Telephone Excellence by Mike Mitchell

Focus on Your Strengths, Delegate Everything Else
By Mike Mitchell

The road to success and happiness is well travelled by those who know how to apply their strengths to their life and work. If you focus your efforts on your areas of strength and delegate activities to your staff in their areas of strength, you too can travel this road.

What is a strength?
Authors Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton in their book Now, Discover Your Strength define a strength as “a consistent near perfect performance in any activity.”

They offer Bill Gates as an example of someone who recognizes that one of his strengths is taking innovations and turning them into user friendly applications. The ability to build and maintain an enterprise in the face of legal and commercial assaults was not Gates forte. Fortunately, Steve Ballmer, Gates’ partner, did have strength in this area. Microsoft products have become ubiquitous around the world, in part, because both men focused on their individual strengths.

Recognizing strengths:
What are your strengths (and the strengths of your staff)? You probably already have a good idea! What activities do you perform with consistently outstanding results? Usually it’s what you enjoy, if not your passion. Do you excel at managing projects, working with people, or resolving technical issues? Are you great at meticulously reviewing invoices, writing and updating SOPs, or training and development?

Take a few minutes today to mentally inventory your strengths. John Maxwell, author, speaker and one of the world’s leading authorities on leadership, recommends the following formula:
• Focus 70% on your strengths
• Focus 25% on new things
• Focus 5% on your weaknesses (Delegate)

The benefits for focusing on your strengths:

• Makes better use of your time - Don’t waste your time doing a task your staff can do better. You get more done in less time if you play to your strength and concentration on priorities.

• Develops and encourages your team - Delegating to staff’s strengths encourages them, improves their skills, creates a team attitude, and increases your effectiveness as a leader.

• Inspires excellence rather than competence - Focusing on your strength allows you do what you do with excellence rather than settling for mediocrity in activities where your performance and results may be weaker.

• Reduces stress – When you delegate everything from special projects to routine responsibilities to the strongest person (btw, this could be you!), it will be completed by the most capable person.

As a manager, you have to maintain competency in many areas that may not be your strengths. I know that staff evaluations, yearly budgets, invoice approval, etc. requires a manager’s attention. Don”t ignore those areas, but not everything has to be done by the department head. When you focus on your strengths, you will be a few miles farther down the road to success.

-Mike