We’re going on a bear hunt…

There is a school of thought that believes you have to identify an individual’s weaknesses and try to fix this. Assist the person to become a ‘complete’/perfect individual. However, research shows that if you would focus on the individual’s strengths, the overall improvement in performance would be double what it would have been focussing on the weaknesses. The obvious choice would then be to…?

Not to sound patronising, it is like the response in those banking ads. The presenter asks: “Why are you choosing this bank?”. And the response: “Are you serious?! ”

Yet, we generally still have a societal focus on weaknesses, not strengths. I am not suggesting we deny the obvious development areas, especially if there are high risks linked to it. What I am saying is, we have to find ways to overcome our limitations, not deny them.

My dad comes from the insurance industry, so I grew up with ‘risk management’ as a theme. I know that if you focus on the risks, you can easily become anxious. This is often visible in performance when someone receives criticism. If the negative feedback is not positioned in a constructive way, the performance will be worse, not better.

When people become scared to admit their weaknesses, they hide them, lie about them, and blame others. In a team this could be disastrous. I find myself doing a lot of senior management team development work - assisting in creating a ‘safe space’ where team members can talk about their own limitations, and as a collective figure out ways to move around them.

Personally I was in denial of a technology related limitation for a long, long time. I was exceptionally creative in finding ways around this, compensating for this in, let’s just say interesting (read ‘really stupid’), ways. It was only when a client in a meeting looked at my black book with a thousand tags and just shook his head, that the penny dropped for me. What I would call a “Development Area” was not just to wake up to technological possibilities, but to move through the fear of the unknown, maybe to struggle initially. When I now look back at this, I cannot imagine not dealing with this limitation.

I love reading Going on a bear hunt to my kids. Michael Rosen has taken an old children's rhyme, and turned it into a picture book. The repetitive line when spotting an obstruction/limitation says it all: “We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”

Motto Model: http://goo.gl/cNnpy and Motto Individual Assessment: http://goo.gl/UhC7V

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