Side Ponytails and Slippery Sports: The Value Of Playing to One's Strengths

Every time my wife is out of town and I am in charge of the Anderson domicile, something gets broken –without fail. One time while Susan was en route to a business trip in Florida, our son Josh broke his arm jumping out of a swing set. The doctors had his arm in a cast before she had even touched down at her destination. Breaking the news to her was an interesting phone call.

Another time while Susan was away, I accidentally broke our dog’s tail in the sliding glass door to our backyard, mistiming shutting the door behind him to prevent the onslaught of bugs that inevitably trailed him into our home during the hot, muggy, Indiana summer. I didn’t even realize the damage I had done to poor Lucky until he started wagging his tail and sprayed blood all over the walls of our home, like a scene from the movie The Shining. He ended up having part of his tail amputated and for the rest of his life I fed him freely from our dinner table in penance for the permanent mess I made of his beautiful, bushy tail. 

I could go on for hours on the things I’ve broken while my wife is gone, but one final example will perhaps put an exclamation point on the havoc I’ve wreaked on my poor family and pets during my better half’s absences from our home: that would be the time I broke our youngest daughter Lauren’s school picture.  Yep, I actually broke her school picture.

Let me explain how I managed such an unlikely feat. Susan was out of town on a work trip and had left me her usual two pages of instructions of “to-dos” and “things not to break” while she was gone. After taking every possible precaution short of wrapping the children and Lucky in bubble wrap, I felt pretty cocky that this would be the one trip when Susan would come home to find everything and everyone perfectly unbroken.

However, with my laser focus on family physical safety I somehow missed the note to check Lauren’s school folder for important upcoming events – i.e., her school picture - until fifteen minutes before the bus was to pick her up for picture day. 

If I had the luxury of twelve hours to do her hair, complete with YouTube tutorials, I’m not sure I could have pulled off anything resembling the magic Susan routinely worked on Lauren’s blonde mane. With the fifteen minutes I had to get Lauren fed, groomed, and to the bus on time, it was sure to be a bad hair day for Lauren on the most important day of her 3rd grade year. 

I hurriedly pulled Lauren’s hair back and tried to pull it through the “scrunchy” for a respectable pony tail, but went down in flames five straight attempts. Finally, I sent Lauren to school in tears with something loosely resembling a side pony tail, but much worse than any side pony tail that’s ever been created in the history of fathers doing their daughters’ hair. 

No matter how I tried to spin it I had broken Lauren’s school picture. Lauren was doomed to have one of those pictures she will spend the rest of her life hiding from boyfriends, her fiancée, husband, and children. It is a picture for which she might never forgive me – now I’ve written about it for all to read, that’s pretty much a given… 

There are a few other areas where God seemed to forget about me when he was passing out talents. For example, I really struggle in what I call the “slippery sports” like snow skiing and ice skating. The only two times I attempted to hit the slopes were unmitigated disasters. 

The first time I plowed down the wrong slope, taking the right fork instead of the left, into the unlit abyss during a night skiing debacle with dorm mates my freshman year of college. I put only my life at risk as I eventually crashed headfirst into a snow bank, sending the white stuff so high it dusted the tips of my buddies’ skis as the passed overhead on the chairlift just at the time I crashed. They saw the whole thing and never let me live it down…

My second skiing excursion could have resulted in the worst slippery sports disaster in American history. Once again, I got separated from my party and in my herculean efforts to stay upright, lost complete sense of where I was going. I took a wrong turn and ended up skiing down a run that was closed due to avalanche dangers. Each time I passed avalanche warning signs my knees quivered and I prayed for God to just take me and spare all those talented skiers who deserved to be on the slopes. In nothing short of a miracle, I managed to make it down the mountain without falling and killing myself or others in the process. I promised God that day I would never wreak havoc on the slopes again and I’ve kept that promise for 30 years. 

However, about 5 years later I reluctantly strapped on ice skates for the first time to support a friend who was in charge of a church ice skating party. I took one step on the ice, my feet went out from underneath me, and I woke up a couple minutes later with my wife, friend, and a large crowd of concerned bystanders huddled over me. My head hitting the ground must have sounded like when the comedian Gallagher hits a watermelon with a sledgehammer, because people were genuinely surprised that I eventually regained consciousness. I went home with wounded pride and a serious concussion, and after my third brush with death in three tries, decided to permanently throw in the towel on the slippery sports.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating throwing in the towel at the first sign of adversity. Most massive success stories involve people overcoming great odds through determination, will power, and faith. Miracles don’t happen without persistence and hard work. However, dogmatically pushing ourselves and others in directions that don’t really play to their strengths, in some misguided  effort to have someone face their fears or round out their skill set, lacks the nuanced approach necessary for any good leader.  

This is particularly applicable when it comes to the workplace. I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw a manager futilely try to fit a team member who was a “square peg” into a “round hole” role. Directors promote technically-brilliant engineers to managerial roles even when those engineers lack a lick of people sense. Creative geniuses are thrust into mundane, process-oriented roles. Employees who are valuable for their meticulous attention to detail are expected to become visionary, big-picture thinkers. When things don’t work out, we then blame the promoted employee for not being able to cut the mustard.  With just a little self-reflection and intellectual honesty, we would realize that too often we set them up for failure. We have tried to hammer people to fit in roles for which they are not fit and then wonder why things didn’t work out. 

The best leaders I have worked with over the years are the ones who learn the strengths and weaknesses of their people and then fit the team together like pieces of a puzzle. They realize that superstars who excel at everything are rarer than unicorns and often come with the baggage of over-inflated egos and unrealistic expectations of others. Great leaders are adept at speed reading their people and putting them in places to succeed and compliment the overall performance of the team. 

These leaders are master puzzle builders, because they understand when it comes to people, the pieces don’t fit perfectly together without some shaping, grooming, nudging, and challenging. The pieces of their figurative puzzle are not made of cardboard, but of clay which is pliable to a certain point. 

Maybe an edge needs to be knocked of one corner and built up in another. Maybe a small piece needs to be made a little bigger. Maybe a complex piece needs to be simplified. However, they are not going to take a corner piece and make it a center piece – they are not going to force a piece to be something it’s not. The best leaders know how to take imperfect pieces (people) and put them together to build something special and enduring. 

So, when it comes to pushing ourselves and others, how do we walk that fine line between throwing in the towel before giving things a chance and realizing that people have strengths and talents that need to be leveraged to make the team stronger. I don’t have all the answers, but here are some key areas that would show me you are headed in the right direction:

Show Me The Love. Do you or your people love the things they are trying to do? If so, don’t give up until you build the skills needed to reach the goal. However, if you keep doing something just because you are expected to do it, it might be time to think about your motives. For example, if I loved skiing, I would have kept with it regardless of my skill level. Truth be told (and I know this is heresy in Northern Nevada) I really didn’t enjoy skiing very much. Compare that to golf, where my skills are just slightly better than my skiing prowess, but where I would be happy to be on the golf course every day, carving out crater-sized divots, slicing shots into the woods, and hopefully hitting a great shot every once in a while. When it comes to managing people, it is important to gauge a team member’s true interest in opportunities with the company. If they are doing something just because it is expected of them or to get more money, things are likely to fall apart.

Show Me The Potential. Do you or your team have aptitude for the skill you are trying to develop? This is a tough call to make. Sometimes things are really hard in the beginning, but if you keep up with them, they become easy. However, if you spend inordinate amounts of time, don’t get better at it, and neglect the areas where you add ginormous value, it may be time to examine what you are doing. Sometimes it is better to let a creative person focus on being creative, rather than to fixate and try to fix their deficits in organization, strategic planning, etc. Put the person in a place where they can succeed.

Show Me You’ll Live To Fight Another Day. Are you relatively safe in what you are doing? When you try to develop your skill, are you taking your life or the lives of others into your hands? When I skied, I was a danger to myself and others. However, when I took job candidates on high speed Tesla test drives around the police training track, I felt safe and in control - maybe they didn't feel quite the same way! 

Show Me You Know Your People. Learn to speed read your people, understand their strengths and weaknesses and place them into areas where they can not only succeed individually, but mesh with and compliment the whole team. 

Show Me Your Diversity. Don’t build your team out of people with all the same strengths. Doing so, is the equivalent of building a puzzle out of all corner or center pieces. You need creative types, meticulous types, visionary types, pragmatic types, people types, and process types to build an effective team.

Show Me Your Courage. Listen to your inner voice. In the long-run it doesn’t matter what others think about you and your capabilities. If you want to do it, go for it. Follow your bliss. If you love it, don’t let anyone dissuade you. But, be ready to work, work, work to make it happen – particularly if you love to do something that is not in your wheel house. At the same time, do not let others guilt, shame, or pressure you into doing something that in the long run doesn’t get you up in the morning, jazzed and psyched to take on and own the day.

I hope this blog has helped you elevate your thinking in some small way on how to lead and leverage the strengths of your team.

Let's all finish the week strong! ... Tomorrow’s Friday, Friday, Gotta Get Down On Friday, Everybody’s Lookin’ Forward To The Weekend …