Building strengths from weaknesses

dominate your enemy by building your strengths in an area where he has little or no influence.
(Basically if your opponent has no cavalry and you then focus on that).
“Appear where they cannot go, head for where they least expect you . . . to unfailingly take what you attack, attack where there is no defence.” – San Tzu
Do not try conducting a war from a point of weakness.
Similarly, Marcus Buckingham and his find out what you do not like doing and stop doing it approach to the “strengths movement” advocates focusing on what you are good at.
It makes common sense, if you are good at something you will be more likely to succeed and more likely to enjoy both the activity and the success. As a business, if you can be the first to develop a product line or aspect of business where your competition has little focus then you are more likely to succeed.
And by the time the competition wakes up to the fact that you are there you are too far ahead to catch up. Apple invested in MP3 technology when the rest of the music industry was trying to clamp down on it – the iPod and iTunes store are still leaders in the music industry today.
The phrase “core business” get bandied around a lot when companies try and maintain focus or decide whether or not to follow a plan of action.
Barring the odd rare occasion this usually translates into “does it fit with our vision and does it make us money”.
As a start-up, it is important to stick to your mandate. Only once in a while will a company accidentally stumble onto a radical change in direction.
Even companies that appear to have massively diversified interests (think Virgin who run airlines, gyms and cellphone networks) have a core ethos about how they do things, how the different areas that they invest in are run, and what the brand represents.
For them, it is not so much the “what” you do but rather the style with which you do things – the “how” if you will.
For Virgin it is their dedication to customer service and reliance on the business principles they have employed since the beginning.
The idea of sticking to your strengths fits at both a corporate and individual level.
As an individual if your core strength is planning and analysis then you may find creative sessions difficult for example.
You can think of the strengths movement as niche marketing.
The difficult part of sticking to your strengths comes when growth occurs.
The company looks to expand into new markets; on an individual level you get promoted.
If your strength as an individual is sales then you may have a problem if you get taken off the floor and placed into management, unless you can persuade yourself that as a manager you are selling the company system to your staff.
For the entrepreneur as the kick of starting a company turns into the potentially more mundane (in your eyes anyway) running of a company you may find yourself bogged down with mind numbing details and daily tasks that suffocate your creative drive and energy.
Hiring someone to take care of these details would be an option here (provided of course they love the details of course).
Here are some practical questions to ask yourself. What do you do better than everyone else?
What does/could your company do better than everyone else?
What tasks do you lose track of time while you do them because you are so engaged by them?
What energises you?
Is it the task or the way that you do the task?
I enjoy being in front of a group teaching – not because I enjoy hearing myself talk but because I get a kick out of delivering information that helps people do what they do better. Hence writing, blogging, one on one mentorship situations also flip my switch.
On the opposite side, what drains you and how can you fix it?
Perhaps it requires a change of perspective, hiring someone else to do the job or outsourcing it.
Or what happens if you just do not do the task, will the negative impact be as big as you thought it would be?
This does not mean that you ignore your weaknesses or never try to improve on them, but it just means that do not waste your time on them as much as you might have been doing.
A strengths and weakness analysis is worth it on a personal and corporate level.
Just do not let it become a self-critical, focus-on-the-weakness-only session.
Look at your strengths. Realise what you enjoy doing.
Then look into other areas where you can put this ability to positive and constructive work to help both you and your business grow.
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” – Audre Lorde.