Though your genius is ingrained, the right way to channel it is not
. This final challenge is that even if you do cut through the noise and identify what unique strengths you have to offer, that’s still not enough. To be truly your best, it isn’t sufficient merely to understand
that
you’re unique or even to understand what
makes
you unique. Sustained success comes only when you take what’s unique about you and figure out how to make it
useful
.
Your strengths, in essence, are value-neutral. They can be put to good use, or they can (as Lilia’s poor teachers can attest) be put to bad use. If you don’t own your strengths, if you don’t know them and understand them and consciously decide how you can best apply them in your life, they
will
come out anyway. But you won’t be in control of how they do.
On your own personal strengths journey, here are three principles to guide you:
Principle #1: Your Genius Is Precise
Current thinking about effectiveness advises us to be flexible, versatile quick-studiers, ready-willing-and-able to jump from one challenge to another. A close scrutiny of excellence, however, reveals that our edge—our particular genius—is quite precise. We each have specific areas where we consistently stand out, where we can do things, see things, understand things, and learn things better and faster than ten thousand other people can. And when we find ourselves in these areas, our “strengths zone” if you will, we are magnificent. Self-assured and flushed with success, we imagine we can do just about anything that we turn our minds to.
And yet we can’t. Move us even slightly out of our strengths zone, and our outstanding performance falls to average alarmingly quickly.
Michael Jordan offers an extreme example. As foolhardy as it now seems in retrospect, Jordan retired from the NBA in his prime to attempt to do in baseball what he had already accomplished in basketball. Jordan had been a high school baseball all-star, and, although he opted for basketball in college, it remained a lifelong dream of his and his father’s to be a professional baseball player. After his dad’s untimely death he felt compelled to honor the dream they had shared. When he first started out, Jordan hit .202 in the minor leagues (barely above the fabled “Mendoza Line” of .200 that baseball fans refer to as the minimum competence for a hitter at any level). But his work ethic in basketball was legendary, and he applied the same dedication to his baseball career. In just one year, he raised his average to .252.
A 50-point year-to-year increase in batting average is remarkable in any league. Terry Francona, his manager at the time (and current manager of the Boston Red Sox) claims that with a little more work, Jordan could well have made it to the big leagues—and furthermore, Francona insists that there the legendary Michael Jordan would have been . . . a journeyman player. At best. And if that’s all he’d ever done, you’d never have heard of him.
After one season in the minors, Jordan returned to the Chicago Bulls to win three more NBA Championships. He was not the same player he was before—not according to his coach Phil Jackson. According to Jackson he was a better player, more passionate about the game, more in control of his gifts, and, significantly, much more inclusive of his teammates.
His time away from basketball had taught him not that career experiments are useless—during his time with the Birmingham Barons he discovered a great deal about the extent and the limits of his own strengths, as you will if you decide on what turns out to be a misguided career detour. Rather, what he learned is that you have to fully own your own genius before you can responsibly offer it up to others.
Michael Jordan is a distant figure, both in level of achievement and, now, in years since he last graced the basketball court. I saw the precision of genius much closer to home. At a very early age my sister, Pippa, discovered that she could dance—not just move in time to the music, but dance as though her guardian angel had been teaching her for centuries. She donned her tutu, skipped off to ballet class every afternoon, and then, at thirteen, attended the Royal Ballet Boarding School where years of bar work and choreography and movement classes prepared her to graduate into the Royal Ballet Company itself and become the perfect classical English ballet dancer.
The problem for Pippa was that the “perfect classical English ballet dancer,” the dancer who could take the lead role in
Swan Lake
or the
Nutcracker
, was supposed to be a brilliant technical athlete. She was supposed to be able to do four pirouettes to the left and four to the right, and then do it again and again, without breaking a sweat. And Pippa couldn’t. She could do three—no problem, three to the left and three to the right—but not four. More than ten thousand hours of deliberate practice, huge talent, unbelievable dedication, but still she couldn’t do what was needed to excel in her chosen field. At this point it looked as if she’d never become a principal dancer. It looked as if she’d picked the wrong career.
But she hadn’t. Her career didn’t stall. During her years in school, Pippa had discovered that she wasn’t just a “dancer.” Instead she was a dancer with a particular set of strengths. She was a lyrical dancer, a dancer of beautiful lines, flowing form, long legs, and the most expressive arms you’d ever seen. And so when she realized that she would never excel in the ballet company she had dedicated her life to, she wasn’t utterly derailed. Instead, she thought deeply about the precise nature of her “genius” as a dancer, and then sought out a very particular dance company, the Nederlands Dans Theatre, which specialized in making dance pieces for lyrical dancers, dancers whose strength was grace rather than pure athleticism. After a couple of nerve-racking auditions, she was hired by the company and then spent the next ten years— ten wonderful, challenging, highly successful years—expressing her unique strengths in dance.
No matter where you look, you can find examples of how surprisingly precise genius is. Ellen DeGeneres is a stellar entertainer? Well, no. Ellen is a gifted comedienne, but move her even slightly off her game and put her behind the judges’ desk of
American Idol
and her brilliance fades. Likewise, Jon Stewart is a funny, ironic, and always winning host. Well, yes . . . of his own political commentary show. Ask him to host the Oscars and his irony translates as condescension, so the jokes aren’t funny and the audience is lost.
Robert Nardelli, president of GE’s Power Systems division, is a genius-level leader, and leadership is transferable, right? Not necessarily. Install him as CEO of Home Depot or Chrysler and he doesn’t look quite so impressive.
As CEO of Hearst, Cathy Black was the modern-day model of the modern media executive, versatile, plugged in, focused, and efficient. Upon her retirement, she was appointed superintendent of New York City Schools. She flamed out after three months.
Malcolm Gladwell is a phenomenal writer, and since writing is writing, shouldn’t his skill be transferable from articles to books? Not exactly. His true genius is the carefully argued, silky-prosed, three-thousand-word article—today there is no one better. But when he comes to write his books, this genius accompanies him, he can’t shake it, and so his books all have the same recognizable quality: a series of elegant articles wrapped around a common theme.
Your genius will be similarly precise. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with new positions or stretch yourself with new challenges, as Gladwell did in moving from articles to books. You should. But when you do, know that, consciously or not, you will bring your particular brand of genius with you.
This means that if you want to become, let’s say, a manager, you won’t be able to be just any sort of manager. On the contrary, your genius as a manager will depend on the specific strengths you possess. Similarly, if you put yourself in a leadership position, you will be a very particular kind of leader. If you are in client service, you will excel in a distinct way.
For example, imagine that the StandOut assessment reveals your top two strengths Roles as Influencer and Pioneer. This is what your results say about the competitive advantage you will bring to any position, any team:
You keep innovation high on the agenda, challenging us to make the exceptional real. You are usually the first on the block to own the newest toy or gadget and you love to tell the stories of how you got it, how it works, how it’s going to revolutionize . . . everything. As soon as everyone starts buying what you’re selling, however, you’re on the waiting list for version 2.0. You revel in introducing ideas that create a furl in people’s brow. If you see a skeptical, quizzical look in their eyes, you know you’ve hooked one. You don’t like to rally behind anything obvious or conventional. If everyone else is doing it, it pains you to tow that line. In fact, you will swim against the tide for the simple joy of seeing if you can get anyone to swim with you.
Apply these characteristics to a manager position and you will be the kind of manager who challenges, cajoles, persuades, is never satisfied, pushing for more, pressing for action. It will always be an intense experience working directly for you. But whether this intensity comes across to us, your employees, as invigorating or as exhausting depends on how good a job you do at understanding and channeling your genius.
As a leader your style will be characterized by optimism about the future and an impatience to get us there. Your sense of momentum is acute, visceral. It will define you as a leader. But, again, whether this translates to us, your followers, as a dynamism from which we can all draw energy or as mere recklessness will depend on how well you focus it.
In a service role your power will be your confidence that things will work out right. You will confront any obstacles and root out any shortcut to make things right for me, your client. You cannot
not
be this sort of service provider. Whether this winds up making me, your client, happy in the long run, however, isn’t certain. You could become a blowhard who promises more than he can deliver. Or, with your strengths sharp and focused, you could excel as the first line of defense for difficult clients needing help with novel, as yet untested, products.
In each of these positions you
can
excel, as you can in many others. But you are most likely to do so only when you understand and respect how precise your genius truly is.
Which, of course, leads to the next principle.
Principle #2: You Can’t Respect What You Don’t Remember
In a world that doesn’t really care about you and your strengths, the responsibility falls to you to apply your strengths
consciously
every day. Ironically, the unconscious nature of strengths—the fact that you are most yourself when you vanish into whatever you are doing—makes this quite difficult to do. And yet, if you don’t do it, if you allow your strengths to remain as unconscious, subliminal reactions, you won’t have a lifeline to grab on to when events conspire to yank, lull, or lure you off your strengths path.
After college Michael became a software engineer, writing code. And because he was good at it and hardworking and reliable, he got promoted to team leader. Here he also excelled. He is a wonderful explainer. Some people get impatient when new team members don’t understand something. Not Michael. For some reason the more difficulty a person has in understanding something, the more patient he becomes. He slows right down to their speed and walks them through what they need to “get,” step by step. (In the language of StandOut, his top two strength Roles are Teacher and Equalizer.)
His team loved him. And so he was promoted again, this time to project manager.
Now he was being paid to run an entire project for his company, and the strengths required were very different from the team leader position. The two most important were first, designing-testing-redesigning the software as the project went along (Pioneer), and second, handling the client warmly and tactfully (Provider).
Michael struggled with both. He hated it when the software didn’t do what it was supposed to do, and then having the client see it not do what it was supposed to do, and then having to charm his way through the meeting so that the client wouldn’t feel panicked, and then having to repeat the whole horrible process at the next update meeting. Each time the software wouldn’t do something it was supposed to, and each time he would have to find the right way to dance around it and put the client at ease.
This might not sound like hell to you. You might embrace the inherent ambiguity in this kind of design-and-hand-hold-as-you-go position. But Michael didn’t. He was
capable
of it—he’s smart and reliable and hardworking—but it drained him. Day by day it dragged him down, slower and slower, until one day he stopped altogether. In his words: “One morning I just couldn’t put my key in the car door.”
That day was fifteen years ago. And he hasn’t worked since.
They say that burnout happens the same way that bankruptcy does: gradually, gradually, then suddenly. This was certainly true for Michael. In the project manager position, he found himself day after day being asked to have strengths he didn’t have. He became weaker and weaker, until suddenly one day he broke down. That day is where he is today. Fifteen years have gone by, and though he has fought hard—harder than I think I might have done if my life had emptied me out—he hasn’t moved.