LeadershipHQ Magazine February 2015 1st Edition | Page 10

LEADERSHIP AND LEARNING ARE
INDISPENSABLE TO EACH OTHER
John F. Kennedy
In his 2008 book Outliers: The
Story of Success, Gladwell popularised the concept that it takes
over 10,000 hours of practice to
become an expert, or great, in any
field. Gladwell bases the 10,000
hour rule on research conducted
by Swedish psychologist K. Anders
Ericsson, who found that it takes
enormous amounts of time for
anyone to move from the level of
competence to greatness.
Since we only a limited amount of
lifetime, it makes sense to focus on
developing our natural talents and
abilities to master an area of greatness that separates us from our
competition, rather than wasting
time developing areas where we
have little patience or natural ability. We should use the gifts we have
and polish them to perfection.
Why Developing Strengths
Gets Results
You know that you do your best
work when you are doing things
that come naturally to you; things
that you genuinely enjoy. That’s
what happens when we focus on
our areas of strength. We automatically improve our performance
because we naturally put forth our
best effort.
Wise leaders assign roles and tasks
to people who have the best natural ability in those areas, making it
easier for everyone to excel. As we
9 | © LeadershipHQ 2015

continue to focus on our strengths,
an increase in confidence, engagement, satisfaction and performance naturally follows, and we
each find happiness because we
know we are doing great work.
This happiness and self-satisfaction is contagious, and it spreads to
co-workers and onto your customers. Productivity improves, costs
related to inefficiency decrease and
our profits increase. As we begin to
focus on our strengths in our personal lives, we stop wasting time
on meaningless tasks and focus on
fulfilling our dreams. Our stress levels naturally decrease and we find
a natural increase of harmony and
balance in our key relationships.
What a great way to build happy
and enthusiastic teams!
How to Identify Your Strengths
Start with you and your own
strengths. I know that in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives,
it can be easy to lose sight of our
strengths. Here are a couple of
ways to rediscover them.
• Try to remember what past activities have brought you the
most joy and satisfaction in your
life. What about the activity did
you enjoy most and least? What
brings you happiness?
• You can gain insight into your
strengths by asking close friends
and relatives to name five or so

qualities that describe you or
five areas and natural talents
that you possess.
• There are even free tests that
can help you to discover your
hidden strengths and abilities;
you just need to search for them
online. Workuno, the University
of Kent and Psychology Today
offer three of most well- known
free online tests to help users
identify their strengths, but
there are countless other resources that can help you to find
your key natural strengths.
Once you’ve identified your
strengths, seek ways to put more
of your time and energy into using
and developing these areas in your
daily life. Even little things add up
over time and the more that you
can begin to play to your strengths,
the happier and more energised
you will become.
Whether it’s something in your
personal or professional life, if you
have tasks that you hate that are
not in your area of expertise, seek
ways to delegate those tasks to others who have a natural strength in
those areas. This way you will have
more time and energy to focus on
areas in which you excel. As you
continue to “play to your strengths”
you and everyone around you will
become happier and more productive. What can you do today to focus on your strengths?