I find the most rewarding journey is that of the self to discover one’s strengths and weaknesses.
However, I find that the missing emphasis is on finding the weaknesses in strengths and the strength in weaknesses.
There is no strength without weakness and no weakness with no strength. We are polar people like a stick with one positive end and one negative end.
It is this discovery of self that helps in many areas in life such as forming teams. We need the negatively charged weaknesses of one team member to attract to the positive end of another team member. If tram members do not align this way then the like charges of team members repel each other and the team disintegrates. This is what Harvey Lloyd referred to as hydrophilic and hydrophobic teams.
If we do DISC Analysis for any person we may notice his strengths and weaknesses. DISC stands for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. Not a single person is equally strong in all of them and mostly one prominent strength, one with average strength and the remaining other two being weak.
It is my belief that for the DISC Analysis to improve then we need to find the weaknesses in our strengths and the strengths in our weaknesses.
It is blinding to consider a strength without its weakness or a weakness without its strength.
Illustrative Examples
- My father had a strong personality, but was very dedicated to his family. He became over-worried and reacted in extremes when say one of his kids became ill. Emotionally he was weak.
- If you tend to explain everything in detail you have the weakness of not delegating work to others. This results in stress for being overloaded with work and making others weak by overly depending on you
- If you are very creative then you may lose your ability to focus on what needs to be done.
- Alan Culler provided one great example “If I am extraordinarily good at detail, I might miss the “big picture.” This is the weakness embedded in a strength.
- Charlotte Wittenkamp offered another great example. Would you call being great at problem-solving a weakness? Normally we consider it a strength.
But ask any person who needed a good listen how they felt when the person they asked to listen immediately jumped to offering suggestions, and this strength suddenly became a stumbling block for the relationship. - Harvey Lloyd offered another example. Behavior/habits are always making a statement. Repetition distances us from understanding what the question is, much less the answer.
- If you are too kind then you become exposed to exploitation.
The lesson is that our tendency to build on strength leads to excessiveness and the emerging weaknesses.
This problem shall stay with us for we tend to build on our strengths. This leads to excessiveness which in turn allows our weaknesses to surface out.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts.
There is no doubt that the knowledge of one’s own behavioral style, one’s strengths and one’s limits allows you to face difficult situations or conflicts in both private and working life, learning to orchestrate them in the best possible way, activating the most favorable ones in an organizational context. or in a certain role.
Not only that, self-awareness and the habit of recognizing the behavioral style of the other facilitates the adoption of more appropriate behaviors for effective interaction.
In recent decades, however, models based on the five core personality traits have emerged in personality psychology: open-mindedness, conscientiousness, sociability, willingness to cooperate and vulnerability. The adoption of four personality-related behavioral styles would be obsolete.
Personally, I have only theoretical knowledge of these models and therefore I do not express opinions on them.
Probably, with the complexity that we must face today in the world of work in particular, it will be necessary to ensure that the model adopted is more responsive to the context.
Brother Ali
I haven’t explored DISC or the Gallup Strength analysis. I am curious about them and think I might take the assessment, but get stuck at the “Why, dude -you’re retired!” reaction from my inner twenty-year-old.
I have taught Myers-Briggs, and have taken lots of other instruments. Here is what I think I learned.
Many are self-report assessments -your own view of the kind of person you are. So one’s journey of self-discovery is constrained by one’s own bias of who we think we are.
I have also participated in multiple 360 degree feedback instruments. These provide interesting perspective, as they show how others perceived me. They were all for work and therefore all showed only my work persona. Also I saw only aggregate data. The few instruments that showed me a range as well indicated that I might sometimes be perceived entirely differently by different people.
Much of what I have learned about myself that isn’t from personal reflection has come from conversations with others. That too is fraught with “their” perspective. At one firm where I worked I was considered the “strategic guy” -perceived to be highly analytical and assigned torepresent to organizational discipline to the strategy discipline consultants. At another firm, a partner described me as “the best facilitator ever, but hasn’t got an analytical bone in his body.”
So lesons of self discovery:
Individual reflection is powerful
Self-report assessments -are assisted self-reflection, which rely on a model -what are the questions -bias and personal blind spots may persist -talk to others in a variety of contexts about your results -but remember that this is selfish and must be repaid.
Strengths -always carry a shadow -call it a weakness -that is the consequence of development in one area, which necessitates ingnoring its opposite. Imagine a sprinter’s bunched quad muscles developed for quick speed compared to a swimmer’s lean and long quads developed for an elongated kick from the hip.
Alan
I sent a post to BIZCATALYST 360° titled Dynamic Mentality and it addresseswhat you borther Alan Culler referred to. “So one’s journey of self-discovery is constrained by one’s own bias of who we think we are.”
I could not agree more with you. My post deals with the problem you expressed in your comment.
The second great thought in your comment is this one. “consequence of development in one area, which necessitates ingnoring its opposite.”.
This is exactly the goal of publishing this post. When we pay too much attention to any idea, objective or whatever shall result in the emergence of a new problem that catch us and it could be a wicked one.