Are Your Employees Weaklings?
We frequently hear the phrase "you can achieve anything if you just put your mind to it". As nice as that sounds, I can guarantee you I will never play professional football no matter how hard I try!
For every strength, we possess roughly 1,000 non-strengths. This ratio says it's a huge waste of time to try to fix our weaknesses. Weaknesses can't change into strengths, but they can be MANAGED! When your best efforts get you nowhere, redirect the same energy to strength. Most weaknesses can't and don't need to be corrected, they need to be made irrelevant.
What Are Weaknesses?
A weakness is a pattern of behavior, thoughts, and feelings that produces low satisfaction, drains psychic and financial resources; and presents little or no measurable progress toward excellence no matter how hard we try. Here are some signs of weaknesses:
Feel Defensive about Performance: Individuals functioning on strength show little or no defensive
behavior. They meet challenges with a doubling of activity, and progress is the norm, not the exception Experience Slow Leaning: Can't seem to "get it" no matter how hard you try. Slow learning is so significant an indicator of non-strength that it can never be discounted on the assumption that a person will "get it someday."
Do Not Improve With Repeated Experience: Some people plod along; they "get" enough of the activity to be barely functional and then they hang in there, but lack the basic talent for excellence. No matter how hard/often they try, there is no measurable improvement.
Experience A Reduction of Confidence from Performing the Activity: Motivation goes away when we can't do something well. We lose interest and find excuses to avoid doing it.
Suffer Burnout While Practicing The Activity: We experience resistance when doing something we're not good at. "I just can't do this anymore." Top producers report that pressure and stress often create more energy and renew motivation.
Do you see these weaknesses in your organization?
Learn to Manage Weakness
Stop putting people in situations where they are forced to do something they don't do well, which depresses or angers them. Holding on to something (activity, relationship) that doesn't work only perpetuates a weakness that pulls energy away from strengths.
"Enlightened delegation" moves a task to a person/group with the skills to do it.
Use support systems. Find and use the tools that work best to manage specific weaknesses.
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Are weaknesses constant? Typically, yes. Our natures are set by age 14 or so. We can change for short spurts but to maintain behavior over extended periods of time that does not naturally suit us will cause stress and low performance. My family knows my stress when I paying bills for example!
No Failure!
If managing our weaknesses allows our strengths to overpower them, ultimately making the weaknesses irrelevant, does failure truly exist? Or is it simply an inaccurate match of expectations and strengths? Could it be that people are not successes or failures but simply functioning in the right or wrong expectation environment?
In your organization identifying strengths and weaknesses may be the difference between employees firing on all cylinders in their respective positions! Call us for more information!