling experience.
Higher Engagement
Think back to your school days and the subjects you were strongest in. Now think about which classes you were more engaged with. Your answers are probably the same. If you were strong in English, you most likely enjoyed participating in that class and completing related assignments. On the other hand, if science made no sense to you, you probably faded into the background during class discussions and put off your science homework as much as possible.
Engagement comes naturally when someone works in their wheelhouse. Focusing on employee weaknesses will cause your people to disengage. Others may become discouraged or frustrated, and they may even start to doubt their role in your organization.
If you want your team members — your company’s future leaders — to be engaged, lean into their natural abilities instead of their flaws.
More Confidence
The best leaders are confident in their abilities, and this confidence is contagious. As humans, we’re wired to trust self-assured people because they make us feel secure. Confident leaders build trust in others and can easily inspire people with their vision. On the other hand, unconfident leaders foster doubt in their teams. It’s hard to trust them if they don’t trust themselves first.
So when it comes to creating new leaders, confidence is a very desirable trait. And all of us feel more confident harnessing our strengths rather than our weaknesses. Weaknesses are outside our comfort zone. Navigating them can feel like a minefield, with hidden traps at every turn.
Put a numbers person in front of a crowd and watch them falter. Give them an equation to solve and watch them transform into a beacon of confidence. And, confidence compounds. The more your employees lean into the areas where they’re already strong, the more their confidence grows.
Sustainability
With burnout posing such a huge risk to modern workers, sustainable efforts and workflows are vital. And this is yet another reason to coach strengths over weaknesses.
Working to improve one’s weaknesses is endlessly taxing. It zaps time, energy, and confidence, and it often feels like you’re taking one step forward, three steps back. Ask your team members to do this day after day, and you’ll soon find them exhausted.
On the other hand, focusing on their existing talents is revitalizing and exciting. Rather than stealing their energy, it adds to it, allowing them to thrive day after day without feeling drained and overworked.
Higher Fulfillment
For those of you who haven’t read our Fulfillment Theory yet, fulfillment requires three key experiences, which are passion, purpose, and progress. In short:
- Passion is loving what you do
- Purpose is believing what you do matters
- Progress is seeing the impact of your work
Leaning into strengths fuels all three drivers of fulfillment. Our passions and our skills usually intersect, and it’s natural to find purpose in the activities that spark passion. And, as we learned above when I discussed faster growth, progress is far more achievable when you focus on strengths over weaknesses.
For leaders, fulfillment is one of the greatest things we can help our people achieve. Start by focusing on where they excel instead of what they lack.
Natural-Born Leaders
If you want to help create the next generation of natural-born leaders, start with their natural strengths. Do they have weaknesses? Of course. But everyone does, and no one exceeds expectations in every skill and trait.
Focus on strengths and you’ll have a team member that is fantastic in some areas.
Focus on weaknesses and they’ll be average across the board.
You aren’t perfect, and none of your team members will be, either. Instead of harping on the areas that could be a bit better, lean into the areas where they can make the greatest difference.