Great Executives Play to Their Strengths. Here's How to Find Yours

Focusing on your strengths will dramatically improve your success, but finding them can be challenging. Here are three key questions you can use to find yours.

We've all heard the adage, play to your strengths to win, but it's often easier said than done. Yes, it's better to pick a handful of skills and work on becoming exceptional than to try to be good at everything. Just like a business need to find a unique position in the market by becoming exceptional at a few things, executives also need to focus on becoming uniquely skilled and experienced in a handful of skills to become world-class professionals.

But how do you pick?

The challenge for many high-performance leaders is that they are good at many things. Often, they are the best person in their company at many things, which creates a lot of pressure to keep doing all of them. However, this will not only hold them back as individuals, it will hold back the company's growth as well.

To grow and advance, you need to let go of things that you may be quite good at to become uniquely amazing at a few more important skills. And to do that, you need to choose, which can be difficult. Here are the three key questions I give executives to help them understand the areas in which they should double down and focus.

1. What are you uniquely good at?

Start by figuring out what you're currently good at. Not just OK, but really good. What can you do that not many other people can do well? Start with comparing yourself within your organization, but also think more broadly about your market and industry. You might be the best public speaker in your CPA firm, but you might be below average in another industry.

The best way to do this is to get feedback from managers and colleagues. You might think you're terrible at something, but everyone else sees you as a rockstar. If you're getting surprising feedback, get curious and ask why, and get details about what you do that people see as valuable.

2. What creates value for your organization?

It's one thing to be really good at something, it's another to create exceptional value. The key with this step is that other people need to see it as valuable, not just you. Go through the things you do on a weekly basis and have people highlight the top two to three activities that they feel lead to improved business performance and results. This could be generating sales or revenues, optimizing the business or reducing costs, or developing talent or intellectual property.

Remember that value can be defined and identified in many ways. The easiest measure is money. Companies will pay higher salaries and better wages for more valuable services. Another indicator is autonomy. Generally, organizations give high-value contributors freedom around when and how they do the work. Finally, look for activities that get a lot of recognition and rewards. These are good indicators that an activity is important and contributes to organizational success.

3. What puts you in flow?

Finally, once you've found things you're good at and that drive value, look for the things that you are highly engaged in and motivated by. I like to focus on activities that naturally put you into a flow state. Originally identified by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a highly focused mental state that leads to exceptional performance outcomes.

Good indicators that you're in flow include the feeling that time slows down or speeds up, that your focus becomes narrower and tighter, that you don't have to think that hard about the work, that it seems to come naturally, and you're feeling a sense of engagement and accomplishment.

Once you've identified the three to five activities that score well on all these criteria, focus on doing more of that work and less of everything else. Remove the other activities by delegating them to other team members, hiring support staff or services, or just stop doing them if you can get away with it. Over time, you can continue to hone that list and further concentrate and advance those skills.

As you develop your capabilities, keep watching general industry and market trends. Be mindful of how the value of different skills might change in the future. Being a world-class typewriter repair person is just not that valuable in today's market. And in the near future, new skills will quickly become valuable and in high demand.

Highly successful executives find ways to become uniquely valuable in their industries, and they learn to adapt to changing market needs quickly. Asking yourself the three questions above and focusing on the answers to guide your growth will be the difference between getting a 5 percent cost of living adjustment and getting that promotion you've been waiting for.

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