strengths and weaknesses

I’m with my main client company for an all-hands meeting for a few days, which includes one of the endless variation of personality assessment quizzes. This particular one is designed to assess five key categories of “strengths.”

I don’t mean to sound flip; I think that these assessments are a great way to find a starting point for a discussion about personality. I took the Myers-Briggs (perhaps the best known one) a few years ago as a way to try to resolve personality differences with a boss. It didn’t fix the problem, but it was nice to know why we didn’t see eye-to-eye.

What I learned from this test wasn’t surprising. It also wasn’t surprising that I wasn’t surprised; the latter half of my MBA was chock-a-block with exactly these types of quizzes, and I’ve been doing nothing but exhaustive self-assessment in the last few months.

Right now, I have to say that I’m far more focused on weaknesses than strengths. Is this a good thing?

The assessment revealed that my core strengths lie in the Strategic, the Futuristic, in Individualization, as a Learner, and in Input. In other words, I have a forward-thinking big picture tendency, I believe that you have to know your audience and play to their abilities, and I love to learn and seek input from others.

Again, this is not surprising. But is it useful?

My struggle right now is figuring out how these core skills are useful in my present context. It’s like being an Olympic swimmer stranded in the desert: pretty cool, but not as useful as the guy with survival training.

I can’t help but feel that my weaknesses are keeping me from success more than my strengths are moving me forward, because those weaknesses have an immediate–and substantial–impact. I’m skilled at thinking about future projects and coming up with new ideas, not in finishing projects already in progress, but guess which one pays the bills? I love learning new abilities, but applying what I’ve already learned in a disciplined manner is what gets rewarded.

It’s not that I’m completely lacking in those traits, it’s more a question of whether the impact of, say, being in only the 75th percentile of “attention to detail” has more of a career impact at this stage than being in the 99th percentile of “strategic vision.” Like the swimmer in the desert, I think that’s the case–you can’t win in the Olympics if you never make it out of the desert in the first place.

So if your core strengths aren’t necessarily applicable in your current situation, what’s the best strategy? I’m not sure what the answer is, but hopefully I’ll find out more today.