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Every day the Harvard Business Review posts a "Management Tip" on their web site. I retweet most of them because they offer good advice or a thought-provoking idea. I didn't do that on December 7, 2011, though. That day the tip was: "Improve Your Strengths, Not Weaknesses." Here's the opening.

"It’s a pain to work on weaknesses: Who wants to spend energy trying to move from slightly below average to slightly above? Try focusing on your strengths instead."

This is dangerous advice. The word that makes it dangerous is "instead."

The tip implies that you ignore your weaknesses. That's not such a hot idea. I prefer Peter Drucker's advice.

Drucker advised us to build on strengths and make our weaknesses irrelevant. You can do that by getting just "good enough" at a weakness or by turning yourself into a top performer. That's working on your weakness. But you can also make your weaknesses irrelevant by letting another team member pick up the slack for you.

That sounds like ignoring your weakness and it may work just fine if you're going to stay in the same position on the same team forever. But if you want to move up, the game changes.

You may need to work on your weaknesses as a condition of promotion. If you only work on your strengths, you may take yourself out of the running. And, if you do get promoted,
it's like moving into a parallel universe.

Your big strength in one job may turn out to be a weakness in your new one. A weakness that was a minor nuisance at one level can be a career killer at another level. You can't ignore your weaknesses and you can't ignore your personal development trajectory, either.

Boss's Bottom Line

Build on your strengths and make your weaknesses irrelevant. Do that with an eye on the present and what will be important a job or two up the line. Help your team members do the same.

Resource

I heartily recommend Scott Eblin's book, The Next Level. I especially like the way Scott treats each level as a new development challenge. At each level you have to decide what to keep and what to leave behind. You have to re-assess your strengths and your weaknesses.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.