Focus on Your Strengths for Career Success

by Tony Colangelo

The Benefits of Focusing on Your Strengths:

Great leaders know that a critical X factor of career success is leveraging their strengths to deliver the highest impact to their teams, organizations, and broader stakeholders. These leaders enhance their capabilities by building a team around them with diverse strengths that complement their own. As a professional executive coach, I help my clients leverage and enhance their strengths to accelerate their journey to reach their career goals.

According to Gallup Research: To improve performance, develop your people based on their strengths -- not their weaknesses.

Traditional workplace development focuses on finding and fixing people's weaknesses. The result? A negative employee experience, mediocre performance improvements, and less engaged employees.

Instead, developing people's strengths helps them become more confident, productive, and self-aware. This leads to 7% to 23% higher employee engagement, 8% to 18% increased performance, and 20% to 73% lower attrition.

This powerful approach of leveraging your strengths also aligns with research in positive psychology, emphasizing that when working in our most proficient areas, we are significantly more productive, boosting our motivation and overall well-being. These productivity gains allow us more time to focus on our strategic projects that are critical to meeting our objectives. Leveraging your strengths can also help you become an expert in niche areas, making you a valuable asset to your company and significantly increasing career advancement opportunities.?Ultimately, recognizing and focusing on your strengths helps you build a personal brand that telegraphs your unique attributes and ability to deliver results.

5 Strategies to Leverage Your Strengths to Increase Your Impact:

1 - Identify and Analyze Your Strengths - Review the skills and behaviors that have provided you the most impact and success to date. Regularly seek feedback from colleagues, mentors, and leaders, including past performance reviews, to fully understand your strengths and any developmental blind spots. Understanding your unique abilities and strengths will help you develop a plan to leverage them to your best advantage.

2- Showcase Your Strengths - Once you have reviewed your strengths through the methods above, build a plan to ensure you maximize your strongest abilities in your daily work. Look for new opportunities to utilize these strengths, i.e., new projects where leadership will see your strengths on full display. Having your unique attributes recognized by others is one of the quickest ways to position yourself for promotion to a next-level role. Be willing to step out of your comfort zone, take calculated risks, and take on challenges that allow you to showcase your strengths in new ways.

3 -Enhance Your Strengths - It is also critical to continuously look for ways to develop and expand your current strengths. Engage in seminars and training sessions that align and broaden your core capabilities. Continually read articles and listen to podcasts closely related to your current strengths to expand the breadth and depth of your knowledge. Also, look for mentors inside and outside your organization with similar competencies to benefit from their insights & learnings.

"Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths." - John H. Zenger

4 -Build Your Personal Brand Around Your Strengths - Another crucial part of leveraging your strengths is communicating them to your broader network through your LinkedIn profile and other professional forums. You will be surprised by the power of developing and communicating a clear and consistent personal brand message that others can easily understand. Highlight your talent and abilities to attract like-minded individuals and open new career collaborations and opportunities. Networking with individuals who share your strengths provides you with further inspiration and growth over the long term. Join professional associations and participate in forums to provide opportunities to share your unique views and position you as a thought leader.

5 - Work With a Professional Coach - This personal development journey is very challenging to accomplish alone. A professional executive coach can facilitate assessments that validate how others perceive your strengths. This method will help you identify blind spots and provide valuable feedback and guidance to develop more advanced skills and behaviors to enhance your performance.

Summary:

Leveraging and enhancing your strengths is the most effective and efficient way to increase your career trajectory and impact. This strategy enables your most potent capabilities to stand out while building your reputation as an expert in your field. This approach can also significantly enhance your overall motivation, career outlook and satisfaction.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

#careerdevelopment #careercoaching #careertransition

Tony Colangelo is a Certified Executive Coach and Founder of eXecutive Factor Coaching. Tony is also a Speaker and Author of Career X Factor Insights. Tony has over 30 years of experience in Leadership roles in the management consulting and information technology industries.

Contact Tony on LinkedIn at Tony Colangelo or email [email protected] to schedule a free consultation to discuss strategies to Help You Reach Your Career Goals.

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