Larry Borsato's Personal Development Blog

In a word, no.

In pretty much every interview, you'll be asked two questions:

• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?

In many cases your strengths will be glossed over. After all, you did get to the interview stage so you must have some of the required skills. But the weaknesses will often be used to disqualify you, or suggest why you aren't right for the role. Or the interviewer will be thinking in their minds about how they will deal with those weaknesses, even they may have absolutely no effect on the work you will be doing.

In pretty much every employee review you ever have, your manager will tell you what you did wrong. What your perceived weaknesses were, so that you can improve upon them. Of course nothing will improve your morale quite as much as being told what your are bad at.

Weaknesses are things that you aren't particularly good at.That suggests that you probably wouldn't enjoy those things either. So you will likely find that improving on your weaknesses is extremely boring, draining, and possibly even painful. You can suffer through workshops, seminars, and other training, but at best you will probably only be able to achieve a minor improvement.

After all, if you had a natural aptitude in those areas, they wouldn't be weaknesses, right?

Now does it seem worth it to endure pain to achieve a minor improvement in something you aren't good at and don't enjoy? Of course not. It is a far better idea to spend that time improving on your strengths; the areas in which you already excel and enjoy.

By all means you should know and acknowledge your weaknesses. Then you should take steps to minimize their impact.

For example, one of my weaknesses is the area of attention to detail, preferring instead the big picture. I can force myself to do it and do it well, but I don't enjoy it.So I try to pair up with someone who enjoys dealing with the details, and we make an excellent team. I'm also weak when it comes to finance, so I make friends with accountants and business analysts. You owe it to your employer to deal with these issues so that they don't impact your work.

Finding the weaknesses may be difficult; while there are tests to determine what strengths you have, there are few that determine your weaknesses. If you try to think of tasks that you find difficult or particularly boring, that should give you a clue as to your weaknesses.

However, once you have handled the weaknesses, you should concentrate on making the most of, and improving on, your strengths. Because you are already strong in these areas, you enjoy them, so improving them will be fun and you should be able to improve them substantially.

Effective use of your strengths will improve your productivity, make work more pleasant and possibly even fun, and the tasks will be accomplished almost effortless. And when you are "firing on all cylinders", people won't even notice your weaknesses because you'll be getting so much done and having fun doing it.

You'll be a lot more fun to work with too.

So to summarize:

1. Acknowledge your weaknesses.
2. Mitigate and minimize those weaknesses.
3. Know, use, and improve your strengths.