19: Coach your strengths
There are plenty of books and courses about how to tackle your areas of development, the places where you have ‘gaps’. I have doubts that is the best use of time. In my experience playing on your strengths and working on making them better delivers better returns than working on some ‘area of development’ in a smaller weakness.?
I make this example of Messi, probably the best football player in the world[1]. There aren’t many ways to score a goal: by feet in action, by feet from a free kick (or set piece if you are British) and with the head. Messi’s key strength is in his left foot rather than in his head because his height is 170 cm, and an average defender height is 184 cm; shorter legs also mean shorter thrust when jumping to hit a ball with the head. That is why in training Messi, (one of) the best free kick throwers in history, continues to polish his great gift rather than learning to score more goals with his head.
He trains to be perfect in free kicks. He must have practiced tens of thousands of times, but he will still train his greatest strength. Focusing on your strengths and becoming better and better at those, rather than worrying about areas of development, might be the best course of action.
Now some will argue that despite all this training he scored only 2.5 x more goals from free kicks than headers[2], despite the disproportionate advantage in his skill set; but what must be noted is that free kicks are in your hands (or feet) - headers are dependent on someone else to cross and you being in the right place.?
The difficult part is to prioritise what you are really good at, and train to become the best at it and get a good coach. Because don’t forget that ‘even Messi needs a coach!’.
[1] According to The Economist, Messi is the greater goal scorer https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/08/14/by-the-numbers-lionel-messi-is-european-footballs-best-scorer-ever. You might disagree.
[2] As Messi keeps scoring this stat won’t be perfect. At time of writing he had scored 24 goals with an header, 443 with his left foot and 89 with his right foot and 65 in free kicks (same as Beckham but he can still beat him)
Sales & Marketing | Customer Experience & Business Strategy | People - with a strong passion for Mentoring young talents
8 个月Great article. Couldn’t agree more Giorgio Delpiano ! One of the best advices I also got from Emmanuel E.G.M. Mignot years ago ….
That’s interesting - our competence management systems always seem to work along the lines: measure competence vs a large complex framework (skills and experience) -> develop long list of gaps -> develop long list of actions. Leading to unfocused and unproductive effort at best, or nothing. Your thought would lead to a very different approach, if I understand correctly.
This also applies to improving our teams' performance. One way to draw more from teams' strength is focusing on success of the team and replicating the conditions led to that success. The 'Bright Spots' exercise, where you focus on the moments when the team delivered best results and felt proud of themselves , consciously replicate and improve the conditions that enabled these results is one of the corner stones of building high performing teams.
Delivery Manager Motorsport presso Shell
10 个月This is one of the most important drivers for me, and I am always trying to pass it on my teams!! Thanks for the very good article
Executive Coach and Mentor | Leadership | Business & Digital Transformation at scale | Facilitator | Capability Building | Program & Project Management | Change Management | Problem Solving | Business Analysis
10 个月Completely agree with this & am delighted to have put into practice recently; helping individuals understand their strengths through psychometric assessments & how to get the best out of themselves - as well as sharing individual strengths across the full team, so they can work more effectively with complementary strengths.