Just pump up the other three
The genesis of this article was a recent SmartBrief on Leadership email, with the following two articles highlighted at the top. In the first, “Great bosses know the glass is always half-empty”, Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta said, “Every single day, maybe 85% of things are going right, and there are 15% that aren’t going right…I’d rather focus on the 15% that are not going right, because that’s how you become great.”
In the article right below that, “How to Lead Like A Navy SEAL”, we’re emphatically told that, “Focusing on your weaknesses holds you back and limits your thinking…”
Since I believe everything I read on the internet, I started getting really confused. Which is it? Do you become great by focusing on the 15% that’s not going right, or should you ignore that and focus on your strengths?
So I did what I always do when I’m confused; I dug into the topic, I asked around, did some more research, read a couple of books—and that only got me more confused. I found some very smart people who made a compelling case that you should focus on your strengths, and I found some very smart people who said it’s very dangerous to do that.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said the sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in your head while still retaining the ability to function. Since I’m not that smart, I had to find a way to reconcile these two opposing ideas, and hence this roundabout way to what I think is the “right” answer.
The case for focusing on strengths
First, let’s look at the case for focusing on strengths. Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, in their book, Now Discover Your Strengths, tell us that “Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.” Buckingham also says that the best performers are not well-rounded, they’re spiky.
Along the same lines, leadership expert John Maxwell said, “But do you know what happens when you spend all your time working on your weaknesses and never developing your strengths? If you work really hard, you might claw your way all the way to mediocrity! But you’ll never get beyond it.”
From a coaching perspective, focusing on strengths can foster a much more positive climate. People like to hear about what they’re doing well, and the opportunity to do more of the things that come naturally to them is certainly more appealing. Chip Bell, co-author of Managers as Mentors wrote me, “Jack, I would recommend always focusing on strengths…it keeps the betterment process free of negative energy, guilt and judgment!
My good friend Ross, who never took a management course in his life but runs a very successful small business, said that he learned the hard way that the 80/20 rule applies, and if you focus on the 20% of things that produce 80% of your results, you can’t go wrong.
Those are strong arguments, but let’s examine the flip side.
The case for focusing on weaknesses
Bad is stronger than good. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others noted in a well-known paper that in this sometimes-perverse world, the bad often has a disproportionate impact on how others perceive you. I told the story in a previous post of a speech I attended where the speaker made one slight gaffe, unrelated to the quality of the bulk of his talk—yet it’s now the only thing I now remember about what he said. On a business level, one bad customer service incident can scuttle a long-term relationship.
And it’s not just perceptions. Legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight maintains that, “…mistakes determine the outcome of far more games that great plays do.” The problem with ignoring weaknesses is that one weakness can get you fired, or at least severely hold you back. George Patton almost did not get a chance to show his brilliance as a general because his aggressiveness, which was a huge strength in battle, also led him to slap a soldier suffering from battle fatigue. In a way, the 80/20 rule applies in reverse: one weakness can undo a lot of strength. Think of these as “flat tire” weaknesses. If you have a flat tire, you don’t compensate by pumping up the other three.
Strengths can become weaknesses. You can overdo your strengths by focusing too much on them. Rob Kaiser and Robert Kaplan caution that it is easy to overuse your strengths, because they work for you, so you get more comfortable with them—the old cliché about seeing nails everywhere when all you have is a hammer applies here. Assertiveness is a strength—except when it leads you to run over your colleagues and subordinates. As Aristotle said, any virtue has to be employed in a golden mean amount between not enough and too much.
And let’s not forget the Peter Principle: the strengths that get you promoted may raise you to incompetence because of the different demands of the new position. For instance, being analytical can be a strength in certain jobs, until you’re promoted and have to focus more on the people side.
You don’t always know if the door is locked unless you try the handle. Did you ever try something and get it wrong, and then conclude that you’re just not good at it? Some weaknesses are self-fulfilling: we may initially fail and then quit trying. But sometimes a door is wide open to opportunity and you don’t know it, In my own experience, I hated speaking in front of an audience, and preferred the solitary work of crunching numbers and analyzing financial statements. I also filled out a personality instrument and was told that I had absolutely no talent for sales. Then a friend coerced me into attending my first Toastmasters meeting, and that literally changed my life. For an even more dramatic example, read the story of what happened when a young Kansas boy tried something new.
So, which is it?
So if you can’t be great without building on your strengths, and weaknesses can get you fired, what should you do? In reading these opposing points of view, it’s hard to avoid thinking that most people take a position based on personal preference and then find ways to justify it. Is it as simple as playing to your own preferences, with optimists ignoring weaknesses and pessimists obsessing on them? Or is there a more objective way to look at it?
This may be an example of applying my own strength, but let’s take a “financial” approach and look at the question as a return on investment calculation. What’s the best investment of your time, effort and attention?
Step 1: Address your weaknesses first
Anthony Iannarino asked me, “Can’t we eliminate our weaknesses and play more to our strengths at the same time?”
While I think that may be possible, because losses tend to outweigh equivalent gains, it makes sense to begin with weaknesses. Dealing with weaknesses requires three steps:
Identify:
The critical first step is to honestly identify and inventory your weaknesses, which isn’t as easy as it may seem. We tend to avoid or ignore evidence about our weaknesses or attribute failures to circumstances outside of ourselves. As Elon Musk said, “Always seek negative feedback, even though it can be mentally painful.”
Assess:
Here’s where you apply an objective, “financial” approach. What will it “cost” to get there? What are the risks if it is not addressed? How much improvement is good enough? What’s the ROI, or the risk/reward ratio of your investment in time, effort and attention?
Address:
Depending on how you assess the weakness, you can either:
- Ignore. If the weakness or deficiency does not carry expensive consequences or risks, or if the “cost” of the remedy is too high, don’t invest attention on it.
- Contain/mitigate. Can you reduce the consequences, or take steps to ensure that the weakness does not grow?
- Delegate. Can the weakness be outsourced—that is, can someone else handle the activity so that you can concentrate on your strengths?
- Fix. If it carries high risks, or it’s becoming an issue with those you work with, address it as soon as possible.
Step 2: Develop your strengths
This is where the fun begins. Secure in the knowledge that your weaknesses won’t hurt you, you can focus your energy and attention on developing your strengths and your full potential. For a strength, what is the potential payoff if it is developed further? What will it take to get there? How can you design your career so that your strengths can have maximum impact? Is there a level at which further development results in diminishing returns? How will you know?
So there you have it. Secure your base first, and then strive to develop your full potential. If you’re still confused, let me know—maybe my clarification skills are still weak!
A lot of well-meaning people tell you that you should develop your strengths and follow your passion. The unspoken corollary to that is that you should steer away from your weaknesses. If you were a school counselor, what would you tell a young boy who tried and repeatedly failed to make every team he tried out for? Would you suggest that he try to develop some other strengths?
A young boy from Kansas once faced that question. He yearned to be an athlete, but being weak and uncoordinated he failed at everything he tried. He couldn’t make the baseball or basketball team; he didn’t even try out for football. Turning resentful and rebellious, he began smoking, stealing, and skipping school. Finally, in 9th grade he tried the only sport he hadn’t yet tried: track. At the school tryouts, he burst from the starting line in the 400 meter time trial, briefly leading the field before falling back, exhausted. He didn’t make that team either.
Despite these failures, he desperately wanted to earn a varsity letter so he could fit into the school social scene, so when 10th grade came around, he tried out for the cross-country team, despite not being sure what cross-country really was. The only reason he tried out was that it was the last athletic door available to him. He barely finished the first day’s training run, thanks in part to the fact that the last section of it was downhill. When he got home, he was too tired to eat dinner, and went straight to bed. He could barely walk the next day, and as he left for school he said “Mom, I’ll be home early today. I’m done with that cross-country stuff.” Yet his friends talked him into going back to practice that day, and he barely made the C team—a step below junior varsity.
But somehow, once that door was open something began to click. Despite shin splints and all the other ailments that are likely when someone who has never run before begins intensive training, he improved so rapidly in the first three months that he moved up to the varsity that won the Kansas state championship, and he personally finished 6th in the state meet. When he began training again after the winter break, his rapid progress continued, and the boy who five months before was 14th on his team in the mile time trial, defeated the defending Kansas state champion with a 4:26 mile. He finished 10th grade with a 4:08 best time.
In his junior year young Jim Ryun became the first high school kid to break 4:00 in the mile, and in the summer before his senior year he ran in the 1964 Olympics. Within 3 years, he set a world record that stood for eight years. In 2007 ESPN named him the greatest American high school athlete of all time, ahead of Tiger Woods and Lebron James.
The problem with focusing only on your strengths is that sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. You may make assumptions about your own strengths and weaknesses based on limited or no experience.
Potential is not always obvious. In developing talent, we tend to notice the kids who excel early, and then put them on a fast track to realizing their potential, supplying the coaches, teachers, facilities and opportunities to get better. Many times, that works. But some physical attributes like speed and size, and mental attributes like wit and a quick mind, can be seen instantly. Endurance, good judgment and other qualities take time to emerge. There are a lot of activities where success does not come quickly, and it’s so easy to give up too early before you see any results. The strengths-based movement sounds really positive, but does it run the risk of closing doors prematurely?
Along the same lines, we’re counseled to find out what we’re good at and follow our passion. But Jim Ryun did not have a passion for running. He didn’t even like it at first; he just saw it as a way to be somebody at school. Sometimes, instead of needing passion to be really good at something, maybe you have to get really good at something in order to develop a passion for it.
Note: Besides the hyperlinked video in this article, most of the facts in this post came from David Epstein’s excellent book, The Sports Gene.
Winners drink from both
Which of these teams would you rather be on?
The first is famous for taking on highly dangerous and seemingly impossible challenges. Its individual members are known for their high self-confidence, tough-mindedness, and indomitable wills. They are the ultimate can-do optimists.
The other team obsesses about planning; they envision everything that can possibly go wrong, they build in as much room for error as possible before they try anything, and they do everything they can to stack the odds in their favor before acting. Call them the ultimate pessimists.
Most people, especially readers of this blog, would choose the first. After all, optimism is practically a religion in America. The idea of a positive mental attitude has become so ingrained in American thinking that it verges on political incorrectness to question it. You can never win an argument with someone who says that you can do anything you set your mind to, because they take it on faith. A positive attitude is often based on faith and emotion, and anyone who points out practical deficiencies and obstacles is seen as lacking in the right stuff.
But when you take a closer look at what the experts say about it, the picture that emerges is a bit more complicated. In fact, the descriptions above both describe the same team: US Navy SEALs. It turns out that optimism and pessimism are not polar opposites—they can coexist in the same person or team at the same time, and the right mixture at the right time can be critical to your success.
Optimism and pessimism are not opposite ends of a spectrum. They can coexist in the same person at the same time
In The Positive Power of Negative Thinking
Combine these two attributes, and you’re at the top right of the scale. You have big-picture optimism, but fine-detailed pessimism. You have high confidence not because you ignore the dangers, but precisely because you acknowledge and respect them, and then do everything possible to avert, mitigate, or deal with them. And because you’ve thought about them, your mind is better prepared because you’ve probably mentally rehearsed the situation already. Norem calls this defensive pessimism, but I prefer the term positive pessimism.
The right mixture at the right time can be critical to your success
If you think of a competition or major undertaking as a process, there are three distinct phases. The first is the decision whether to play. The second is the preparation. The third is the actual performance.
Whether to play: You have to be optimistic to take on the challenge.
Most people will not undertake something challenging unless they think they have a chance of succeeding. Po Bronson in his book, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
Yet at this stage some negative thinking can also help. Negative thinking is about realizing that it’s not true that you can do anything you set your mind to. Accepting your limitations frees you to focus on the things you can do, and developing those strengths you do have. A positive thinker will take a bad shot in hopes of making it; a negative thinker will help the team by passing to someone who is open or who has a better chance of making it. A coach, or any other leader, will work with the limitations of his individuals to form a better team.
Pessimism and negative thinking during the preparation phase can increase your chances for success.
Bobby Knight, in his book, The Power of Negative Thinking
One of Knight’s themes is that determination and a positive attitude are no substitute for hard work, preparation, and planning. He quite correctly attacks the “don’t worry, be happy” school of success. He tells us that in his experience more most basketball games are not won, they are lost. In other words, mistakes do more to determine the loser than positive thinking and desire and will to win determine the winner.
Negative thinking is similar to Andy Grove’s philosophy that only the paranoid survive. It’s about being fully aware of all the things that could go wrong, and then preparing so that they don’t, or so that you can overcome them when they do happen.
Ironically, when pessimists do their job right, no one notices. Heidi Grant Halvorson tells the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter which missed its target by 100 kilometers, costing NASA $125 million. The fault was traced to a unit conversion error: the NASA engineers worked in metric and the Lockheed Martin worked in English units. Potential errors such as this are caught all the time by people who pay close attention, but “No one says ‘Way to convert those units from inches to centimeters, Bob. You just saved us $125 million dollars and a boatload of humiliation. You rock!’”[2]
During the “game”, it pays to think positive. Playing not to lose can actually decrease your chances of winning.
Once all the preparation is over and you’re in the arena, it’s time to trust your training and preparation and focus all out on the positive aim of winning.
As Bronson says, “The hallmark characteristics of playing to win are an intensification of effort and continuous risk taking. The equivalent for playing not to lose is conservatism and trying to avoid costly mistakes. Under intense pressure, though, having a strategy of avoiding mistakes leads, by itself, to more mistakes. This is the paradox of playing not to lose.”
As evidence, he cites these extraordinary statistics from professional soccer matches that end in penalty kicks to determine the winner. In soccer, the true odds of making a penalty kick are 85%. Yet, when kickers are in the position where their kick will win the match, they make it 92% of the time. When they have to make the last kick to avoid a loss, they make it 62% of the time.
Positive pessimism is not an oxymoron—it’s a highly adaptive, effective and professional response to difficulty and risk. Positive pessimism does not let anxiety prevent action—it harnesses anxiety to produce positive action, when it’s applied at the right time.
The reality is more impressive than the illusion
The wonderful thing about sales is that it’s so competitive and performance-driven. Unlike many professions, you have to be at the top of your game all the time if you want to have any success, because others at the top of their game are working hard to take food off your table. Most salespeople understand this, which is why salespeople in general are always looking for the magical formula that will guarantee success.
There is no magic formula that guarantees you will outsell your competition, no magic formula that guarantees you will get others to do what you want them to do. If there was, what possible reason would anyone have for sharing it?
But if you can never guarantee success, you can deserve it. And there is a formula for that, comprising four simple ingredients:
Care: It all starts with caring because no one will ever persevere in the face of difficulties and rejection for very long only for the money or other external motivators. Michael Jordan got paid a lot of money, but from everything I’ve read about him, he would have played for free if only for the fierce need to compete and win at everything he did. Do you care about something bigger than yourself? Do you care about improving the lives of your customers? Do you care about your prospect as a person and not just as a name on a decision making chart? Do you care about the good of the company you work for? Do you take personal responsibility for a 3-win outcome? A good sale should be a win/win/win. The customer wins, your employer wins, and you win. If the deal you’re trying to put together doesn’t benefit all three, you shouldn’t be going after it, or you should think harder about how to change it so that everyone wins.
Think: Richard Feynman, the great physicist, tells how, as a kid, he would fix broken radios. He would ask the owner what was wrong with the radio, then he would quietly ponder for a few minutes. Once, an owner impatiently asked him what he was doing. He said, “I’m fixing your radio.” Only after thinking for a few minutes would he open the back of the radio, and usually be able to make the repair on the spot.
Selling is similar to radio repair in that it’s about asking smart questions, thinking about the answers you get, and then providing valuable insights to the customer. Thinking is about not merely accepting the situation as you see it, but about analyzing it, understanding it, asking the right questions about it, and actively imagining ways to change and improve it. Thinking is about learning, about taking an active role in your own professional and personal education every day of your life, not just when someone sends you to training. It’s about having the humility to learn from everyone and everything, about not taking the first answer you get at face value.
In selling, it’s also about outside-in thinking: looking at the situation from the other’s point of view and taking their perspective. It’s about clearly understanding and expressing what makes you unique, and why the customer should care.
Plan: Success in any complex endeavor is always the result of a process, whether you knowingly follow the process or not. Knowing the process allows you to have a clearer picture, gives you better control of the outcomes, and helps you to constantly improve it. Planning is about making that process transparent and lining up the resources and actions to increase your efficiency and effectiveness. Salespeople would much rather spend their time in front of customers than writing down a plan, but that little extra time up front is about the most highly leveraged time you spend. Besides, if selling is about improving outcomes for customers, the time you spend planning how to accomplish that is selling time just as much as making a presentation is.
Even if things happen in real time that don’t go according to plan—which will always happen—the insights gained from the planning process will help you react faster and more intelligently. As Kelly Riggs says, planning is the great equalizer; it’s what enables a small competitor to beat the bigger ones.
Work: I hate the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” Why should they be mutually exclusive? Working smarter should not be an excuse for slacking off. The guy who works smarter not harder will lose to the one who works smarter and harder. Sales is partly a numbers game, and the numbers that count include the hours you put in, the calls you make, and the number of opportunities you pursue.
Of course, it’s not just about putting in the hours; it’s about what you put into the hours. If hard work by itself were enough, there would not be billions of people around the world earning less than two dollars a day who work harder than you do. In truth, if you are fortunate enough to earn a living by selling, your hard work is more likely to be rewarded than almost any other profession.
Care. Think. Plan. Work. It’s not a magic formula, but if you do these four things consistently, your results will be magical.
