BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 30
Getting Stronger
continued
for their properties.
Your goal in making incremental changes is to gradually
push your job toward your strengths and away from as
many of your weaknesses as possible. “You’re rewriting
your job description—right under your boss’s nose,” says
Buckingham. “And in all likelihood, your boss wants you
to do this. It’s called taking responsibility for your own
development.”
What do you do about activities that deplete you yet
are critical to your job? Buckingham suggests these
strategies:
Find someone who is strengthened by the very activity
that weakens you, and see if he would be interested in
taking it on.
n
n Keep offering up one of your strengths; it may eventually
make your weaknesses irrelevant. Buckingham cites an
AT&T executive who loved starting up new projects and
systems but who found maintaining an established project
deathly dull. She kept asking what new projects and
challenges were in the pipeline and volunteering for them.
After a while, she became so good at ferreting out and
volunteering for innovative projects that her supervisor
agreed to reconfigure her career as a series of 18-month
assignments. Today, says Buckingham, she’s known as the
Startup Queen.
HARVARD MANAGEMENT UPDATE | FEBRUARY 2008
Reframe the weakening activity as a vehicle for
leveraging a strength. For example, if you hate designbrief meetings but love helping clients, practice thinking
of meetings as means that enable you to better serve
clients. “This technique won’t turn a weakening activity
into a strength,” Buckingham acknowledges, “but it can
help you feel less drained by it.”
n
Accept that no job is perfect. Every role will contain at
least a small percentage of activities that weaken you but
that you can’t avoid—no matter how diligently you reshape
your responsibilities in favor of your strengths. The goal is
to keep the weaknesses to an absolute minimum.
n
Turning your strengths into powerful performance
drivers takes time, thought, and the courage to reshape
your role as needed. But the investment is well worth it.
When you spend most of your time doing activities that
tap into your deepest passions, you benefit yourself and
your organization. u
Lauren Keller Johnson is a Massachusetts-based business writer.
She can be reached at MUOpinion@hbsp.harvard.edu.
Reprint # U0802C: To order a reprint of this article, call 800-668-6705 or
617-783-7474.
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