Strong Weaknesses?

When we start businesses or organizations, we have to do everything.
We need to come up with the brand and our marketing. We need to develop and deliver our product/service, raise capital, manage the books, hire our staff, and so on.
What’s great about this experience is that we learn how to make due with very little, we learn how to make tough decisions (“I just can’t afford that”), and we learn everything about our business. The bad news is that we carry that experience forward into our growing businesses, which causes us a number of problems:

• We spend much of our time doing work that isn’t our strength. Since it isn’t our strength, it takes much more time for us to do that work than it would take a more competent person. 
• Our businesses/organizations reach a maximum output, irrespective of the people or technology that we throw at the productivity problem, because we are involved – in some way – with every transaction. Therefore, output is constrained by our waking hours. 
• At a personal level, it saps your energy. You do a great deal of work that just doesn’t interest you THAT much, but you do it for any number of reasons (no one can do it as well as you, it will be too hard to train someone else, if you want something done right you do it yourself, etc.)
  

There’s more, but suffice to say that – as a business leader – focusing on strengthening your weaknesses is ill advised. Outsource or delegate those things that are not your strongest suit and focus your efforts on your strengths. “Strong weaknesses” may be personally rewarding, but developing them comes at the cost of what your bottom line could have been.
Need some objective eyeballs to help you with this? E-mail us or give us a call at (202) 640-1908. We’ve helped thousands of business owners and executives around the globe increase their productivity by knowing what to focus on.

Ingar Grev