7 Dangers of Weakness and Why You Undervalue Your Strength
The illusion of competence is deadly to successful leadership.
Experience, success, position, and power give you the deadly illusion that you are good at nearly everything. But you’re exceptional only at one or two things and average at many.
Overconfidence in small doses is useful. It enables you to stretch yourself.
Overconfidence – in large doses – is deadly.
It takes humility to acknowledge that you suck at many things and excel at a few.
Stop doing things you’re not good at.
7 dangers of weakness:
- Performance below your potential.
- Frustration. Imagine the frustration of a cat trying to become a great barker.
- Self-criticism. You beat yourself down.
- Loss of respect. You lose credibility. This is especially true for anyone who thinks they’re talented when they aren’t.
- Missed opportunities to bring maximum value.
- Discouragement.
- Excuse-making that lowers people’s confidence in you.
Remarkable success is built on strengths.
Undervalued strength:
Value your strength even though doing it is easy for you.
It’s difficult for you to appreciate the value of a skill that comes easy or naturally. You might say, “Oh, creating that plan was nothing,” if you’re a skilled organizer.
But your skill is remarkable to someone who works hard to think beyond their plan for lunch.
I’m exceptional at asking questions. I still work at my strength. I read books about curiosity and coaching. I constantly evaluate the questions I ask clients. I’m always looking for a new question.
Sometimes people call me to help them generate a list of questions. What’s easy for me is valuable to others.
Not everyone needs an exceptional question asker. But some do.
The intersection of someone’s need and your strength is your place of greatest value.
Know and avoid your weaknesses. Find ways to leverage your strengths.
How might organizations become more realistic about strengths and weaknesses?
How might people protect and maximize their strengths?
To be realistic about strength and weaknesses you had to do their tasks.
Understanding what others need to do and performance at an acceptable level needs to be monitored and critiqued some more than others, some not at all. Putting the right team together so they learn from each other and enhance their skills. I have always looked up to the senior leaders and learned from them to share with others, knowledge is the wisdom handed down for a lifetime of building.
To maximize our strengths we have to continue learning all we can, new techniques, better equipment, proper training for everyone.
Build the workforce with positive influences they can build on throughout their lives.
Dan
Great post and I really enjoyed your comments about your own strength in asking questions.
Organizations tend to build teams or business units around primarily technical skills like marketing, finance etc.
But what your example reminded me of is that the best staff teams or business unit teams I was ever part of had people with not only those technical skills but a variety of people, organizational, teamwork and other softer skills. I believe this is even more important the higher up you are in an organization. The difficulty that occurs is that it is much harder to evaluate those softer but critical skills.
Brad
Well, how can I accurately identify my strengths. I’m not so sure what I’m bad at
Ask others for feedback, may help open your eyes.
Thanks, Tim