Playing Your Strengths

Happy to play into your strengths until you are asked to do something new...

What worthwhile job stays static enough to not have anything new, difficult or outside of your comfort zone?

Exactly. New is good and provides challenge and satisfaction.

One can play the game too, and deliberately really suck at some tasks that you particularly dislike doing, then you aren't asked to do them again.

Evidently "Wal" is short for "Wally".

I answer to either and both are short for something else.

Wally Dilbert is a hero. We were both born with the same genetic affliction and seem to have both been cursed

Is there flexibility for engineers and scientists play to their strengths and natural abilities, or are their pre-determined paths to greatness?

Very few engineers and scientists are employed in an environment where they can pick 'n choose their work, and are generally employed to assist some enterprise in turning a profit in a generally indirect way, which is measured by the understanding and appreciation of fellow engineers in the organisation. Simply another day, another dollar...

It is more in the consulting business that opportunities to play to specific strengths arise, where an engineer might have been chosen/ appointed because of a specific strength. Even then, you have to hope that attractive projects come your way...

Who decides on strength and weakness, and how?

For instance, in my own case, I tend to stick at a problem until I come up with an elegant solution - however long it takes. Is that a strength?

My son however doesn't spend much time on a problem and tends to adopt the first solution he comes up with -warts and all. Is that a weakness?

Or vice versa?

This is not a question of who is right or wrong here, but one of principle on how to decide. In some respects I think my son is right when he says I take too long to solve problems.

Strengths are not static either.

Being able to develop new strengths is a strength in itself.

It's those pills you are on.

Developing new weaknesses must also be a strength ?

A vapour infusion might make that easier to understand.

John Maxwell says, "develop your strengths and staff your weaknesses." That is an appropriate view of things if one is in a leadership position. If you want to become a concert pianst or guitarist but you have very short fingers or are possibly missing a finger you will be very hardpressed to develop that weakness into a strength. It would be better to stick with that which the basic components are in place already.

The bulk of our efforts should be directed to the things in which we have strengths. We don't ignore the weaknesses because those things will hold us back, but we recognize the Pareto Principle in which 80% of our results will come from 20% of our effort.

This apsect of strengths and weaknesses also depends on the role in which we are functioning. If we are in a leadership role our response to "weaknesses" will need to be addressed differently than if we are working on a project alone. There is no cut and dried process or thinking.

A team concept always works better because different skilled people all make contributions in their areas of strength. You need good leadership to bring those people together though and work with synergy.

Don't even get me started on the "schooling" process. It is so screwed up and dysfunctional, with the associated results to prove the point, that it pretty much should be scraped/wiped clean and start over. We teach kids facts, many of them wrong or not of any value, rather than teaching them how to think and problem solve. We focus not on what is done correctly but on what is done wrong or missed. There are some great teachers but their hands are tied because of government and union intrusion in the educational process. Read a great book by Oliver DeMille titled A Thomas Jefferson Education which lays out the need for and solution for a classical education.

At the founding of this country and before we had maybe 3 million people and people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, etc. came out of that process. Many of these kinds of men had little if any formal education and yet through a self-directed process became the kinds of men who did notable things we still talk about today. In a country of better than 350 million people we now spend massive amounts of resources on an educational system that turns out notable people like .....? There are a miniscule number of people doing notable things that will be talked about 10 years from now let alone 230+ years from now. That is a Scoreboard that tells me something is drastically wrong with what we focus on as a society.

If you want to become a concert pianst or guitarist but you have very short fingers or are possibly missing a finger you will be very hardpressed to develop that weakness into a strength.

There are exceptions to this and they standout. For example....

Django Reinhardt.......Using only the index and middle fingers of his left hand on his solos (his third and fourth fingers were paralyzed after an injury in a fire), Reinhardt invented an entirely new style of jazz guitar technique

Otherwise what you say rings true.

When you work alone with limited resources you have to develop polycompetance.

Working only to your strengths is what gets you a McJob. You have a task...you do it well, and you get to do it again and again until that is all you can do. Examples would include cleaning toilets in fast food restaurants or putting out oil fires. Working to your strengths only works in simple tasks.

You have to have a bar to aspire to. If I was putting out oil fires, pretty much the only metric available is "put it out faster". Then, when you get cocky and burn yourself, you will start thinking about, oh.. "safety", "security", and all the things which are not part of the original "strength".

People who only work to their strengths become wealthy and move up in management. They become pointy haired bosses familiar to Dilbert fans. People who work on their weaknesses to become truly competent become CR4 members.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that you only work to your strengths at the exclusion of your weaknesses. You can't do that because you make yourself ineffectual as a leader.

In their New York Times, Wallstreet Journal, etc. Best Selling book, Launching A Leadership Revolution, Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady talk about a Tri-Lateral Leadership Ledger which involves three components; character, task, relationship. If any of those areas are glaring deficient the ineffectiveness of the leader is assured.

Weaknesses are never ignored but they also never take the bulk of our efforts. We do what we do best primarily, with the bulk of our time, and also take some smaller amount of time to strenghen the areas of weaknesses. We surround ourselves with those people who are strong in the areas where we are weak. As Zig Ziglar said, "Teamwork makes the Dream work."

In our community, we have a charter school which is based on "project based learning". The idea is to mimic real world work. You have a task to do. It must be done by a deadline. There are specific criteria that must be met. Some projects the student gets to choose his team, while others the teacher selects the team. A presentation is given by the team.

So, how well does it work? Since our state uses and an ineffectual method of verifying student learning (state testing), our charter school does not test well. We also don't know how well the kids will do when they go to college, since this is the first year that seniors will be graduating (last year the highest grade was a junior, the prior year a sophomore, etc). I'm expecting them to do well and be ahead of their "normal" public school peers.

I was so impressed with this method of teaching that I became active with the school and was brought on to the Governance Board, which I consider a great honor. I think we're doing a great job providing our kids with the necessary tools to give them a head start in their future education and careers.

I would go along with that.

In a similar situation (years ago) I was chairman of a community association committee. The underlying strength was that most committee members (unpaid volunteers) had something special to contribute (time, effort and/or expertise) whereas at the same time the underlying weakness was that most of the active members had a dislike of formal committee meetings. "...we've come to do the work and help solve problems, not sit and talk about them..." Coupled to which was a further dislike where some active members thought they had had extra work thrust on them by inactive members who seemed only to attend committee meetings - but did nothing in between.

Of course we needed meetings, otherwise we were unable to focus attention on important matters or co-ordinate activities, or to authorise decisions. Finding a balance was tricky.

My approach (as chairman) was to allow everybody on the committee to each agree a specified task they would take on (no shirkers). They would then be the focal point (a sub-committee of one) for all activities associated with that task. Every issue arising in the period between committee meetings, was referred to them for action, where if necessary they would liaise with other members that might be affected by the task. Co-opt non-committee helpers where necessary, do the job, and report back to the committee when completed.

I suppose this was cross between democratic committees-v-autonomous management. But it worked. Problems encountered were solved on the run - rather than delayed and saved for the next committee meeting.

There were problems of course. Usually dropped in my lap. I tried to solve them and usually did. That was my 'strength' I guess. Perhaps it was also that was my 'weakness' - word gets round, and soon you are no.1 problem solver on everyone's list list to call on.

As I said in my previous post 4, a difference between strength and weakness is not always easy to define.

I love reading about success stories like this. Sometimes we need to simply give people the autonomy to do things "their way" and as long as no major rules are broken and the outcome is positive, then everyone wins. I also think that intelligent people thrive on being given the opportunity to do things their way.

Things were different then. Students were asked... What do you want me to teach you today? They knew they were there for the day, same as now. Jefferson taught himself masonry. (including how to reduce lime to cement). Who taught him how to do that? Should it be on the average inner city curriculum?

Now what do you think your average 8 year old wants you to teach him? How to plant frikken cherry trees? Nah...he will want to learn a couple of new apps for his I phone.

Think you can keep in front of him?

Yusef1, I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at, but the question isn't so much what we should teach, although that is critically important, the emphasis should be on how the learning takes place.

We all know much of the content of education will be different, although the basics of reading, writing, communicating and using numbers are always in vogue, as the environment (not air, trees, etc.) in which we exist/function changes almost constantly. The more important thing to learn is how to think, how to solve problems, how to find the answers to questions, etc.

It's a little like when my son (20 yrs. old) was in China for about 7 months working in a camp ministry. Better than half that time was spent fixing things at the camp, hanging doors, installing a sprinkler system, landscaping, planting grass and trees, etc. One morning he called and we visited for a bit and then my wife and oldest sister got on Skype with him. As I left for work I went by and told him goodbye and he said, "hey daddy, thanks for all those times you took me to work with you and taught me how to ...." What I was teaching him wasn't so much the technical side of work but more importantly, how do we solve problems, how do we learn to work with other people in a synergistic manner (interdependence), how do I learn on my own?

That isn't being taught anymore, except in isolated instances where there is a teacher who knows what his/her true job is.

The point of the Thomas Jefferson Education is to have more of a classical education where the kids learn different things and in a different way than the conveyor belt system of government and many private schools. The goal is to have young people who will be business owners, entrepreneurs, independent thinkers, leaders in their homes, churches, business, community organizations, military, etc.

Look at the curriculum standards and tests for 5th Graders from that time period. They would probably confound most high school kids in our current educational system. We are spending more and more money on "education" and turning out a high percentage of imbeciles who are ignorant, they're not stupid, just uninspired.

Interesting that we would be considering a return to the very thing that our forefathers put in place decades ago that made America a world power but was abandoned in the 1980's.

For decades the workplace was made of people that were experts/specialists in their field and their products were without a doubt the very best available in the marketplace.

A group of knowledgeable people with concentrated focus in small specialized areas working together as a team will produce the very best results attainable every time.

The problem is that in order for these highly opiniated, intelligent humans to be successful as a team none can be lazy and none can be so super sensitive and egotistical that they cannot accept and grow from the criticism of/by their peers.

Each and every one of the team members must know and accept their limits and not take it personally when told they are wrong by another member.

They must know, understand, and accept that it is ok to fail or to not know the answer and "lean on their peers" for help.

All must understand and accept that they are in the workplace to perform a service for a company for a price and they do not have to like each other as friends to work together.

All must understand and accept that the task at hand must be completed regardless of boredom, personal dislikes, or that they are just having a bad day.

Everyone must understand and accept that there will be mistakes and these must be corrected but treated as a learning experience and not as an opportunity to blame or "get even".

All must accept that as humans none of us are perfect.

"Interesting that we would be considering a return to the very thing that our forefathers put in place decades ago that made America a world power but was abandoned in the 1980's."

The degeneration of the culture, the educational system (elementary, high school and secondary), governement, etc. started much earlier than the 1980's. It really started in about 1913 when the role of government changed dramatically through some Constitutional Amendments and Court rulings.

We have enough evidence on the Scoreboard to show that our thinking and actions have been faulty since then and we need to restore the principles that helped to make us great as a nation.

Hear! Hear! GA!

Yes I agree that it started sliding down the hill in the early 1900's but we finished it off in the 80's with all the greedy "outsourcing" and imlementation of the "touchy-feely", "can't say no", "spin it up" and "tear it down" work culture changes.

Too many people in this great country have lost sight of what it really means to be an "American".

Being a citizen of this country gives everyone the right to attempt anything they have the nerve to try but it does not entitle them to anything nor does it guarantee success.