Strengths and Weaknesses

It's the individual's responsibility to maximise strengths whilst it's the manager's responsibility to minimise weaknesses by providing support structures to complement them.

There is a tendency amongst many managers to focus on the weaknesses of employees and constantly try to improve them.

We believe addressing weaknesses is an individual pursuit and should not be a major focus of management. Of course, this must be taken in context and on what the weaknesses are.

We have a term called baseline weakness. In other words, if the person who spends a lot of time on the phone has a weakness with basic language skills, this falls below the baseline and won’t work.

But assuming a person is above the baseline weakness, it is far better for managers to focus on their strengths.

Most people don’t know what their weaknesses are, let alone their strengths. A good manager must work to identify them. Once this is done, all efforts must be used to maximise what they are good at and put them in position…