The Only Way to Build Your Career
While I continue on th subject of finding your strengths, I would like to say that your strengths are the only thing you can really build on when trying to enhance your career assets. Common wisdom dictatesthat the way to improve professionally is by shoring up personal weaknesses. That is so wrong!
You cannot improve a weakness.
Why can I say this with such conviction? There is a whole ’strengths movement’ out there, initiated by venerable experts who say you can’t. As I pointed out in the previous post Peter F. Drucker can be considered the father of this movement. He probably ignited the whole thing with his 1966 book, The Effective Executive, in which he wrote: “The effective executive builds on strengths-their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates…”. In 1987 David Cooperrider fanned the flickering flame with his premise that we must “build organizations around what works rather than fix what doesn’t.”
Marcus Buckingham made it personal in 2001, however, with his book, Now Discover Your Strengths and has furthered this thinking with his latest directive, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, in which he calls for a “personal strengths revolution” where we shed our societal preoccupation with improving through studying failure. He challenges us to investigate the unique and intricate patterns of our strengths, becoming an expert at ”finding, describing, applying, practicing and refining your strengths.”
Having helped many find greater career and life satisfaction by doing this very thing, I wholeheartedly agree! So don’t spend time trying to gain imperceptible improvement in your shortcomings when that same time applied to your natural strengths can pay off exponentially.
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