Should you focus on your strength’s or weaknesses?
When you are working through your teambuilding plan personal and professional development can often factor in the wider matrix and inevitably many people focus on their weaknesses, developing action plans for how to work through shortcomings and make improvements.
It is a logical approach, your strengths are your strengths, and you should focus on your weaknesses to become a more well-rounded individual which will benefit you both personally and at work. Whilst this may seem the obvious answer is it wrong? and should you instead be focusing on your strengths to gain a competitive advantage?
The Clifton Strengths Assessment
The Clifton Strengths Assessment is a famous piece of psychology work that works out your strengths across various disciplines; after the assessment, you will gain access to your top 5 strengths and these cross both the personal and professional fields. Some of the notable areas include empathy, focus, competence and a range of other areas. The tool is used by managers to give them a better insight into their team and what areas they are better at.
So should you focus on your strengths? Well, Gallup who run the assessment make the argument that you should as these are areas where you can gain a real competitive advantage and make improvements whilst weaknesses can only ever be developed to an extent where they mitigate failure.
The takeaway is that you should consider focusing on team-member strengths during your next team-building exercise. That being said you should not exclude all focus on weaknesses as these will need to be improved upon if you want to become the most well-rounded individual possible. if you want to find out more about team-building and this concept, then get in touch with a member of the team at Fresh Tracks.
