Improving your Weakness vs. Growing your Strength?

Strengthen Strengths, and be keenly aware of, weaknesses.

Today’s digital workforce is facing many challenges, as information is only a few clicks away, but knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, you have to de-learn and relearn all the time. So how to hone your skill set and manage your career path more proactively? 

How to manage your energy and time more effectively? Improving your weakness vs. growing your strength, which one shall you focus on?

Strengthen Strengths, and be keenly aware of, weaknesses. It depends on your context whatever pragmatically you think would make the biggest impact? . You can't put your blinders on and not identify and own your weaknesses. It is more impactful to work on improving your strengths as this is where you can work in your sweet spot. Our strengths are where our natural talents lie, they energize us and point to where we can be most successful - so the trick is to know what your strengths are (realized and unrealized) whilst also being aware of your weaknesses - navigating around them by using appropriate strengths and calling on the support of others who are naturally strong where you are weak.

Being versatile not only allows for greater depth in your team, it also greatly improves every employee. If your strengths are formidable enough to overshadow your weaknesses, go with your strengths. If your weaknesses prohibit the effective exploitation of your strengths, then you better focus on your weaknesses. There is something here also about matching your strengths with what the business needs so there may be a need to hone, adapt or even play down the strength to ensure you fit with the business direction. Being a great process operator may be great but not if the business requires that process to change and you to use your process knowledge to build a better process. Also, overplaying strengths can be just as destructive as underplaying them

There is no limit of perfection. Still, learning is a continuous process, that means a person has to continue working on strengthening his/her weaknesses, and strengthening his/her strengths. Thus, both are required. You might want to, as an alternative, think about raising a skill, style or quality level from weak to a certain level, but stay focused on the strengths. Go with your strengths and hire for your weaknesses. They are somebody else's strengths. Weaknesses are embedded in human nature; however we should continue to overcome our weakness by learning new thing. There is no limit of perfection.

Strengthen your strength, strengthen your weakness, make your strength shine through, don’t let your weakness drag your down, and manage your time wisely to strike the right balance.