Focus on strengths

The best managers in the world are not just interested in the weaknesses of their employees. They are positively obsessed with finding and building on their strengths. They look for the sweet spot of each employee’s talents. As a manager at Google puts it: “We all have our blind spots, and the strongest managers have a knack for finding the right people at the right time to cover them.”

The strong manager’s goal is to build an employee into an indispensable asset. She wants the employee to feel like a winner, to know that through hard work and dedication she has achieved something great. It doesn’t matter if the employee is an outside hire or if the employee is a veteran of the organization. The best managers treat every employee as if the person were a potential star—and they treat her that way from the very first day on the job.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. The strongest managers in the world still have to deal with reality. The world is not fair. Some of the best employees in the world are not being treated as if they are the best. Some employees are simply in the wrong roles, for whatever reason. They may be in the wrong organization for their talents or in a job that just doesn’t fit them. They may have been hired by a manager who didn’t recognize their potential. They may have been hired by a manager who didn’t have the bandwidth to handle them properly. They may be in a role where they face too many obstacles, or where the job itself is too difficult.

Whatever the reason, the best managers don’t let this stop them. They may have to become creative. They may have to find ways to get around obstacles. They may have to find ways to make the role itself more interesting or more empowering. Or they may have to find ways to transfer the employee to a better job within the same organization. Whatever it takes, they will get the person into a role that makes the most of his or her talents.

How do the best managers do this? How do they turn an employee who is not succeeding into someone who is a superstar? They do it by focusing on the employee’s strengths.

Another interesting question is how to turn a weakness into a strength. This is no easy task. Most of us have worked with someone who is a whiz at one thing and a disaster at everything else. A good manager’s job is to help that person find ways to use his strengths in the service of his weaknesses. For example, the engineer who is a whiz at designing software might be able to turn his weakness into a strength if he designs the organization’s sales process in a way that takes into account his own weaknesses.

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  Photo by JESHOOTS.com.