By Do you know your strengths? Does knowing what you are good at mean you a conceited person? Absolutely not! You need to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses to be a success. I can assure you that asking about greatest strength and greatest weakness is a fairly popular interview question, so you have to be prepared for it…and PLEASE PAY ATTENTION HERE…while you should be aware of your weaknesses, when you get the question on weaknesses, you are supposed to actually talk about a “weakness” that is secretly a strength. Interviewing is about selling yourself and involves some puffery. That doesn’t mean you’re not being true to who you are. It just means you’re putting your best foot forward. I’ll even offer you my golden response ‘my weakness is that I am stubborn. I stay on a problem until it is solved when I probably should give up.’ See how that might get a prospective employer excited? The worst response I got from an interviewee was ‘I’m really not good at time management’. Sorry, that level of honesty won’t get you to the next round of interviews when the position absolutely requires good time management. Now philosophically the position probably isn’t a right fit if that really is his biggest weakness. I would argue is biggest weakness is being too honest in an interview. But I digress…
The philosophy I was taught was to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Once done, always lead with your strengths while finding ways to shore up your weaknesses. A few years back Mark McGraw from The Sandler Selling System presented at an Origami colleague conference and bravely threw out that while you need to identify both (strengths and weaknesses), you really should showcase your strengths and somewhat ignore those weaknesses (This was paraphrased by me. I’ll see if he writes me that I missed the point.)…because strengthening/lessening your weaknesses doesn’t change them from still being your weaknesses. Interesting dichotomy, huh?
The struggle around strength identification is that some skills may not feel like strengths, because they are innate. For example, I was told by a friend that one of my strengths is that I am a good listener. To me that is so central to who I am (e.g., it comes so naturally), that I don’t view it as a strength. That being said…having seen meetings run by a colleague who is NOT a good listener, I came to understand not only that it is a strength, but also how important that skill in particular is for success not only in corporate America, but also in your day-to-day life.
At Origami I was honored to be part of the ERG for women (WOO – for Women of Origami). During one of our WOO events Minda Rossman mentioned Clifton Strengths as a nifty tool to utilize in the strength identification process. I dutifully bookmarked the url. Unfortunately life took over and I forgot about it. So….I am stating here and now that I promise to purchase and use Clifton Strengths. As with most challenges in life, talking about it publicly (on a blog, in an app) will force accountability. I’d love it if one or two of you will attempt as well and we can share about the experience!
