Self-Reviews: Rectify your Weaknesses, or Improve Your Strengths?

The year-end is coming up, which for many people means a (sometimes stressful) time of reviews, evaluations, and assessments. At my company, we do 360 colleague evaluations, as well as self-assessments, in addition to the ubiquitous manager reviews.
In preparing for my self-assessment, I was reading Peter Drucker’s “Managing Oneself” (from Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must Reads: Essentials, also as a standalone book), and one thing stood out to me as Drucker was talking about feedback analysis (the practice of writing down your expectations before a change, and evaluating what really happened 9–12 months down the road):
“Second, work on improving your strengths.”
This struck me as interesting because we typically think about fixing our weaknesses, and leaving our strengths as they are, which on the surface seems like common sense, right? You have a set of skills that you get high marks on, and some you don’t, so you should work on moving the skills on the “weak” side over to the “strong” side, shouldn’t you?
Well, probably. I mean, if your emotional intelligence is low, then certainly you should work on that, since it’s one of a very few key indicators for success. And Drucker does in fact go on to say that it’s very important to remedy bad habits, since those will hold you back. But what about other things, things that you typically think of when listing your weaknesses? Take a technical skill for example: what if you’re a front-end web developer and though you are comfortable using a Web API, you don’t know how to build one? Should you spend time moving that “weakness” to a “strength”?
Maybe, but only if a)it’s something that you really want to do or b) you’ve determined it’s a necessary skill to get where you want to be, for example the (mostly mythical, in my opinion) “Full-Stack Developer.” But if neither of those are true, you should probably not spend time on making that a strength. Instead, look at where your current passions and skills intersect, and work on making those even better. There will always be things you can’t do (but you could), but not all of them are things you need to improve on. Your time would be much better spent getting really good at another thing; improving an existing strength?
What do you think? I’d love to hear from anyone who’s been taking this approach for some time, and learning how focusing in improving your strengths has been a good strategy for you!
