The biggest weakness may be pretending you don’t have any

Focusing on strengths turns out not to be plain sailing. After centuries of being encouraged to be modest, the modern workplace positively encourages us to acclaim our strengths.

It is now a lot easier to talk about our strengths than it is to mention our limitations. Job applications, interviews, and performance reviews all explicitly or tacitly request invitations to inspect our freshly scrubbed decks and gleaming hull above the waterline. They want to be piped aboard our HMS Winner to admire the bright work.

There is little or no enthusiasm shown by our visitors to go below the waterline into the dark, dank bilges of our failures and the merely adequate. Why should we be interested in the merely human, when we can celebrate the nearly super-human?

Strengths are figuratively and sometimes literally uplifting. They can seem easier to manage. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Micro-managers aside, most sane people tasked to supervise others can dream of nothing more perfect than not having to address their team’s weaknesses.

There are now many coaching and human resource systems that are quite explicit in their determined focus on only strengths. Often, the logic is that there is more reward for efforts directed at boosting strengths than there is in correcting limitations. The argument goes, that as long as collectively the team covers all of the key competencies, they can cover for each others weaknesses, while performing to their strengths.

The danger with this focus on strengths is two-fold and both relate to the relationship between weaknesses and limitations. The first problem is that the strength-weakness relationship is not linear. It is a mistake to construe weaknesses as working like a brake on progress towards a goal. Some weaknesses, like structural failures in steel, can lead to sudden catastrophic outcomes. Exposed corruption, criminality or incompetence, which may seem initially to no more than small leak in the hull, can sink the whole ship if not corrected. It won’t be corrected unless you are prepared to go below the waterline and confront the reality.

The second mistake is to conflate weakness with limitation. Limitations may be weaknesses, which might explain my non-existent Test cricket career. However, limitations may also represent the lines that we draw to moderate and control our behaviour. Most of us have lines that we will not cross. When the price of success is too high, we stop or jump ship if we can.

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The trouble is, when a culture exists that says, “failure is not an option”, “nothing is impossible”, “go the extra mile” or “whatever it takes”, it is asking a lot of an individual to insist on not crossing their personal lines. This was beautifully illustrated this week, in episode four, series three of the wonderful Succession. The media mogul and family patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) gives his daughter Siobhan (Sarah Snook) some firm coaching feedback. Fearing she is being undermined by an editor of one of their newspapers, she pleads to her father “there’s a line”. Logan snarls back “Nothing is a line, everything everywhere is always moving forever. Get used to it”.