Strengths-Based personal development

Chris Brogan: I’m on a kick. I just finished reading Marcus Buckingham’s, NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS, and found that I agreed with their premise that working on your strengths is much more productive than throwing time and effort at changing your weaknesses.

One example given was a school report card. If you have one A, two B’s, one C, and two D’s, parents tend to obsess over the negative grades. (Did you, just now when I mentioned it, think about the D’s differently?). Instead, what would happen if you worked on amping up the good grades?

Develop Your Talents with Skills and Knowledge

If you accept that there are three building blocks to how you do things- talent, skills, and knowledge- then what this practice teaches you is that talents are what you’re born with while skills and knowledge can be learned and absorbed. It’s not that you can’t work tirelessly to improve your on-board talents, but instead, the book (and the research behind it) suggests that working from your talents and building skills and knowledge that support it is the best approach.

Buckingham’s book leads you to a website where an online test is administered. (Note: the version 2 of this test comes courtesy of a book by Tom Rath, but it’s all in the family.) The test asks you questions based on years of research and millions of responses, and then maps your answers to a path of your top 5 talents. If you work on your top five talents, and build appropriate skills around these, you’ll find better results than if you work on your weaknesses.

Note: you can only take the test if you buy the book. They add a sealed packet with a special one-use code in it. (Buying this for teams can be done through the website, I discovered.)

Don’t Ignore Your Weaknesses

Managing around your weakness, hiring to compensate for your weaknesses, and building systems that minimize your weaknesses are all recommendations Buckingham gives for dealing with that part of your life. Knowing thyself is still vital to your personal development. Learn how to put your negatives down the chain from your talents, and then work hard on your talents.

Is It Right For You?

I’m a sucker for training and discovery and learning. (It said so in my talent results, too!) I believe that the more I learn about things, the more I can develop personal ways to be effective. What separates you, as a Lifehack reader and hacker of life yourself, from some of your more, shall we say, “lean back” colleagues, is that you’re interested in personal development and improvement. For that reason alone, I think it’s worth checking out Buckingham’s premise for yourself.

If you take the test, I’d love to hear your results. It’s interesting stuff. And overall, do you agree with the idea of strengths-based development? Have you an experiences either from your own perspective or as a leader?

Chris Brogan: I’m on a kick. I just finished reading Marcus Buckingham’s, NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS, and found that I agreed with their premise that working on your strengths is much more productive than throwing time and effort at changing your weaknesses.