Beyond Strengths And Weaknesses: Accepting Traits as a Key To Sustainable Growth

In 2017, I was asked for the first holistic feedback as a team leader. Although I had provided feedback before, it was never from a leadership perspective. I felt more responsible for outcomes and wanted to find actionable insights.

Initially, I approached it through the traditional lens of “strengths” and “weaknesses.” I wrote the former on the left side and the latter on the right. And then I was struck by a realization. These strengths and weaknesses were merely different manifestations of the same traits.

I connected both sides into pairs and it became clear as day that you can’t have one without the other. I felt like it’s an important concept I need to take into account.

This insight has since proven invaluable in my role. Today, I wanted to share why I think it’s significant and how thinking beyond strengths and weaknesses can facilitate your own growth and the development of others.

Beyond Strengths and Weaknesses

Let’s look at the aforementioned traditional “strengths” and “weaknesses” approach. What does it imply? For me, they always seemed like two separate sets. I thought I should use my strengths and get rid of my weaknesses.

However, this approach never sparked specific actions I could take. How do you get rid of something that’s part of you?

The traditional view of “strengths” and “weaknesses” implies that these qualities are innate and unchangeable, which can be discouraging and less actionable. It suggests that certain parts of a person are valued while others are not. Furthermore, working on weaknesses can often feel like losing one’s authenticity.

My thesis is that we don’t actually have strengths and weaknesses; we have traits that form our habits and natural ways of acting.

In certain situations, these traits lead to positive outcomes and are perceived as our strengths, while in others, they may result in negative consequences and are perceived as weaknesses. But they are still the same traits, only applied in different circumstances.

This framing shifts the focus from changing yourself to how you can better respond to certain situations, while letting your habits do the work in others. It’s really hard or even impossible to change your personality traits. But it’s entirely possible to find workarounds for situations in which they hold you back.

Identifying Underlying Traits

Let’s look at some examples to better understand the concept.

Being spontaneous is in itself neither a strength nor a weakness, but it usually results in being great at improvising and working in unpredictable situations. You can hear that “finding your way in a chaotic environment” is your “strength.” The same trait makes it hard for you to plan long-term and focus on delayed gratification. So “assessing risks and planning ahead” becomes your “weakness.” But it’s the same underlying trait that biases you toward positive results in some situations and negative in others.

You can perform a similar analysis (ironically) for being analytical. It probably works in your favor in situations that require attention to detail and deconstructing complex ideas or plans. However, you may hear that you’re not decisive or maybe even too critical.

Your willingness to experiment can be viewed as a strength when rapid progress is needed, but for tasks that need to implement specific requirements, you may be viewed as “too reckless” to handle them.

As you can see, all “strengths” have their corresponding “weaknesses” because they stem from the same traits.

Focusing On Situational Awareness

Having explained the core concept, how does it shift our focus and, in my opinion, biases toward action?

The core idea of improving yourself is to find better and better responses for specific triggers that, after some time, become our new habits. However, a “weakness” is not a trigger. It’s hard to recognize it in the moment and change your course of action.

So the first thing that the model does is that it makes us focus on circumstances first. Looking for situational triggers, you can use them to realize you need to apply a new, non-intuitive behavior.

This leads us to the next benefit — the model makes it easier to understand why working on better responses won’t feel natural. You realize that your personality pushes you in a certain direction and you’ll need a conscious effort to push yourself in another. And since you’re not changing yourself, only your intuitive response, it’s easier to accept.

And last, but not least — when you focus on one’s response to a situation it’s much easier to immediately think about solutions. Without trying to change their personality, you can figure out a desired behavior and focus on how to execute and maintain it over time.

Putting It Into Action

I highly recommend you try the model on yourself! Think about your strengths and weaknesses. Try to connect them in pairs and name their underlying traits. Then, try to list situations in which these traits lead to desirable and undesirable outcomes for you.

Lastly, accept the fact that some situations will be challenging for you and try to come up with a plan for responding to them better. List triggers that you can use to identify these circumstances and new behaviors you want to implement.

And one last tip — don’t strive for perfection, strive for improvement. Don’t stall trying to come up with a “perfect” response. Try to come up with something that’s achievable and simply better than your current patterns. When you try it and find it’s working, you can always iterate and improve in the future.

If you’re looking for help with developing new behavioral patterns and sustaining habits, I highly recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear.

When you test the model, let me know if you found it helpful! It’d be great to learn that you found it useful.