Focus on Strengths
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. It was a cool week, with celebrations and gifts.
I always reflect on what I've learned in the past year after turning another year. Maybe for another time!
I hope you had a restorative weekend.
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Things I discovered in the past week
- The Crowdstrike outage was very interesting to observe. I hope they release a postmortem on this incident.
- Breaking the Ceiling: Scaling Your Impact at the Staff-Plus Level was a great presentation on how to evaluate staff-plus promotions.
There's this general advice around focusing on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
I think it is a good idea to do this when we're starting our careers, as leaning into strengths will give you greater leverage than trying to improve what you might consider weaknesses. But as with everything in life, balance is critical.
Just skills
I know I'm phrasing skills in terms of weaknesses and strengths.
However, the practical reality is that all skills can be learned and improved. We might have a natural inclination that makes learning something easier than other skills. Nevertheless, a different mix of skills might be needed at various points in your career.
Overused strengths
Leaning into your strengths might get you where you want to be in your career (up to a point).
But as we move higher, roles change, so you might need to lean into a skill opposite of your strength. If you're good at managing day-to-day implementation, as a leader, you must be good at the long-term view or big-picture perspective.
Don't let yourself get into tunnel vision about a given strength!
Weakness (might) hold you back
I've seen multiple instances of people not getting the promotion they seek due to weaknesses. They lean into strengths and build them well, but sometimes, neglecting a single weakness might get you passed for that promotion!
Especially as in the past example, where you haven't worked on a skill that's opposite of one of your "strengths," it might be seen as a weakness, but it can be a learnable skill.
Get help from others
As we grow into leadership roles, it becomes a necessity to identify the strengths in others.
While we might be able to train relevant skills, someone might be better at a certain skill, and understanding how to leverage their strengths in projects becomes more critical for project success.
Leadership becomes more about leverage in the long run, finding the right people and team composition for success.
Focus on coachability
As I called out at the beginning, all of these skills are framed as strengths vs. weaknesses. While it is good to lean into strengths at the beginning, in the long run, we should focus on coachability.
I would define coachability as how open we are to feedback and what we do with that feedback.
The general recommendation in this area would be the classic book Thanks for the feedback, which discusses both areas: the feedback and what we do with it.
We need to develop self-awareness and personal ownership so we can improve how we receive feedback and integrate it into our own work style. This work style will change over time with different jobs and roles, so knowing when to apply this or that skill becomes a higher leverage than plainly leaning into a given strength.
Your turn!
Let me know if you've taken stock of your skills, which you're improving, and which you're not. Have you ever had a conversation about skills with your manager? How do you take feedback? Let me know by replying to this email!
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