How to be good at everything
From the time we are born there is a focus on what we aren’t good at. As a child our parents worry when we don’t take our first steps quick enough, or when we don’t make friends as easily as others in our class. They might scorn us for being too trusting of others, for talking too much or telling too many stories. As a teenager you take home your report card full of A and B grades and what did your parents focus on? The poorer grades that you must improve upon. Then we leave home, go to work or college and are told we need to be ‘independent’. To look after ourselves and not rely on anyone else for help.
This continues throughout our adult years. When we get to work we have performance reviews where the primary focus is on getting better at what we’re not so good at. How does that make us feel? De-motivated and de-energised often to the point our performance declines and we leave that job in search of a better one. And so the cycle continues as we constantly strive to be become the well-rounded person, good at everything, that we will never be.
I've spent 17 years working in corporate environments. It is astounding how much time and effort I've seen going into telling people they need to improve on what they are not naturally good at instead of focussing on where their talents naturally lie.
As Peter Drucker, one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice said: “It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity, than to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
It begs the question of why do we continually ask people to improve in areas where they will only ever be mediocre? What if we could help people perform from where they are naturally strong? What if by doing that we would start to see the very things we are striving for - increased performance, productivity and ultimately bottom line profitability for our organisations?
We know that when individuals are able to use their strengths their happiness and well-being increases. This benefits their employers through increased productivity, higher engagement and fewer sick days and health-related expenses for their organisation. [1]
In his book 'The Outliers - The Story of Success' best selling-author Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-hour rule", claiming that the key to achieving expertise in any skill is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing for around 10,000 hours. If you put this into the context of the working week it would take around 170 years to get good at all 34 strengths in the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment. Which just goes to show what a huge waste of time it is to try because it's actually impossible.
So if you want to be good at everything what is the answer? The answer comes from identifying your strengths and claiming your weaknesses. Your weaknesses sap you of your time and energy. Once you understand them you can partner with other people who will be energised by your weaknesses because they have them as strengths.
Here are some examples.
If you are someone with the strength of a Relator, as I am, you enjoy close relationships with people you know and trust. The chances are you don’t enjoy small talk very much because you want to get to know people and find out what really makes them tick. You don’t like being in a big room full of people you don’t know, it makes you feel uncomfortable. You are the person at a networking event who will easily stick to someone when you have something in common and want to talk to them for a long period of time. Does it make you a bad networking person? Probably if you look at the tick list suggestion of ‘how to work a room.’ No wonder so many people who are told by their organisation they have to network don't want to do it! But as a Relator the chances are you will be able to follow up with the one or two people you spoke to and maintain a relationship with them afterwards.
Let’s contrast that with the strength of someone who has Woo in their top strengths. People with Woo (which stands for Winning Others Over) love to meet as many people as possible. They actually enjoy a room full of people and will go out of their way to make friends with as many people as possible because they enjoy it. So as a Relator how do you make yourself be as good as you can possibly be when you go to a networking event? Find a person in your organisation who has Woo as a strength and take them with you. They will do the initial introduction and leave you to get down to the deep and meaningful conversation whilst they carry on working the room.
Lets look at this from another perspective. If you are someone who is great at coming up with ideas (the strength of Ideation) but struggle to implement them, you need to partner with someone who is good at getting things done. Someone with great executing skills like an Achiever or someone with Focus. Otherwise action never gets taken and whilst you have brilliant ideas, none of them will ever get the light of day! What a huge waste of your ideas!
We all like people like ourselves so we naturally seek them out to work with. I am sure we have all witnessed it - the teams that work in silos and don't communicate with anyone else. The boss that works all by themselves whilst their team, not empowered to do anything until they are told, wait for instructions on what to do next. These types of behaviours spell disaster for organisations in more ways than one.
Being able to be good at everything is about understanding what you are good at, your strengths, and what your areas of non-strength are so you can partner with others who fill the gaps you don't have. Dealing with what we aren’t good is not something we are naturally comfortable with because we have been conditioned, from a very young age, to see it as a weakness. We ALL have weaknesses and they need to be embraced so we can partner with others to achieve the best results.
