How to Play to Your Strengths
Unleashing your potential begins with understanding your strengths. Let's delve into the art of identifying and leveraging your unique abilities, transforming them into powerful tools for personal and professional success.
The Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise
This method allows managers to develop a sense of their “personal best” in order to increase their future potential
- A few caveats: the tool is not designed to stroke your ego; its purpose is to assist you in developing a plan for more effective action
- The lessons generated from the exercise can elude you if you don’t pay sincere attention to them
- It’s important to conduct the exercise at a different time of year than the traditional performance review so that negative feedback from traditional mechanisms doesn’t interfere with the results
- Used correctly, the RBS exercise can help you tap into unrecognized and unexplored areas of potential
Compose Your Self-Portrait
Write a description of yourself that summarizes and distills the accumulated information
- The description should weave themes from the feedback together with your self-observations into a composite of who you are at your best
- It should be an insightful image that you can use as a reminder of your previous contributions and as a guide for future action
Redesign Your Job
Having pinpointed your strengths, Robert’s next step was to redesign his personal job description to build on what he was good at
- Scheduled meetings with designers and engineers to brainstorm better ways to prevent problems with new products
- In less than nine months, Robert was promoted to program manager
- He was interacting with more people at work, learning about systems design and engineering, and enjoyed his work more
- Sometimes, the exercise findings conflict with the realities of a person’s job
Identify Respondents and Ask for Feedback
The first task in the exercise is to collect feedback from a variety of people inside and outside work.
- Many people-Robert among them-feel uncomfortable asking for exclusively positive feedback from colleagues, but once managers accept that the exercise will help them improve their performance, they tend to dive in.
Beyond Good Enough
Knowing your strengths also offers you a better understanding of how to deal with your weaknesses
- It allows you to be clearer in addressing your areas of weakness as a manager
- The strength-based orientation of the RBS exercise helps you get past the “good enough” bar
- Once you discover who you are at the top of your game, you can use your strengths to better shape the positions you choose to play
Recognize Patterns
Search for common themes among the feedback
- Add to the examples with observations of your own, then organize all the input into a table
- Even small, unconscious behaviors make a huge impact on others
- For naturally analytical people, the analysis portion of the exercise serves both to integrate and develop a larger picture of their capabilities