CHAPTER  |  THIRTY-NINE

You Must Know Your Strengths

Most people think they know their own strengths, but they are almost invariably wrong. This assertion of Peter Drucker's is of critical importance because a person builds great performance on his or her strengths, not by avoiding weaknesses or working to improve areas that are weak. Any individual will always have faults, even the most effective and successful among us. But if you focus on avoiding faults to such an extent that you ignore your strengths and their development, you will be making a major mistake.

History is replete with individuals who made major contributions at critical times, yet had weaknesses that we might wish they did not have. Winston Churchill was a great wartime leader who saved England, and maybe the world, from the Nazis, yet he was known to drink to excess. During the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy avoided a nuclear conflagration and war with the Soviet Union, yet he was a womanizer.

General George Patton was a great field general who won more battles with fewer casualties than any other American general during World War II, but he could have a terrible temper when dealing with subordinates. He once slapped a psychologically wounded soldier and called him a coward, which led to Patton's being relieved of command.

Another highly successful general, Douglas MacArthur, has been called swaggering, egotistical, and insubordinate. However, when he was military governor of Japan after World War II, he instituted democracy and won great respect for the United States in a country that was steeped in authoritarian rule. After President Truman fired MacArthur for insubordination, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida declared that MacArthur's accomplishments for Japan were unparalleled and that all Japanese looked upon him with veneration and affection.

While we can work on building our strengths, we are limited by time to do this. So focusing on the development of a minor strength while missing a major one can cause you—in the vernacular—to miss your calling.

Whistler's Other (Ambition)

James Whistler, noted American-born artist of the aesthetic movement whose most famous painting is his portrait Whistler's Mother, once wanted to be a soldier. The young Whistler applied to and was accepted to West Point, where he struggled for three years before he finally abandoned his limited talents for what was required at that institution and began to focus on developing the considerable artistic strengths that he possessed. Despite receiving acclaim in the artistic world, he never forgave himself for his failure in a chemistry class for defining a particular solid material as gaseous. He was often heard to lament, “Had silicon been a gas, I would have been a major general.”

Whistler was fortunate. While serving as a major general is an important and honorable calling, so is producing great works of art. Even if he had become a major general, he would have been but one of many major generals during the Civil War. Moreover, though Whistler seemed pretty confident of achieving this high rank, the percentage of men from his West Point class who survived battle and competition with others to become major general was less than 5 percent.

Identify Your Strengths

There is only one way to identify your strengths, according to Drucker. He called it “feedback analysis.” In a short time, you can identify your strengths—and you'll be surprised. I certainly was. A “short time” for me was maybe two or three days. But Drucker wrote that it would take “only” two or three years! As Lao-tzu, the great Chinese sage, said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Since knowing your strengths is critical, it really doesn't matter how long it takes.

Drucker's methodology for this self-analysis is simple. Every time you must take an important action or make a decision, you write down your expected results. Then, some months later when the results are in, you compare the actual results with your expected results. If the expected and the actual are close, you are competent in this area.¹ If not, continue to do this until you have gained a clear picture of your strengths (and weaknesses). You can also try this with others, such as your subordinates or candidates for a job promotion.

What Do You Do Next?

Drucker suggested that several “action conclusions” should follow your strengths analysis. You know you are strong in certain areas—now what are you going to do about it? In other words, you take action. Drucker identified seven such action conclusions:

1. Concentrate on your strengths and make them stronger. Drucker found that strengths are of far more importance than weaknesses. Position yourself so you can use your strengths to produce your very best performance and get optimal results.

   I recently read that famed 1930s and ’40s actress Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, the only child of assimilated Jewish parents, had a strange background indeed. She made lots of films, but she was most famous for an early film made in Czechoslovakia in 1933, called Ecstasy. Need I say more? In a time when appearing in a bikini would have been cause for arrest, Lamarr was in a movie that included frontal nudity and a simulated orgasm, the realism for which was achieved by the director's jabbing her in the buttocks with a safety pin. However, Lamarr was also a math prodigy and was co-inventor of the wireless technology used in Bluetooth and cell phones today. She made thirty-two films; none spectacular, yet the technology she invented was truly remarkable and has had widespread impact on our world of today. Only she would be able to answer the question of whether or not she chose wisely in her career.

2. Work on improving your strengths. Steve Jobs didn't invent an industry by turning his computer skills into party games. He kept improving them throughout his lifetime; he introduced the iPad less than two years before his death. Alfred von Schlieffen had a strategic plan for Germany's winning World War I in a two-front war. It is said that von Schlieffen's final words were, “Keep the right wing strong.” Alas, his successors failed to follow these final instructions, and Germany lost the war.
3. Identify where intellectual arrogance causes disabling ignorance. Now, what is Drucker talking about? He says that this third point is of particular importance. That's because he's talking about a situation in which you have overwhelming knowledge in one area that causes you to neglect the knowledge in other areas to the extent of almost complete ignorance. A friend of mine who dealt regularly with a number of highly educated people, some of whom were contemptuous of anyone less educated than they were, used to call such snobs “educated idiots.” Drucker would have agreed. He said that such people frequently demonstrate poor performance owing to concentrated knowledge in too narrow a field.
4. Remedy your shortcomings or bad habits. Don't ignore your shortcomings or bad habits using the excuse that you're developing your strengths. If a weakness affects your major strength that you are developing, you have a problem and must fix it.
5. Demonstrate good manners. How many bright, knowledgeable people fail because they lack the necessary social graces? Drucker called manners the “lubricating oil” of an organization.
6. Don't take on assignments in which you are incompetent. Don't agree to be a Chinese interpreter unless you speak and understand Chinese. Pretty obvious, huh? Yet, haven't you seen someone volunteer to carve the Thanksgiving turkey even though he or she hasn't a clue what to do and leaves behind a butchered mess?
7. Don't waste a lot of time raising your performance in weak areas. Drucker stressed that your time should be spent on raising your high skills and competence levels to even higher levels.

Other Important Qualities to Consider

Building on Drucker's concept of staffing for strength, I think there are other qualities you must consider in addition to your strengths. These include what you like to do, what you think you should do, and what you want to do. If you are doing the staffing for your organization, and are responsible for placing round pegs in round holes, you need to consider your staff's strengths, as well as what you would like them to do, what you think they should do, and what you want them to do.

For example, you may have two Russian interpreters of equal ability, but there's only one position available. Or, there may be a personality clash that requires an individual to be placed in a certain job and not in another. To blindly staff without considering all aspects of the individuals involved and the environment in which they will function would be foolish. However, all considerations of strengths and weaknesses start with a knowledge of strengths, yours and those you work with.