59: Work on Your Strengths not Your Weaknesses

Every leadership development plan starts in the same place. Here are your gaps. Now go work on them.

It is the most standard advice in corporate life and almost nobody stops to question it.

And you have done it. You took the feedback seriously. You worked the list quietly and mostly on your own time. You did get better at those things.

And the promotion still went to somebody else.

Here's the thing. Senior leaders were never reading down your gap list. They are trying to answer a completely different question about you, and getting better at your weaknesses does nothing to help them answer it.

Nobody has ever told you what that question is. Or that there are two kinds of strengths, and that the one that could change everything for you is the one you have never once been asked to use.

So what are they actually looking for?

Tune in to learn:

The one question senior leaders are actually trying to answer about youThe two kinds of strengths almost nobody has ever explained to youWhy your 'zone of brilliance' is the one thing you cannot see in yourself

📚 MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Episode 35, where Wendy tells this whole story herself: https://youtu.be/HE48xkQ-1xM

• The Strengths Profile assessment, which returns your realized and unrealized strengths