Finished Reading: Design for Strengths

"Race your strengths" (Mike Walden)- A consistent theme in the book "Design For Strengths."

This book is a great read for those who are looking to boost their productivity, focus, and to ultimately differentiate themselves from the crowd. As an athlete this book really resonated with me. As a coach and manager, it strongly supported practices that I have seen work to help people or teams excel when they shouldn't have. This theme of playing to your strengths is so simple, but very often difficult to support because of our own human nature and demands from others. It puts extreme importance on doing what you do best, more frequently and working to strengthen that skill over rounding out your other skills. This is truly maximized when a team, department or organization understands this and supports it by allowing you to thrive in your expertise area, while surrounding you with others who have equally strong skills in another domain that is relevant to your work.

Another line that strongly stuck out to me in this book, is actually from a reference to a thesis summary of "Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton - "You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses...and you must derive some intrinsic satisfaction from it."

As a former ice hockey goalie and coach, I have seen this play out so many times. A young player has a strength, say shooting - quick release, accurate, hard shot. But they are an average skater and mediocre defender at best. As a result, they are on the first power play unit...in fact the whole system is designed to get them a shot in a high percentage area due to the man advantage situation. They are a star here, naturally. Then they play on the 3rd or 4th regular line because of their other deficiencies in regular play. Instead of accepting their strength and understanding it's value and how to maximize it, they work on skating and defense with limited success. At the age of 16 or 18, it is clear that they will never be much faster or have the ability to play strong defense. In practice they waste countless hours trying to improve and ignoring time that could be spent enhancing the power play and their shot. As a result of focusing on their weaknesses, they lose sight of the power play and become less effective.

John does a great job of describing how to find your strength, understand your weaknesses, accept them and build around them. This book does not suggest to ignore your weaknesses, simply it suggests to understand your limitations and build a support structure around them so you can drive your best attributes more frequently.

As a manager, I so often look for where my employees, team, and company want to go. If I can align an individuals strengths to their goals, the teams goals, and the companies goals, that is great. They will be very satisfied in their work and achieve above their own expectations. If they do not align, I must ask myself why and is the person the right person for the role - the hard part is, the answer is not always "Yes." As a leader, it is important to understand and overlay your teams strengths and how they align to your company and strategy. Communicate effectively before, during, and after the hiring process and build the right team, for the right time.

With a sales organization, you can see where this is misguided a lot. A fresh start-up, pre-revenue, with moderate funding goes out and hires a VP of Sales. They previously worked at a mid-stage company, producing $10,000,000 in annual revenue, had a team of 5 - 10 reporting to them, and had a budget and maybe even a marketing department. This person will fail in the fresh start-up role - 70% don't make it one year.

Why? Because their strength is likely coaching a team, managing the budget and focus on which deals will close next, understanding a defined market, and sales process. A fresh start-up will not have a defined sales process, will have a small budget, has no sales support or junior BDM's developing leads coming in from marketing...this all needs to be defined. You need someone who can operate in the ambiguity of it all, get creative and find what works. Once they find what works, guess what, they will probably not be the right person to operationalize it. Here is a good read on some of the different VP of Sales characters.

In summary, "Design For Strengths" is a great read, perfect for a plane ride or while on vacation. It has plenty of use cases and applicable information to use right away. It will help both individuals and teams to better leverage what they do best to drive extraordinary results. I suggest picking up a copy for your next business read.

[Original post from November 12th]

I am about 1/3 of the way through Design for Strengths and I find this book to be highly relatable to my background. Obviously a Stanford graduate, who is an Olympian, and author is only SLIGHTLY more accomplished than myself :), but I agree a lot with how John equates sports training and performance to life both personally and professionally. I have found the breakdown of Design Thinking to be simple and approachable - probably as a result of empathy (you will get it once you read the book). I also love his focus on being intentional about practice within your 10,000 hours to become an expert...simply not putting in the time, but pushing yourself to fail and grow from failure. So far, this is an easy and enjoyable read. I will update this section soon as I continue to plow through the book!