Managing to Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Managers sometimes suffer from poor performance due a lack of understanding as it relates to their own personal strengths and weaknesses. They fail to develop awareness of their attributes and how it impact their success. Helping managers understand where their strong points and weak points reside will help them devise strategies that encourages higher performance levels.

Throughout the years of working life you should become increasingly aware of yourself each and everyday. Personal attributes become apparent through trial and error. As you tackle daily problems and manage your staff you should develop a personal plan of performance that allows you to get the greatest outputs. To reach your peak performance requires tapping your personal strengths and weaknesses.

Understand your personal strengths. Manage from your personal strengths and seek to maximize your management skills through those strengths. If you are strong at communication then use that as a cornerstone of your management technique. If you are a great planner ensure that you incorporate that into your management processes.

Know and hedge your weaknesses. Even the most competent people have weaknesses. Sometimes these may be in time management, communication, or any self-development arena. Once you found your weaknesses you can put together a plan that improves these areas as well as hedge them by finding additional support.

Lets pretend you have a deadline and need to get your staff coordinated in order to meet the challenge successfully. Through self-reflection and feedback you found that you are a great communicator and a strong planner. Unfortunately you are poor at details and fine tuning the final product.

What are you going to do?

If you learned from your past you will meet with your staff and use your communication and planning abilities to inform everyone of their specific roles and guide them  to completion. You should hedge your weakness in detail management by getting someone with those skills to review the final product before it is sent in for completion.

How did this help?

You have now maximized your communication and planning abilities to get the project moving in the right direction. You found someone who can help you with your weaknesses. Furthermore, you have developed a process to manage future projects until you have picked up some detail skills. Because your management outputs increased there is a higher likelihood that as you apply this process you will raise your value within the organization and receive greater promotion abilities.