Tag: strengths

Managing Your Strengths

by Bright Osadiaye, posted in Health & Well-Being, Improve Academy, Leadership, Management, Personal Development, Workplace Learning
Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

We all have strengths and weaknesses. Success comes from strengths. Failure, on the other hand, comes from doing what we are not good at.

If you wan to succeed in your life, use your strengths, not your weaknesses, to get what you want.

To manage your strengths, according to Robert E. Kaplan and Robert B. Kaiser, ‘… is to accept them. If you literally don’t know your own strengths, you have no way to calibrate or modulate it.’

‘… to stop overplaying your strengths does not mean … to stop using it. It means using the strength more selectively.’

‘overusing one’s strength not only corrupts the strength, but it begets weakness in yet another way.’

‘Leaders who develop versatility don’t lose their range, they embrace it.’

‘Versatility requires knowing when a certain approach is appropriate and when it is not.’

‘You best chance of making change stick is to do both the outer work and the inner work of improving.’

‘… an iterative cycle of reflection and action is required to achieve lasting change: insight begets action begets insight begets action.’

‘Changing yourself is an admirable exercise in self-control. But it is wise to also employ counterweights- process or people- to aid your efforts.’

‘… to accept yourself is to look at yourself as if you are somebody else.’

‘To accept yourself is to be courageously objective about yourself, inside and out.’

Source:

Robert E. Kaplan and Robert B. Kaiser (2013). Fear Your Strengths: What You Are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem.

Managing Your Blindspots

by Bright Osadiaye, posted in Health & Well-Being, Improve Academy, Leadership, Management, Personal Development, Workplace Learning Report

‘Blindspot: An unrecognized weakness of threat that has the potential to undermine a leader’s success.’

‘People who are smart and self-assured are often very skillful at justifying their thinking and behavior- to the point of being in denial about their weaknesses and the threats they face.’

‘Mistakes are the royal road to understanding blindspots, particularly when repeated over time and in different situations.’

‘Part of the skill in identifying and overcoming blindspots is to understand that some are the result of individual traits and others arise from situational factors.’

‘Leaders can assume they are aware of what is occurring around them when, in fact, they have partial, sometimes inaccurate, and often outdated views.’

‘There is some truth in the saying that the surest way to destroy a company is to give it ten years of unmitigated success.’

‘Leaders must strive to create a culture that promotes straight talk but also pay attention to the nuances of communication in the decision making process.’

‘The challenge is to remain focused on the decision that needs to be made while simultaneously paying attention to subtleties that can easily be lost in the heat of debate.’

‘Leaders need to listen openly before a decision is made and then become drivers of results once it is reached.’

‘One of the burdens of moving up is that the complexity of the decisions leaders face increases at the same time as their ability to reveal their vulnerabilities decreases.’

‘Successful leaders have a strong belief in their own abilities … the best and the brightest can easily come to believe that following anything other than their own convictions is foolish.’

‘The leader creates the team and the team then creates the leader– as a primary source of feedback and advice, it becomes a key influence on the leader’s thinking and behavior.’

Source:

Robert Bruce Shaw (2014). Leadership Blindspots: How Successful Leaders Identify and Overcome the Weaknesses That Matter