Focusing On Strengths Vs. Weaknesses: Change Your Career, Life And Organization

The pace of technology and the speed of change are placing unprecedented demands on people (and organizations) to be adaptable. Coupled with the movement away from experts to generalists, linear career pathing for many professions simply isn’t a reality anymore.

Depending on the needs of a business and external factors, it’s not unusual for someone to potentially jump industries (or even areas of expertise entirely) multiple times during their career. Understanding your core strengths enables you to evaluate opportunities not strictly on the title or job description, but rather on the specific strengths required of that role. This can reveal opportunities for career growth that may have been obscured previously.

As a growing organization, we speak to many job applicants and recognize the value of matching candidates with roles that emphasize their strengths. I’ll share Angela’s story, review why and how focusing on strengths can be a game changer in your career and suggest a tool that can help you shine a light on what you do best.

Angela was in a funk. The normally highly-engaged and positive team member was in the midst of a career crisis.

She moved into a new role a year earlier, which she thought was a great opportunity at the time – but she was struggling. It didn’t excite her the way her previous roles did. Sometimes she felt overwhelmed. Other times she felt like she wasn’t making the same level of impact that she made in her previous positions. She loved the company, but it was apparent that maybe this wasn’t going to be enough to retain her.

Angela thought she needed to switch to a different role. She had something in mind but still wasn’t sure if it was the right fit. When asked why she thought the new position would be a better option, Angela struggled to provide specific and concrete reasons.

Something wasn’t clicking. It seemed like she was running away from her current position instead of running toward the best position for her talents and skills. Even worse, Angela was beginning to not only doubt her own abilities, but she was starting to mentally check out. She was motivated, but not happy.

Angela’s situation isn’t unique – in fact, it’s extremely common. Most people go through similar moments during their career. They’ll take what seems like a dream job and then struggle to make the impact they thought they could achieve. Sometimes it’s just a matter of persistence and patience, but other times, the issue is that a person’s strengths are mismatched to the actual needs of a role.

And the office isn’t the only place that strengths come into play. The same talents that make you a high-performer in a professional setting are the same strengths that can positively impact relationships and fulfillment in your personal life. Strengths don’t stop or start when you enter the workplace: They’re with you 24 hours a day, whether you realize it or not.

The principle behind strength-based coaching and development is fairly straightforward: The amount of effort it takes for you to increase your skills even marginally in a given area that you’re naturally weak in will rarely equate to the amount of impact you could create with that same effort in your areas of strength.

Your strength cluster is really your set of superpowers: The things that you’re consistently very good at and, when combined together (and ideally alongside complementary sets of strengths from others within a team), they exponentially increase the impact you make.

The strengths that you have are usually core to who you are and they change very little over time. If you showed them to your friends, coworkers or family members, they would almost instantly say, “That’s you.” Yet, surprisingly, many people don’t recognize those traits and talents in themselves, which creates the situation Angela was in.

It’s important to not confuse competencies and skills – things like basic communication and organizational competencies – with strengths. Strengths are not things that can be taught: They’re who you are. They’re the talents that can be driven closer to mastery through dedication of time, focus and energy.

So back to Angela. How did the story end?

Angela’s first step was to understand what her particular strengths actually were. She utilized the CliftonStrengths online strengths assessment tool, which identifies your top five strengths, and then we sat down together to review them.

As we went through her strengths profile, it became clear that the strengths that Angela possessed, which were very action-oriented, were surprisingly mismatched to her current position, as well as the new position she was considering applying for.

All of Angela’s strengths pointed to a person who measured their success, fulfillment and impact based on getting very specific things done in an organized manner, and they did it by being action- and people-oriented. She wasn’t an idea generator, but instead, she was an idea activator.

Angela had a classic project management profile. Yet the role she currently was in wasn’t about project management at all – it was compiling data and analyzing results and making recommendations.

No wonder she was disengaged.

From there, we started to look at other roles that actually required her strength cluster, eventually finding her a position in project management. Her confidence soared. Her attitude rebounded. Her work performance and productivity went through the roof. And she returned to being both motivated and happy.

How can you apply Angela’s situation to your own? When you consider job opportunities, try focusing on the positives that your unique background offers instead of the things that you fear might be holding you back from success. If you haven’t taken the strengths assessment tool, you might be missing out on identifying strengths that hiring managers are looking for in various roles. You may be the missing ingredient for a team who needs your strengths to maximize success, but they won’t know that unless you do.