Grow Your Strengths With Practice

Sunday August 24, 2008

I am a real proponent of the management philosophy that you help people continue to develop their strengths rather than trying to help them develop their weaknesses. This theory was proposed by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently as a result of the Gallup organization's interviews with 80,000 managers. On top of trying to get the daily work completed and the annual goals achieved, I don't see how anyone has time for both.

In my case, I'm good with people, not very good with mathematical story problems. No matter what, I will never be good at solving complex mathematical problems. Could I get better? Probably. But, why not spend my time honing my strengths? I'll bet you have a parallel in your life. Why not share it in comments below?

In a more middle of the road personal story, I have always been a good writer. But, strengthening that skill over the past eight years, writing online and for publications, has made me a better writer and a faster writer. Writing is definitely a skill, once I started doing it every single day, with hours of practice and a deliberate commitment to growth, that I continued to develop.

And, sure enough, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt at the Freakonomics blog weigh in with these thoughts:

"A while ago, we wrote a New York Times Magazine column about talent — what it is, how it’s acquired, etc. The gist of the column was that 'raw talent,' as it’s often called, is vastly overrated, and that people who become very good at something, whether it’s sports, music, or medicine, generally do so through a great deal of 'deliberate practice,' a phrase used by the Florida State psychologist Anders Ericsson and his merry band of fellow scholars who study expert performers in many fields."

In the column cited in the quote above, Dubner and Levitt conclude that:

"…the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.
"Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't 'good' at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better."

So, it seems there is truth in the power of developing your strengths and deliberately practicing the areas you want to improve. This never comes home to me with such power as when I watch the athletes compete in the Olympics. Sure, many of these athletes have physical characteristics that assist them to excel in their chosen sport – think Michael Phelps, the winner of a record eight gold medals in a single Olympics. But, every athlete competing in the Olympics spent years in deliberate practice to develop both their physical characteristics, their mental focus, and their skill in their chosen sport.

I also liked the plug for "love your work" in the article, a concept you hear me talking about frequently. Do you agree – about the deliberate practice or the love?

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