Leveraging on strengths

Right from our childhood, we have been cautioned about our weaknesses. We have been always taught to work fix them. But does anyone talk about our strengths? Do we know who we are or what our strengths are? In our everyday life we come across many who have mastered their chosen fields. Is there a pattern to excellence that correlates to strengths?

Often people decide on a career because of family or peer pressure. Consider this: have you chosen the right field and picked up the right role? Both are important for you to really excel in it.

Getting to do what you really love is the first lead to success. But do you really take time to identify this. To excel in you chosen field, you need to be the expert in that field. Cultivate your strengths; organize them so you can apply them to your personal and professional life. Only when you build your life around your strength that you become successful.

Strength is one's ability to perform at the highest level. Bill Gates' strength lay in building on an innovation to invent a user friendly product like Microsoft Office. Or closer home, Reliance Industry's ability to conceive and execute mega projects within budget and before time is strength. Similarly, ICICI bank leveraging its strengths of innovation and speed to build the largest retail bank in India is also its strength.

For any strength, one has to be able to do it consistently and be able to deliver superior performance. It also means that one does not do everything, but identifies what you are good at and leave the rest to the others. You have to recognize that you can excel in a task only by maximizing your strengths, and not by fixing the weaknesses. It instils in you the self confidence to understand your uniqueness and at the same time appreciate others.

For this, you need to identify your natural talent vs. the things that you can learn. Do practice and discipline make you perfect in an area that may not be your natural talent area? Experts say "no". The practice no doubt helps you improve and get better, but may not make you exceptional. You will have to be able to distinguish between what is innate and what can be acquired with practice.

As explained by Marcus Buckingham in his book: "Now Discover Your Strengths", the three factors that build strength are:

Talent: natural recurring patterns of behaviourKnowledge: consist of facts and lessons learnedSkill: Steps for any activityThese three combine to create strength. Talent is innate and it is needed to build strength, while skills and knowledge are acquired. One of the most popular training programs in the world today is 'Leadership Skills' training. One could then question: can you develop your strength as a leader without having the innate talent for leadership?

At the work place this becomes even more important as millions of people working in organizations across the globe are struggling to deliver on their KRA's. Are they working at their optimal levels? Are they playing by their strengths? Just imagine if you could identify the strengths of each member of the workforce and allow that individual to focus on that alone.

We always look for well rounded students and also employees, which may potentially lead us to mediocrity. Instead we should select talented people for their strengths and then build a team of equals with different strengths that complement each other, without wasting time on fixing their weaknesses. Lincoln's 'Team of Equals' is an excellent example to highlight the point. Each individual is different and it is the leader's responsibility to identify each member of the team based on their strength and match him to the task at hand.

However, the process of strength identification cannot be left entirely to the organization alone. It is also upto the individual to locate it. As Peter Drucker wrote in his book, "The Effective Executive", one who builds on his own strengths, his superiors, his subordinates, and the strength of the situation.

The author is senior partner, Hunt Partners