Peter Drucker calls upon managers to manage to strengths rather than focusing on weakness. Here is some guidance on how to do just that. The rewards you will reap in terms of your self-image and perception of those around you are amazing.

Most managers focus on weakness. There may be 300 different tasks or projects going on below us, perhaps thousands if we are high enough up the corporate ladder, and we cannot focus on all of them. In order to be efficient with our time, most managers leave alone the people that they know they can trust and focus on the people they cannot. They invest their time not on what is going right, but on the things that are going wrong and how they can help get them going right.

Here is the result of that kind of thinking:

• The people who are weakest on your team or around you get most of your attention while the strongest on your team receive the least
• You invest in people where the return is very low or negative while not investing in people where the return is very high
• You end up “down in the weeds” (buzzword alert) trying to fix small problems on one person’s desk instead of considering how you can use multiple people to solve problems
• Your reports see you as a source of negativity
• You see yourself as hopelessly flawed and become discouraged
• You fail to leverage your best when faced with difficulty
• You spend time in the parking lot complaining about what others do wrong or poorly
• Demoralized, you “die on the vine” or leave.

This is how just about every manager and every individual contributor does their jobs and sees themselves. Most companies and managers do nothing about this situation. The fact is, they don’t know what to do about this situation.

There is hope.

Marcus Buckingham has written three books which provide guideposts to taking yourself from negative to positive leadership.

1. First Break All The Rules - the story of a Gallup Organization study of management showing what great managers do differently
2. Now Discover Your Strengths - a listing of the 31 strengths identified in the study and how and why to bring them to life on the job and at home.
3. Go Put Your Strengths to Work - presents a six step discipline for taking action on what you learned in the first two books.

The concept is relatively simple:

• Everyone has inborn, native qualities that do not change
• When these qualities are utilized well, personal success results
• When you try to leverage other qualities you do not have and never will, you get poor results and end up beating your head against a brick wall.

There is an online test you take when you read Now Discover Your Strengths which is called Strengthsfinder. When you take the test, it will output which five of the 31 strengths are your signature themes in life. This is not a personality test. It doesn’t tell you anything about how you act when you are cranky, it doesn’t try to explain why you do things. These are simply strengths you have.

I took the test.

Looking at my list of strengths and studying the list of the 26 other strengths that are not signature themes of mine, I can see countless times that I have attempted to solve a problem or succeed by pushing a strategy that required a strength I did not have. Instead, I would have been better off solving the same problem by using my five strengths.

And when I view people that work around me, do I look at the things they cannot do, or do I look at the things they do and see what it is they bring to the table? Do I know how to leverage their talents - which person to pick to solve each kind of problem my team faces?

Most importantly, am I developing my and my team’s strengths, or are we wasting a lot of time investing in weaknesses which will never really improve beyond barely acceptable levels?

Thoughout my career I have found myself focused on developing skills that do not come naturally to me, and I have completely ignored seeking out training and coaching in the things that I do really well. This makes no sense! It is like Coca-Cola spending all of their money on making a better cardboard box to ship drinks in instead of investing in a new or better soft drink.

How to manage to strengths?

• Find out what your strengths are.
• Use your strengths to solve problems and get things done.
• Ignore, work around, or spend only a little time managing weaknesses to get them just good enough to keep them from sinking you, then forget about them.
• Find out what other people’s strengths are
• Go to them for those qualities and put them to work
• Hire people who are naturally empowered to fulfill a role at work
• Develop your children’s natural talents instead of focusing on what they cannot do or do not do well.
• Figure out what your boss is good at and offer yourself as a plug-in to cover what they do not do so well.
• Ignore your boss’s not-so-strong points.

This is harder to do than just reading an article on an opinionated man’s blog. But, it is easier to do that it first appears. Read the books, take the test, learn the strengths, and other people and yourself will start to look different to you.

You might have a major epiphany and realize what you want to be when you grow up.