How to deal with a weakness, or lesser strength.
How do you deal with a weakness, or lesser strength, as I prefer to call it?
I often get asked how to handle a weakness which is maybe a strength of someone else's. And on the flip side, how to handle a strength that might be someone else's weakness.
This typically happens in a partnership or a team environment where someone has a strength and they want to do something a particular way because they 'know how to do it' and someone else maybe doesn't feel comfortable with doing it because it's not their thing–not their natural talent.
Common sense might say ‘well you go do that thing you're really good at because I suck at it and I just don't want to do it’, but sometimes we have to pull our weight together and we need to help each other.
Let's take the example of the CliftonStrength called Activator and something like Deliberative. Activator, like me, pushes the button and says 'let's go!' Deliberative says 'well actually before we push the button let's push pause and let's think about why we're doing this. What are the benefits? What's the outcome? What's the strategy? Is there a strategy?'
The team environment
As a team, having a Deliberator push pause can often be very useful because I can tell you from experience sometimes we Activators make decisions that maybe we should have thought about a bit more.
But other times we're just like 'man can everyone please back off and just let me do my thing because I like pushing the button!' There needs to be sometimes some kind of a compromise.
What I learned from the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey was the idea of a win-win. Let's say, for example, you want to go networking, or you need to go networking, or you enjoy networking, but someone else on your team or your business partner doesn't enjoy it. There are two things you can do:
Watch this short 5-minute video to find to what to do.
PS. It really is exactly 5 minutes.
Be safe and as always, be amazing!
Dan :)
