Proven truth:
- Your performance is built on your strengths.
- Mastery of a strength area is a life-long journey. We are always working on our craft.
- No one is perfectly well-rounded.
- Both strengths and weaknesses can become derailers in a role, and therefore both must be managed.
It’s a mistake to be overly-dependent on your strengths. Your weaknesses are a roadmap to interacting better with others.
I recommend you spend 80% of your effort improving your particular strengths. We effectively manage our weaknesses with 20% of our energy in several ways:
Adopt a mature mindset. Don’t beat yourself up over your weak areas, but don’t wallow in status quo either. Pick one weakness area and work on it for a quarter, then switch to another one.
Intentionally draw complementary strength people around you to offset your weaknesses. This is the power of effective teamwork. Keep in mind, this is not only about an org chart, but who is in your network.
Learn enough to appreciate and work better with the strengths of others. Example: I frequently work alongside biostatistics experts. Although stats is not a strength area for me, I can read a few articles to better understand how Bayesian models work and cooperate with their expertise.
