The poker game Seven-Card Stud is an excellent vehicle for exploring the nature of our weaknesses; each player receives seven cards, and from them the player must choose the five cards that create the strongest poker hand, discarding two. Imagine if you will, that these five best cards are your strengths, and the two worst cards your weaknesses. Easy so far, right?

Play begins with the dealer dealing two cards face down to each player at the table. Bets are placed based on the promise of those two cards.

Next, four cards are dealt face up, one at a time, to each player, with betting occurring throughout. Each player now has six cards: four showing and two hidden. Finally, each player is dealt one more card—the seventh card—face down. The kitty builds as players throw in chips based on their prospects!

The best possible poker hand is a royal flush: an ace, king, queen, jack, and 10 of the same suit. So, as long as it’s our story, let’s assume that you are dealt a royal flush—the strongest of all possible hands!

Let’s watch your hand as each card appears. Your first two cards, dealt face down, are a four of hearts (4♥) and a queen of spades (Q♠). That doesn’t tell you much—not until you can see more cards. The next four cards, dealt face up, are the 10, jack, and king of spades (10♠/J♠/K♠) and the two of diamonds (2♦). Hmmm, looks intriguing...you are well on your way to a superb hand!

Finally, the last card is dealt to you face down. You slowly lift the edge and take a hopeful look. You suppress a giggle and try to maintain a poker face! Your seventh card is—you guessed it—the ace of spades (A♠). Wow! What a hand! The strongest hand possible! You bid appropriately and finally have the opportunity to reveal your hand. Your table mates are awed when they see your royal flush in spades—10♠/J♠/Q♠/K♠/A♠—and you rake in a hefty pot! Can’t do any better than that!

Such a strong hand is extremely rare in poker—but in real life, when we consider that each of us has been dealt the perfect mix of personal and professional strengths, we realize we all were dealt a royal flush!

Now, let’s revisit our Seven-Card Stud hand again. Remember that the 4♥ was dealt face down and the 2♦ was dealt face up. The royal flush represents your five strengths and the 2♦ and 4♥ are your weaknesses. Makes sense. To play your strongest hand in the professional world, you want the royal flush—your strengths—visible. You want to play them frequently, have others see them at work, and design your life so these strong cards are always called into play. At the same time, you want to turn face down the 4♥ and the 2♦. Because these weaknesses are part of the hand you’ve been dealt in life, they can be acknowledged and put aside, if not discarded altogether. Because you have the opportunity to choose the five cards you play, why would you choose anything but your five strongest cards?

Lance Armstrong—premiere cyclist, seven-time winner of the Tour de France, and celebrated cancer survivor—knows how to discard.

Before becoming the world’s best cyclist Lance was an enthusiastic triathelete competing in running, swimming, and cycling. He was a good swimmer and fast on his feet as a runner, but he truly excelled at cycling. Recognizing that biking was his strength, Lance chose to concentrate his efforts on cycling competitions. His payoff is historic—literally as well as figuratively! In 1991, Lance played to his best strengths, won the U.S. amateur cycling championship and turned professional the following year. In 2002, Sports Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Year in honor of his fourth Tour de France win, and in recognition of his extraordinary perseverance in battling testicular cancer. For three years, Lance continued to improve his skill and enhance his strength, and in July of 2005, Lance Armstrong became the first cyclist to win the Tour de France seven consecutive times.

Lance discarded his weaker sports, running, and swimming, and focused all of his energy on developing his greatest strength—cycling. We can discard our personal weaknesses just as Lance did. Similar to the discards in a poker game, we can throw away most of our weaknesses and defer to our stronger cards, making us more successful and competitive. Discarding a weakness is an excellent strategy because few of us will ever be stellar or world-class in a true weakness. Mediocre or adequate performance is possible, but superior achievement in an area of weakness is highly unlikely.

Because of society’s myth of well-roundedness, we learn early in life to try to overcome all of our weaknesses. We’re told to concentrate and apply ourselves even if we don’t enjoy it. We’re taught that if we just “try harder” we can overcome our weakness. How utterly exhausting and frustrating! Attempting to overcome a weakness takes time, commitment, and effort. The truth of the matter is, few weaknesses must be overcome. Most of our weaknesses can simply be managed. It’s easier and less painful to manage a weakness than to attempt to overcome it through extensive training, education, and practice. When faced with this radical idea, many clients ask, “But how do I know if a weakness must be overcome, or if I can manage it so it doesn’t get in the way?”

An excellent question! Our intention in this book is to shift leaders away from an obsession with weaknesses, we hesitated to write a chapter on this subject. However, we recognize that we’d be remiss to completely ignore weaknesses, because we’ve all been taught from the first day of school that overcoming them is an admirable goal. The compelling reason we’ve included this chapter is because understanding our weaknesses will help us clearly see our strengths! Knowing your weaknesses provides a frame of reference for knowing your strengths.

As we learned from Lance, discerning and managing our weaknesses can be the most important step we take toward making the most of our strengths. Creating a simple plan to manage our weakness frees us to capitalize on our strengths and develop them further. How effective would Lance be in the Tour de France if he split his training effort by preparing for running, swimming, and cycling? In sports, in poker, and in work we need to assess our strengths and play to them—but also to understand our weaknesses—our areas of vulnerability—so we can compensate for them, discard them if possible, and put our efforts into fully realizing our strengths and their potential.

Just as important, knowing your weaknesses shows you where not to put your energy. Instead of creating personal growth and development plans that are 90-percent designed to overcome weakness and 10-percent designed to maximize strengths, as we’ve historically done, imagine what would happen if we reversed the percentages and concentrated the majority of our growth and learning on our strengths. Wow! This alternative approach makes development intriguing, exciting, and compelling. If we focus on learning more about our strengths and how to apply them, we actually create more energy and higher confidence, improving our performance and our satisfaction.

Throughout the years we’ve noticed that many leadership professionals in human resources and training functions shun the word “weakness” as though a weakness is something to be avoided at all costs…a scourge to its owner. We believe it’s time to admit we all have weaknesses. When we know our weaknesses, we also know the intellectual, mental, physical, and emotional situations in which we will not excel. Great! We don’t want to struggle to perform our best or lead from those no-win situations. Instead, let’s search for the situations that make the most of our strengths.

Unfortunately, these same leadership professionals want to replace the word weakness with the misguided phrase development opportunity. This is precisely the mentality that needs to change, not only in our workplaces, but in our high schools and colleges as well. Simply because a skill or ability is limited does not mean it presents a development opportunity. We are not destined to achieve perfection in every single skill or task we undertake. We can, however, choose to use our gifts and talents to the best of our ability. If I’m not good at design, why focus my development time, money, and energy on becoming an architect? Let me hire one instead—one who is using his gifts, talents, and strengths to contribute his best to the world.

When we assume all of our weaknesses require improvement, we buy into the myth of well-roundedness. If we are excited and intrigued to learn a new skill, even if it doesn’t play to our strengths, that’s great! But when we address a weakness that bores us or is uninspiring, we waste considerable effort, and eventually become discouraged and frustrated. We need to assess if it’s worth it to improve on a weakness, to prevent us from wasting our precious resources of money, time, and energy.

In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton define weakness as “anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.” That definition can cover a lot of weaknesses! Everything from height to geography to disinterest in moon rocks could be a weakness in a particular job or profession. Yet, we also know that some weaknesses matter more than others. How do we decide which of our weaknesses (if any) need special attention? How do we know if working to improve a particular weakness is worth the time and effort? To answer these questions, we need to identify our weaknesses, decide if any inhibit our performance or keep us from fully applying our strengths, and assess which ones can be managed or discarded. Let’s explore two distinct types of weaknesses we all face: low-impact (inconsequential weaknesses), and high-impact (career-limiting weaknesses).

A low-impact weakness is simply a part of our make up. This inconsequential weakness poses no real threat because it has little effect on our lives. Its irrelevance to our excellent performance means we can “discard” it.

Low-impact weaknesses are relatively easy to manage. Once we acknowledge the weakness, we can create and implement a strategy to deal with it. If I am weak at the logic behind creating spreadsheets, I would be wise to choose a job in which creating spreadsheets isn’t a significant requirement! If I occasionally need to create a spreadsheet, then I can find an administrative assistant, colleague, or someone in the organization to do it for me. A simple and effective way to manage a weakness is to find someone who can easily compensate for it and create an agreement with him to do so.

For example, one of Andrea’s low-impact weaknesses is coordination in mechanical endeavors. (Translation: she’s a bit of a klutz!) She is not very adept at using tools and experiences high frustration and limited success when she tries to do so. Because she really has no desire to improve in this area, she asks her husband to do mechanical things. Recognizing her husband’s limitations as well, she also hires an auto mechanic and brings in plumbers and electricians when needed. These people are good! They have strengths and aptitudes that align with the task; that’s how they earn their living! As a leadership development consultant and executive coach, Andrea recognized her weakness and chose a career that does not call for mechanical aptitude! For this insignificant weakness, she developed a weakness management plan.

The second type of weakness, the career-limiting type, more often than not proves formidable because it has a high impact. A high-impact weakness is the lack of knowledge, skill, or behavior essential to current or future performance in a role or career. It cannot simply be discarded or managed, because it has a direct bearing on career or life success. A career-limiting weakness must be improved, or it will affect our excellent performance in our current role. In some cases, a high-impact weakness may so limit one’s career that the individual must choose a new career path. A student in training to become a nurse, who faints at the sight of blood, has encountered a career-limiting weakness. It can’t be ignored or discarded. It needs attention. This high-impact weakness must be lessened, reduced, or curbed—or she must choose a new career. If we find ourselves in this awkward situation, we need to nudge ourselves from poor performance to the lofty place of mediocre performance.

A number of years ago, Andrea discovered she had a high-impact weakness. She wasn’t very good at marketing. Unfortunately, because she already ran her own company, this lack of marketing savvy limited her business success. Of course, a certain amount of marketing can be outsourced; however, Andrea knew that before a business owner could hire marketing support, she must first establish a basic strategy and direction for the marketing efforts. Not wanting this high-impact weakness to limit her business, she learned the business of marketing. She talked to seasoned marketers, read books, studied, took notice of what intrigued her from a marketing perspective, and paid particular attention to what she didn’t like. Eventually, Andrea learned enough about marketing to guide her business. She didn’t become a marketing guru; she still hires partners to help her—marketing strategists and technicians who offset this weakness. The creative and effective presentation of benefits to a potential client will never be her strength. However, she learned enough—and became proudly mediocre in her marketing efforts—to sustain and grow a healthy, thriving business! She didn’t overcome her career-limiting weakness, but she did manage it, and lessened its negative impact.

In the first example, with a low-impact weakness that is more of a nuisance than a genuine problem, Andrea created a plan to manage the weakness. In the second example, a high-impact career-limiting weakness, Andrea devised a method to lessen the weakness—to actually reduce it so the weakness didn’t inhibit her performance or keep her from fully applying her strengths. This is a crucial distinction in weakness management. For a low-impact weakness, managing it means letting it go or corralling and using external resources. For a high-impact weakness, lessening the impact of the weakness means that we must improve, even just a bit, to achieve adequate performance. When we design our work to make the best use of our strengths, if we find we still have an important career-limiting weakness, then, and only then, will we need a plan to reduce the impact of that weakness. Let’s start identifying your low-impact weaknesses, and discovering if you have a high-impact weakness.

If you want to lead from your strengths, display them face up, and show your royal flush to the world, you also need to conceal your personal 2♦ and 4♥. Lay these face down, hide them, and downplay them. These weak cards do not help you when you want to play the strong hand you’ve been dealt. In Seven-Card Stud, it is easy to see which cards are weak cards. However, in life, to downplay and manage your weaknesses, you need to know what they are. Usually this poses no real difficulty, because we are typically quite aware of what we’re not good at—primarily because we focus on it all too often.

To play to your strengths, create a list of your weaknesses. As with strengths, look for the things you don’t like to do or don’t do well, and also identify the missing skill or talent that underpins the tasks you don’t like. In Chapter 2♠ when you identified your strengths, one place you looked for clues was in assessment instrumentation, such as the Clifton StrengthsFinder. Instruments of this type can help highlight your weaknesses. If you are a strong Intuitive, does that mean Sensing is a weakness? It might not be; it may just be something you’d prefer not to do. If you perceive Sensing as a true weakness, put it on your list. Consider weaknesses in your work and your personal life. Here are some useful questions to ask yourself to become clearer about your weaknesses:

Do you have a skill weakness that could affect your success? Put it on your list. Perhaps you lack proficiency at mechanical activities. Put that on your list. Or perhaps you have a perspective or attitude that limits your effectiveness, such as being overly critical. Add this to your list, too.

Perhaps you don’t know much about leadership. Or maybe you hate doing paperwork and procrastinate until it’s past due. List these weaknesses—all of them—and don’t get depressed! Remember clarity about your weaknesses creates clarity about your strengths. Take these weaknesses as simple facts about you. You aren’t posting your weaknesses on the Internet or hanging them on your office door for all to see—though you may do so inadvertently if you don’t acknowledge them. You are completing a thorough and honest analysis in order to maximize your success.

Many methods exist to get a clear handle on your weaknesses. Your staff, colleagues, boss, spouse, and customers might be delighted to help! You can also use a 360-degree instrument to gather anonymous feedback from work colleagues or ask them yourself. Conversations with others about your weaknesses offer an additional benefit: you increase your authenticity, thereby making your relationships more honest and building trust that creates a safe environment for both of you. When you talk openly with others about your weaknesses, you open yourself to better relationships.

Finally, particularly with work competencies that someone thinks are necessary, you might want to look for these clues to identify a weakness:

Are you feeling a little draggy and defeated now? It’s not a surprise, because focusing on weaknesses makes us feel uninspired, depleting our energy and enthusiasm. If it doesn’t feel good, it isn’t a strength. While focus on strengths is crucial, identifying weaknesses is important so we can manage them. As leaders who recognize the need to grow, we may concentrate so much on overcoming a weakness that we lose our objectivity and become obsessive. The good news is that there are reasonable and rational ways to deal with both low-impact and high-impact weaknesses.

After you create your list of weaknesses, look specifically for those that are low-impact or inconsequential. These are weaknesses you can manage. Second, study the list for any high-impact or career-limiting weakness. And remember—you might not have any high-impact weakness! If you do find a high-impact weakness, accept that it must be lessened or reduced. Don’t be discouraged—most of our weaknesses are low-impact because we naturally play to our strengths. Low-impact weaknesses can be managed easily by employing one of three strategies:

Let’s look at these in more detail.

Strong and effective leaders know how important it is to compensate for their weaknesses when hiring staff. In his successful book Good to Great (Harper Collins Inc., 2001), Jim Collins documents a few surprising and interesting differentiators between the great companies and the merely good. One of them is, “First who…then what.” In Collins’ metaphor, the great companies put the right people “on the bus,” and only then decide where to drive the bus.

As leaders, our first priority is to put the right people on our bus; then, engage their strengths, and delegate to them. Makes sense, doesn’t it? You delegate what you’re not good at. Delegate what you don’t like to do. Delegate to those who not only perform the task better, but who do it with pride and commitment. When you find a task that doesn’t fit with your strengths, look around. Someone would love to do it. Let him! He will shine!

Some leaders we coach are under the mistaken impression that they must be effective at every task they delegate. What a waste of talent and energy! It’s not possible, and it certainly isn’t an effective use of resources. We often hear leaders say, “I wouldn’t ask others to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.” Well, why not? This statement doesn’t make sense! Do you perform your own dental work?

The best strategy is to hire people with strengths that complement ours, and then delegate responsibility to them according to their strengths.

We know a training manager, Dan, who is a powerful and skilled stand-up facilitator, but who lacks skill in training design. And he knows it. So, he hires excellent designers, freeing himself for training delivery and, with the strength of his team, creates much better training than he would have done on his own.

Take a look at the low-impact weaknesses on your list and consider which of these could be delegated to someone on your team whom you can trust to do an excellent job. Now, go ahead, delegate it!

There are many ways to “purchase” strengths in order to manage a weakness. The most obvious is hiring someone to do it for us. Successful organizations hire consultants and advisors to assist with an expertise that they do not possess in sufficient measure. A technology firm purchases marketing from an advertising agency. A homeowner hires a plumber to fix a leaky pipe. An entrepreneur hires an accountant to stay on top of tax requirements.

We can also purchase a strength to manage a weakness by developing an effective partnership. In this case, cash may or may not exchange hands. A good partnership occurs when someone assists you by compensating for your weakness while you compensate for his. Hospitals partner with physicians in the community to provide a broad array of medical services. Physicians partner with hospitals to provide the services and infrastructure they cannot. New entrepreneurs often partner with others who have greater access to particular clients and services. FedEx partners with contractors who run their own businesses, purchase their own vans and trucks, and deliver and pick up packages for FedEx. This highly effective partnership is symbiotic. FedEx could not deliver its value proposition to customers without the contractors, and the contractors would have far less business without FedEx creating the market.

An important distinction between partnering and purchasing is that, in partnering, you are a resource to the partnership because you add the value of your unique strengths. To prepare yourself to create an effective partnership, understand and articulate the value you add. If you are simply purchasing a service, the value you add to the relationship is the fee you pay for the service. In a partnership, the payoff is a quid pro quo. Partnerships can be exciting and intriguing. Most importantly, both partnerships and purchasing are essential tools to help us manage weaknesses and each has its place.

Our friend Walter is a brilliant songwriter who can teach us about effective partnerships. Walter earns his living facilitating teams in a manufacturing plant, but he hopes someday to make songwriting his profession. He also has a strong and powerful singing voice, a marvelous complementary skill to his songwriting. On the other hand, Walter’s guitar skills stop at the opening bars of “Down in the Valley.” One day over coffee, shortly after we began to work together implementing strengths-based leadership at his plant, Walter told us he was working hard learning to play the guitar, so he could effectively market and sell his songs. He struggled with this for a few months, having little fun and even less success. Eventually, Walter had an epiphany. He embarked upon a search to find someone to play back-up and discovered several talented local guitar players thrilled at the opportunity for greater exposure! Taking advantage of what he learned about strengths in our work together, Walter formed a mutually beneficial partnership with an excellent local musician who loves Walter’s songs. The relationship is both complementary and symbiotic. The guitar player has an audience he would not otherwise have. Focusing on his strength liberates Walter from the frustrating and not-very-successful task of learning to play the guitar. With his time and energy concentrated on his strengths, Walter writes more—and better quality—songs.

So, take a long, honest, insightful, and liberating look at your low-impact weaknesses and ask yourself, what partnership can I create to buy the strength I need?

Think outside the box! Look in different directions, under rocks, and around corners. Your partner may be a colleague or someone you don’t yet know in another department. There is an individual or an organization just waiting to partner with you! We guarantee it!

Sometimes we can simply ignore a weakness. If it is irrelevant to our path and our purpose, we just turn our back on it. This management strategy is often overlooked when a leader or a business owner puts together a development plan. Andrea well understands her weakness in things mechanical. It’s a weakness she can easily ignore in her role as a consultant, coach, and writer. It simply doesn’t matter.

To be sure, ignoring the weakness may mean negotiating for changed expectations with your boss, partner, or team—either when you take a job or perhaps later, when your role evolves. By learning more about our strengths and weaknesses, we create the leverage to negotiate our current role—or to negotiate a new role that allows us to rely on our strengths and manage our weakness. Can you give away a task that calls on your weakness, and still do an excellent job? Do you need to renegotiate expectations with your boss or a peer? Dan, the excellent facilitator (but poor designer), hired the skill of training design. He also may have been able to renegotiate his role with his boss. Utilizing an “ignore it” strategy, Dan could have offered to manage all the training delivery and none of the design. A colleague who excels in design may have been happy to support this adjustment! By renegotiating expectations, you create an opportunity to design a job in which you can play your strongest cards, take advantage of your strengths, and ignore your weaknesses.

Sometimes, we do have a high-impact, career-limiting weakness for the career path we have chosen. Provided that the path is truly connected to our passions, values, and purposes, and it makes excellent use of our strengths, we may choose to lessen a weakness in order to perform at excellence.

For example, while many strengths can be well-utilized in a leadership role, some weaknesses are career-limiting for a leader. Research completed by Lominger Limited, publisher of FYI: For Your Improvement: A Handbook Development and Coaching Guide, indicates there are specific behaviors that can derail a leader’s career. Lominger calls these behaviors “career stallers and stoppers.” If one of these career stallers is characteristic of you and your leadership, you must moderate it or choose another path. A career staller will keep you from fully utilizing your strengths. Derailers differ slightly from role to role. Leaders can be derailed by a number of weaknesses, including:

What competencies are on your weakness list? Honestly ask yourself if any of these weaknesses can hurt your career. You may find your own boss or a trusted mentor can assist you in identifying any potential derailers. You may also choose to ask yourself these critical questions:

Our client, Maggie, illustrates one way to mitigate a weakness. As vice president of organization development for a hospital conglomerate, Maggie was intrigued by the idea of strengths-based development. Intuitively, she saw that focusing on strengths would inspire staff members to seek roles and responsibilities that provide significant opportunity to use and maximize their strengths, creating a win for the individual and for the organization.

Maggie also recognized that occasionally a career-limiting weakness does appear. For example, Maggie identified a director in the IT department, Jim, whose strengths clearly matched the role requirements in content, function, and leadership. However, Jim could not prepare or manage his budget—an imperative skill if he expected to move up in the organization.

To continue on his career path, Jim needed to address this career-limiting weakness. Maggie could not, in good conscience, support his development plan without including development in budget management.

Maggie asked the important question: “How can Jim use his strengths to help him deal with this weakness?” Maggie knew that one of Jim’s strengths was logic. He understands cause and effect and rational thinking. She found a mentor who could teach Jim budget management by emphasizing cause and effect, explaining how dollars flow into and out of his department. Jim’s face lit up because he was able to comprehend the logic of a budget process. Once he saw the logic, he successfully applied it to identifying future needs, assessing budget implications, planning and tracking expenditures, and making monthly budget projections. While Jim will likely never excel at budgeting, he clearly accepts that understanding his budget is a weakness, yet a necessity. Jim transformed his performance in budget management from inadequate to acceptable. Now he has enough ability to effectively manage his budget. Notice that Jim’s plan to address his weakness revealed a “skill-in-waiting.” Jim improved his skills, but he has not created a new strength. He has merely applied his strength of logic and analysis to a different venue—in this case, a budget.

Maggie understood that, to teach Jim the skill of budget management, she had to appeal to his natural strengths of logic and analysis. For another director, with strengths in empathy and relationship building, Maggie may have chosen to teach the skill of budgeting using games, or to use scenarios that highlight the people-related impact of a budget.

Jim’s inability to manage his department’s finances was a high-impact, career-limiting weakness. It began to restrict his opportunities because it depleted energy he could otherwise use to leverage his strengths. Managing a budget is not a core strength for Jim’s role; rather, it’s an ancillary skill the organization needs from him. If Jim were missing an important strength for his role, his career in that role would be cut short early on. An artist-in-training who learns the skills of brush strokes, shadow, and light, but who doesn’t have the strength of creativity, will never go far as an artist, and likewise, a manager who cannot create relationships will fail. In both cases, these are primary strengths necessary to create excellence in these roles. Jim has the luxury of taking action to reduce the impact of his weakness. He is not attempting to create a brand new strength.

If you decide to address a weakness, you need to create a personal development plan with concerted and targeted efforts. Engage these development strategies:

In our work, we encounter leaders with an enormous capacity for arrogance. Some of these individuals sufficiently soften their arrogance and succeed as leaders. On the other hand, a different weakness—such as being nonstrategic—may tank an aspiring leader’s career. You may not be able to lessen the impact of being nonstrategic. If you are more tactical than strategic, and it’s getting in the way of your current role, you may need to look for a better match. To create a sustaining and fulfilling career, you may need to seek a role that does not require a 30,000-foot view. If success in your current career or role depends upon excelling in one of your weaknesses, then you are, simply stated, in the wrong career.

We have eager clients who ask, “Is it possible to overuse my strength? Can my strength become a weakness by using it too much?” While we probably cannot “overuse” our strengths when aligned with responsibilities that call for it, we can “misuse” by using our strengths when it isn’t needed. When the task is deciding among options, and the super-creative marketing director keeps throwing new ideas into the discussion, she’s using a strength when needed. It’s time for the strength of decision-making, even if she still has four new ideas! Because she’s holding a hammer of strengths, she begins to see everything as a nail.

When she truly understands her strength, she will also understand when it isn’t time for her to use it—when it’s actually time for her to rely on others who have the strength of decision-making. Sometimes the best action is to make way for a person with that strength to jump in. Remember, no one has every strength. The myth of well-roundedness has us believing we should be good at everything. But we know we’re not. No one is limitless!

The more-ambitious souls among us may choose to diminish a weakness just for the fun of it! For example, our client, Joan, isn’t very good at learning languages. She painfully survived high school French. Trying to learn a language consistently lowers her self-confidence. Now that Joan recognizes her language weakness, and accepts the extra effort and occasional frustration learning a language will inevitably bring, she can choose to learn a language anyway, in spite of her weakness! Recently, Joan successfully completed three years of Spanish at her local community college. Was she a good student? Yes! Will she ever excel at Spanish? No! Joan accepts the fact that she will never be facile—and that’s just fine. While she will never be hired by the United Nations as a Spanish interpreter, she learned enough to travel to Spanish-speaking countries and understand directions to “el baño.” She is learning Spanish because she chooses to—not because she believes it will catapult her to the zenith of her career. Even with the frustration and self-doubt, she’s having a blast learning Spanish.

How can a challenging and frustrating learning process be fun, let alone a blast? Well, this is the last point we want to make about weaknesses. Once you truly “grok” your strengths (a word borrowed from Martian according to Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land. To grok is to gain an instant and deep spiritual understanding of something or to establish a rapport with somebody), you will find your weaknesses laughable! They become insignificant and funny. Joan now laughs at her struggles with the numerous conjugations of the Spanish verb ser.

She doesn’t need to be profoundly proficient at everything she chooses to do. Because she takes advantage of her strengths, there are many avenues where Joan can shine. She can choose to build on a weakness—to move her proficiency all the way up to mediocre (or better)—for the sheer joy of it! There is no downside to approaching a weakness this way, and this fresh, new perspective on weaknesses is liberating!

We know it is not a viable strategy for us, as individuals, to even attempt to be completely “round”; that is, to have all skills at our fingertips. It is, however, a viable strategy to create a “round” team. Someone on the team may add the strength of innovation while someone else adds the ability to execute. One person on your team may excel at building relationships with customers while another may shine at product fulfillment. You may have strength in strategy formation and your right-hand person may excel at translating that strategy into actionable plans. A “round” team acts powerfully, building on each member’s strengths and compensating for each other’s weaknesses.

John Inglish, our client mentioned in Chapter 1♠, is a strong visionary and an effective strategist. He inspires others with his great dreams. He commits his time, passion, and energy to communicate his vision to those who excel at making it happen. He creates opportunities to use his strong hand to further his vision for his organization, his customers, and his legacy. He also knows his weaknesses and manages them by using team member strengths. The combination of individual strengths, coupled with weakness awareness, allows each person on John’s “round” team to effectively apply his strengths, and only his strengths, to the situations he encounters and creates.

All leaders, no matter how lofty their titles, have room to expand and grow their strengths to create a more successful, powerful, and far-reaching impact. Stop wasting time on your weaknesses!