It’s the paradigm we have all lived with for years: know your strengths and weaknesses, and then put some serious time into growing your weaknesses - becoming the ‘well-rounded individual’. Performance management systems are often built on the same assumption: that the best employee is one who conforms to the set job description and competencies that are defined for each role in an organisation. The person who scores most on ALL the defined indicators ends up with the most cash in her pocket when the appraisels are done.

Marcus Buckingham, of the Gallup organisation, has a different view. In a few of his books (First break all the Rules; Now Discover your Strengths; and ‘The One thing you need to Know’), he makes a very strong case for a paradigm review: what would happen if we put our energy into growing our strengths, rather than our weaknesses? What if we pursued a model of excellence in the ‘Sharp’ individual, rather than the mediocrity of the ‘well-rounded’ one? Buckingham quotes people all over the world who have attained some level of personal success, and the message is resounding: figure out your strengths, and develop them. Select your work according to your strengths. Manage your team according to their strengths and yours.

At Avo, we have been thinking about this approach for a while. Our first resistance to it was understandible: what happens if I ignore my weanesses, and they come back to bite me? The answer we found makes sense to us: we define weaknesses only as those which interfere with us succeeding where we’re strong. And those we have to massage into an acceptable enough form so they don’t sabotage our moments of brilliance.

My example is this: one of my strengths is defined as ‘Strategic’ (in Gallup’s strengthfinder profiling tool). As leader and MD of this Avo business, it’s my job to chart the way and take the Avos with me. One of my weaknesses is ‘empathy’ (as defined by the Insights profiling tool). SO often, when people in my team are taking strain, it doesn’t even register on my radar! I often need a gentle SMS from my partner and co-director, Elaine, to tell me to notice, so I can do something about it. I can sit down, turn on my empathy switch, and listen to the person that needs my support.

If I wasn’t constantly working on my empathy, I would damage the people in our business with my bulldozer nature, and that would interfere with our business goals and outputs. So in this case, spending some time working on a weakness helps me become even more effective where I’m strong. But I’m never going to be a master ‘empathiser’ like some of the other people on my team (like Carla, or Nomsa, or Tracy). With this weakness I have only one objective - don’t let it destroy your work.

As we have built a deeper understanding of each of our own strengths, and how that plays out as a team, we have been deploying ourselves more and more effectively in our work. Where before, for example, I would hand a product development project to one person on the training team for an end-toend solution, I now hand it to Glen first: his strength of learner and input drives him to research himself into a coma, to make sure we have all our bases covered. Then his more strategic brain helps him define a roadmap, in broad brushstrokes, of how the programme should run. Then Grant picks up the plan, and adds detail and meat. His strengths of consistency and discipline drive him to round up every learning point. Then on to Tracy or Hanli, the magical maximisers, who take the solid product and turn it into the magical execution our clients have come to expect from us.

For us this is just the beginning. We spent Friday afternoon with our coaching team looking at deepening our ability to help managers become better managers of people: by having insight into their own strengths, working with our coaching team to figure how to deploy them well, and strategising on how to use their team members more effectively, they can only get better at building capacity within themselves and their teams.

We have, of course, developed a workshop to help you and your team build deeper insight into your own, and team strengths. Please contact Meryl (meryl@avovision.co.za) if you would like us to come and take you through it. There is no greater gift you can give yourself or your team, than this insight - it’s insight for life!