The Case for Acknowledging Your Gifts or Self-Esteem As A Success Strategy Pt. 3

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. - Marianne Williamson

This is the third in a series of posts making the case for acknowledging our gifts. In the first post, I asserted that, although acknowledging our gifts is scary, not doing so is the scarier option. It cuts us off from strengths we simply cannot afford to lose. We’ve explored two of these strengths: #1 Acknowledging our strengths builds resilience and #2: Acknowledging our gifts allows us to work from our competitive advantage. In this post, we’ll explore a third. #3: Acknowledging our gifts accelerates their growth.

In 2002, the Corporate Leadership Council (now Gartner) surveyed 19,000 managers and employees to understand the biggest performance drivers. They found that when companies focus on employee strengths during performance reviews, employee performance rises by up to 35%. Conversely, when the focus is on weaknesses, performance decreases by 27%. I’ll let that sink in. When we focus on the stuff we’re good at, we become better at it. So much better in fact, that we tend to gain more from focusing on advancing our strengths than we do from solely fixing our weaknesses.

These stats might seem too extreme to be believable. Except that countless other studies have replicated the correlation time and time again. Gallup research, for example, showed that managers who received strengths-based feedback improved their productivity by 12.5%, while improving company profitability by 8.9%.

And yet, we often choose to ignore our strengths in favor of improving our weaknesses. That was Peter’s approach when we first started working together.

Peter is founder and CEO of an Austin-based, fast growing startup. It’s his first time in the CEO role and so, after closing his Seed round of funding, he smartly invested in an external consultant to help uncover his strengths, weaknesses and blind spots as a leader. The results weren’t surprising: he was standout on his technical expertise, strategic thinking and compassionate leadership, but he struggled to keep his executive team focused and his communication tended to be more complex than most of his team, let alone customers, could easily follow.

Peter is committed to being the best CEO he can for his company, so he delved into addressing his gaps with gusto. He made day-to-day management of the product roadmap his top priority, and hired a communication coach to work with him weekly.

But when Peter came to see me three months later he was livid. The same consultant had just completed a review of the progress made and he was blindsided by the results. The consensus of his executive team was that things were worse. Much worse. While there was more focus than before, and Peter’s communication had become notably more concise and clear - morale and team cohesion, once a standout strength of the team, felt like it was at an all time low. In addition, the team no longer felt they could rely on Peter’s technical expertise when making their toughest engineering design decisions. He simply hadn’t been focused enough on the technical details to provide useful insight.

Peter was flummoxed and frustrated. He had invested so much to give his team what they needed and was getting zero love and worse performance for it. I let Peter vent, and then I asked: “How much have you enjoyed the last three months, Peter?”

“Not very much” he admitted.

“How come?”

“Well... I don’t really enjoy the communication and project management stuff. I’ve become a whole lot better at it but, if I’m fully honest, it’s not what I started this company to be doing, you know? The truth is,  I’ll never be excellent at it and I’m exhausted exerting a ton of energy to just be “okay”... and “okay” has never been an exciting place for me”

“That makes sense.” I responded. “So you tell me Peter, what are you not just “okay” at? What do you excel at doing?”

I felt the energy in the room change as Peter began to speak. His eyes got wide, his back straighter and there was a new light in his eyes as he began: “I am great at solving tough, technical challenges. And the problems our startup is tackling, are some of the toughest ones out there. I am also great at inspiring smart people to work with me. And building them into healthy teams that love working together.”

“Nice! How much of that have you been able to do in the last three months?”

“Barely anything…” he admitted with a sigh.

“Well, it sounds to me like you’ve been ignoring the best parts of yourself. The parts your company and executive team need most right now, I might add. What would it look like to make racing those strengths your priority instead?”

“What about the team’s need for more focus?” Peter countered. “And I know if I drop my communication coach now, I’ll go right back to the “nerdy” Peter folks struggle to understand.”

“That’s fair. But it doesn’t sound like trying to compensate for your weaknesses has been working so well. How about you give yourself a break. What if, just for the next month, you try to focus yourself exclusively on racing your strengths and see if anything changes.”

Peter wasn’t convinced. But he was so exhausted with his current approach, he was willing to give it a try.

We caught up on the phone five weeks later.

Before I could get a word in, Peter excitedly launched in: “Thomas, it’s crazy! I thought I was technically competent before, but the more I focused on that side of the business the more I realized there was to learn! It’s great because I pick up that stuff pretty fast, but I had no idea how much more sophisticated I could get in how we were thinking about our critical design problems…”

Over the next half hour Peter described how he’d been able to make design modifications that cut down the estimated product development time by seven months. This was big news for his investors, and they were beginning talks for his next funding round at nearly double the valuation he had expected to be looking at. Unsurprisingly, team morale was through the roof with this news.

By focusing on his strengths, Peter had found a new depth of expertise he didn’t know was possible. And because he was working from such solid footing, his rate of growth was exponential. Peter realized that he, like so many of us, had been leaving incredible value on the table by treating his strengths as something to take his focus off of, rather than something to hone in on and supercharge.

Today, terms like “genius” and “world-class” get thrown around when people describe Peter. You owe it to yourself to give your strengths the attention they need to grow to those levels too.

Coming next: Strength #4 - Acknowledging your gifts allows others to do the same