Only Focus on Strengths

Only Focus on Strengths

Focusing on doing work that caters to your strengths has become extremely popular. In some cases, it’s been for good reason. Dr. Todd Hall recently explained in an article for Entrepreneur.com how the brain’s “negativity bias” has led many people over the years to spend too much time working in roles that require them to address their weaknesses and not enough in roles that focus on their strengths. This sabotaged their success by making them feel miserable and draining them of energy and enthusiasm. In such cases, getting people to spend more time with work that caters to their strengths makes sense.

I first became aware of the need to concentrate on strengths reading the works of the management sage Peter Drucker. To identify your strengths, he recommended using feedback analysis, i.e. keeping a journal of decisions, including what you expect to happen as a result of a decision then recording actual results 9 -12 months later. This comparison of the difference between expectation and reality will provide insight about where you have strengths. Drucker believed the widespread practice of feedback analysis in the Calvinist church and Jesuit order helped explain why each came to dominate Europe within a mere 30 years.

Strengths-based development exploded in popularity with the publication of Now Discover Your Strengths. In it, authors Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton defined strengths as natural talents combined with knowledge and skills. Continued research from positive psychology, which established the benefits of maintaining focus on signature character strengths, added a new wrinkle that further contributed to the growth of the strengths movement. The introduction of assessments to help people identify their strengths (for example, StrengthsFinder 2.0 and MCORE) makes it easier to concentrate on them.

Personally, I’ve found that concentrating on my strengths makes me more effective. When my day-to-day tasks primarily involve my strengths and provide the right degree of challenge – not so overly challenging that I feel extreme stress nor so under-challenging that I feel bored – then I experience what psychologists describe as a state of “flow” or “optimal experience” which is characterized by feeling so immersed in work that time spent working passes quickly. Work that produces a feeling of flow is similar to the experience athlete’s describe as “playing in the zone.” It’s no coincidence that athletes use this phrase to describe their state when they are playing at their very best and producing superior results.

For these reasons, it makes sense to spend most of your time and effort on doing work that caters to your strengths. Proponents of this approach would say, “don’t worry about your weaknesses; just focus on what you do well and the rest will take care of itself.”