 
1. What Are My Strengths?
Most people think they know what
they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are
not good at and even then more people are wrong than right And yet, a person can
perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let
alone on something one cannot do at all.
Throughout history, people had little need to know their strengths. A person was
born into a position and a line of work: The peasant's son would also be a
peasant; the artisan's daughter, an artisan's wife; and so on. But now people
have choices. We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.
The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever
you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will
happen. Nine or n months later, compare the actual results with your
expectations, I have been practicing this method for 15 to 20 years now, and
every time I do it, I am surprised. The feedback analysis showed me, for
instance and to my great surprise that I have an intuitive understanding of
technical people, whether they are engineers or accountants or market
researchers. It also showed me that I don't really resonate with generalists.
Feedback analysis is by no means new. It was invented sometime in the fourteenth
century by an otherwise totally obscure German theologian and picked up quite
independently, some 150 years later, by John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola, each
of whom incorporated it into the practice of his followers. In fact, the
steadfast focus on performance and results that this habit produces explains why
the institutions these two men founded, the Calvinist church and the Jesuit
order, came to dominate Europe within 30 years.
Practiced consistently, this simple method will show you within a fairly short
period of time, maybe two or three years, where your strengths lie and this is
the most important thing to know. The method will show you what you are doing or
failing to do that deprives you of the full benefits of your strengths. It will
show you where you are not particularly competent And finally, it will show you
where you have no strengths and cannot perform.
Several implications for action follow from feedback analysis. First and
foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can
produce results.
Second, work on improving your strengths. Analysis will rapidly show where you
need to improve skills or acquire new ones. It will also show the gaps in your
knowledge and those can usually be filled. Mathematicians are born, but everyone
can learn trigonometry Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance
is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it far too many people especially
people with great It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to
mediocrity than to improve from first rate performance to excellence.
Expertise in one area are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe
that being bright is a substitute for knowledge. First rate engineers, for
instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings,
they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind. Human
resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance
of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride
in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and
knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths, It is equally essential to
remedy your bad habits the things you do or fail to do that inhibit your
effectiveness and performance. Such habits will quickly show up in the feedback.
For example, a planner may find that his beautiful plans fail because he does
not follow through on them. Like so many brilliant people, he believes that
ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the
bulldozers should go to work. This planner will have to learn that the work does
not stop when the plan is completed. He must find people to carry out the plan
and explain it to them. He must adapt and change it as he puts it into action.
And finally, he must decide when to stop pushing the plan.
At the same time, feedback will also reveal when the problem is a lack of
manners. Manners are the lubricating off of an organization. It is a law of
nurture that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction. This
is as true for human beings as it is for inanimate objects. Manners simple
things like saying "please" and "thank you" and knowing a person's name or
asking after her family enable two people to work together whether they like
each other or not. Bright people, especially bright young people, often do not
understand this. If analysis shows that someone's brilliant work fails again and
again as soon as cooperation from others is required, it probably indicates a
lack of courtesy that is, a lack of manners.
Comparing your expectations with your results also indicates what not to do. We
all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little
chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a person and especially a
knowledge worker should not take on work, jobs, and assignments. One should
waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence, it
takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than
it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most
people especially most teachers and most organizations concentrate on making
incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go
instead to making a competent person into a star performer.
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