Marcus Buckingham has written a follow up book to 'Discover Your Strengths'. This one, 'Go Put Your Strengths to Work' allows people to focus on their specific strengths which help bring them forward in the workplace. The detail of Buckingham's work allows the reader to use his/her top strengths to work better, smarter, more effectively without focus on a need to shore up weakpoints. (www.simplystrengths.com)
The concepts behind both books make logical sense-- spend time developing your strengths, rather than ignoring them while you strive to simply improve your weaknesses.
This is also true in business. Why do we insist on taking our precious resources like time and energy to work on a slight improvement of our weaknesses while not building on the momentum of our organizational strengths. We have learned a great deal from partnerships and outsourcing. Those areas which are not strengths may be best done by someone else. Why not take what we excel at, or have the potential to excel at, to new levels and find a great partner to do the rest.
And, why do we not consider the strengths of the individuals in our organizations more carefully when we assign them to roles and tasks. This includes KM roles and tasks. People with high analytical ability are good at certain areas of KM while people thought of as relators can work on the networks of relationships and trust needed for knowledge to flow. The list of strengths matched to need or task goes on. There is much to be gained from this type of understanding and so much momentum to be built upon our strengths rather than concentrate on the resistance of our weaknesses.
We keep ourselves from our true potential in business or in life when we concentrate on what is not working, and ignore the amazing power of what IS working and enhance it. Everyone is doing KM in some form or another. Find it, celebrate it, build on it, give credit for those who do it, and create momentum.
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