Lift Up Your Hearts!

The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2005)

[This is Part Two.  Part One is here.] 

The mediocre manager believes that most things are learnable and therefore that the essence of management is to identiry each person's weaker areas and eradicate them.

The great manager...believes that the most influential qualities of a person are innate and therefore that the essence of management is to deploy these innate qualities as effectively as possible and so drive performance. 

I find Marcus Buckingham's belief in the essentially unalterable effect of our genetic makeup on our abilities to be disturbing, to say the least.  However, that doesn't change my appreciation of his observation that we spend too much time and effort trying to shore up our areas of weakness, and not enough building on our strengths.  True, we can't afford to ignore our weaknesses, and well-directed efforts at overcoming them are often in order.  Spending the majority of our energy on our strengths, however, generally leads to the most progress, the most satisfaction, and the most achievement.

There's a reason we're strong where we are.  Buckingham didn't put it this way, but God created us as unique individuals, with our own special strengths, and it's reasonable to think he had a purpose in mind.  Why say to one's creator, "You made me good at X, so I'm going to ignore that and work on Y, where you weren't so generous."

Strength builds on strength.  Buckingham indulges in some hard biological explanations of why this is so, but the short version is also obvious:  It's easier to multiply knowledge and skill in an area related to those in which one is already knowledgeable and skilled.  Progress in areas of weakness requires a greater investment of effort and time—often just to get to the point of being mediocre. Building on one's strengths is a more promising path to excellence.

Concentrating on weaknesses also comes, for most people, with a huge psychological burden.

[I]f you really want to ruin your chances of sustained success, ponder your weaknesses, ruminate on your past failings, chew on your flaws.  Pretty soon you'll wonder why it's worth getting out of bed in the morning.

[Y]ou will be more likely to be resilient, persistent, self-confident and effective in those areas where you have developed some mastery, and you will transfer these powerful feelings to new challenges [that] are substantially simlar to your existing areas of mastery.

I'll bet that if you can name someone in your life who consistently inspired you to do be better than you thought you could be, that person focused on your strengths, not your weaknesses.  Couldn't it be that one of the reasons most children dislike school is that the classroom is a place where their weaknesses are always in focus?  Where teachers are rarely concerned with building on their strengths once they've reached an acceptable level of mastery?

There's wisdom in The One Thing You Need to Know that applies far beyond the business world.