Forget Your Weaknesses: Bolster Your Strengths

We’ve all heard it, either at work, in school, or even at home:  “you really need to work on X.”  In your personal life, this makes perfect sense since its everybody’s goal to be a well-rounded individual.  Working on improving your weaknesses brings to mind the old adage “Jack of all trades, master of none.”  But that’s okay, because improving your flaws brings personal satisfaction and makes you a more likeable person.

In Business, Focus On Your Strengths

In the business world, the old adage gets turned on its head.  Why?  Because being a Jack of all trades won’t get you anywhere.  In order to succeed in business, you must do something better than anybody else.  You’ve got to be a master of something.  If there is nothing you have to offer that can’t be supplied just as well by somebody else, what incentive does anybody have to hire or purchase from you?

Everybody is born with certain talents, and we all acquire certain other talents over the course of our lives simply because we’re interested in something enough to become an expert in it.  At this point in your life, whether you’re 25 or 55, chances are there are a few things you are really, really good at.  For instance, maybe you’re a great programmer or make new friends easily.  Those are both strengths you can use to your advantage, both on the job and in your own business ventures.

Make no mistake, promotions and purchasing decisions are made based on the candidates’ relatives strengths, not lack of weaknesses.  Most hiring decisions go something like this:  “candidate X demonstrated strong technical skills and would fit in well with our team environment.”  As you can see, the conversation was framed based on candidate X’s strengths.  Can you imagine what the conversation might sound like had the decision revolved around candidate X’s lack of weaknesses?  “Candidate X didn’t smell bad and doesn’t have poor communication skills.”  You would never hear that in the real world because it doesn’t make sense:  not being a poor communicator says very little about why or why not candidate X would make a good employee.

And Ignore Your Weaknesses

Unfortunately, there are probably also a few things you aren’t so good at.  The good news is, you don’t have to be!  Say you have excellent technical skills but are horrible at selling things to other people due to poor social skills.  Some might say you should work on your social skills in order to get your new software company off the ground, but I say that’s a waste of time.  Every minute spent brushing up on your sales technique is a minute not being used to create a high-quality product.  In the end, no amount of selling savvy will make your company successful if you’ve got a crappy product.

Continuing with the example above, it’s much easier and less costly to just hire a competent salesman than spend your time learning to sell.  Chances are, you wouldn’t enjoy sales anyway and if you don’t enjoy something, it’s very difficult to become good at it.  Rather than waste your time, it would be wiser to focus on your core competency, software development in this case, and outsource the rest.  It would be easy in this case to set up some sort of commission structure that would maximize both parties’ earnings.  The software would be much higher quality due to the fact that you didn’t have to spend 80% of your time making sales calls, making it easier to sell, and sales would be higher thanks to your employee’s superior sales abilities being applied to a higher-quality product.  It’s a win-win situation for everybody, but especially the owner.

In business, the only effort you should make regarding your weaknesses is to sweep them under the rug or otherwise minimize their impact.  Sure, self-improvement is great, but do you want to be well-rounded or rich?  Every minute spent improving a weakness is one that isn’t spend bolstering a strength.  Of course, it’s not an entirely black-and-white situation, but the choice is yours:  well-rounded or rich?