It’s important to know your blind spots and address them. It’s important to embrace a little discomfort in order to achieve growth. But when we are truly focusing on getting better every day, we have to approach struggle by focusing on our strengths, not our weaknesses.
The Benefits of Working on Our Individual Strengths
When you work on your weaknesses and attempt to improve those, you are taking energy away. Working on your strengths provides you with more energy, and gives you a unique ability and perspective from which to address any conflict, any shift, or anything that stands in the way between you and your goals.
The idea is to embrace what gives us MORE capability. When we work in a corporate environment, we have the ability to delegate our projects and processes that involve our areas of weakness, so it makes sense to focus on our strengths and build those up in order to provide more capability to the organization and our industry. When we give ourselves more capability, we are giving ourselves more opportunities for success.
Reach and Surpass Your Goals
Each one of us provides a valuable component to the whole. Working on improving what we already do well strengthens our foundation, helps us achieve our goals more quickly and efficiently, and solidifies our own sense of satisfaction and purpose.
Goals should be process-oriented. We are trying to get incrementally better every day so our procedures and systems in place to reach the ideal results are stronger. We work on strengthening what we already do well, to overcome what we don’t. Ultimately, that helps us recognize what we can do to reduce the stress on our teams that translate to the consumer.
Recognizing Your Strengths.
It’s much easier to commit to something that brings us positive results. Working on our strengths and growing them naturally feels better than working through your weaknesses. The struggle is necessary for growth, but you need the energy and focus to struggle well. That happens through the personal development of our strengths to compensate for our weaknesses.
At EPM, we look at gathering as much information as we can about the assets and strengths we each bring to the table so we can work on growth. We use the CliftonStrength Assessment to gauge our areas of the greatest talent, and a risk assessment test helps measure growth as we focus on maximizing our potential through those strengths.
A strength-focused approach will help us be better problem solvers, and help connect and improve our teams in important ways that ultimately improve our industry and our communities.