Image courtesy of Popoever
Gary Vaynerchuk, blogger and creator of Wine Library TV, had a fantastic (and short) video on his personal blog yesterday titled “I suck!”
Gary spends the first 60 seconds rattling off a list of things he’s horrible at, and then begins to explain how instead of dwelling on what he’s bad at, he’s instead chosen to work his butt off doing things he’s good at.
In HR, we spend a lot of time looking at both strengths and growth areas. There’s an emerging school of thought which argues that our time would be better spend enhancing and further developing an individuals strengths rather than focusing on fixing their weaknesses.
The argument is that if someone is not naturally good at something, they will at best be mediocre at it. And while you’re spending all of your time fixing things they’re not really all that good at, they don’t take full advantage of their existing strengths. I think there may be something to that. I’m not sure you should ignore all weaknesses, though.
I’d like to open this up for reader discussion. What’s your take: Grow strengths, improve weaknesses, or both?
Interesting points. Although I think improving oneself to at least be mediocre at something is better than being terrible at it. I do think that it is not worth spending hours on end trying to fix something. There are certainly less time consuming ways you can strengthen a weakness using online guides, tutorials, or watching an expert when possible. Just some thoughts.
@Chris – thanks for the comment! I sometimes wonder if it makes more sense to focus on your strengths instead of your development areas. I’m not saying you should let blaring holes in your skill-set go ignored, but here’s a hypothetical: Let’s say I’m only mediocre at presenting, for example, but great at developing programs. One of my colleagues is terrible at development but great at presentation and roll-out.
Our skills compliment each other, and it may make more sense for me to get even better at program development and my peer even better at presenting, than for us to each work on balancing out what we’re not so good at. What you would end up with in that case would be two people who are mediocre at some stuff instead of two people who are great at one thing and “eh” at the other.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that specialization and cross-functional teams make it more feasible to focus on strengths instead of growth areas.
- Chris
Chris, I prefer to neither expand upon my strengths or improve my weaknesses. I think other people need to change. ;)
@Laurie – And that’s why you’re an HR Punk Rockstar!