Play to your people’s strengths
Tanmay Vora
I am back from a hiatus – could not blog for a first few days after I came back – thanks to piles of emails to be read/responded and lot of accumulated tasks. I am slowly getting over them.
It is very important for a leader to play to people’s stengths. I have a junior engineer on my team who is under training. Assigning her to a larger piece of work is a risk by itself and hence she was allocated small and measurable tasks that would help me in evaluating her and provide her with right feedbacks from time to time. One day, she approached me requesting for larger assignments. I had to counsel her and explain the objective of having her on smaller assignments.
Managers, leaders and organizations have to play to their people’s strengths and see that they win each day. Team members should smell success everyday in whatever they are doing. These small victories build self-confidence over a period of time and makes them capable of handling larger assignments. I call this “eventual strength building”. While proper utilization of team members is important too, assigning them tasks without thinking about their capabilities and strengths is a sure way to failure – both for the team member and for the manager.
An extension to the above is to manage their weaknesses. I prefer to have people with complementary skills on a project. Ideal team composition is where weaknesses of one member is complemented by strength of another team member.
I thought she was convinced with whatever I had to explain. I could see that she did good at that small task – this gives me more confidence – and to her too.
Do you play to your people’s strengths?
“These small victories build self-confidence over a period of time and makes them capable of handling larger assignments”
Can’t agree more on that.
My experience as a trainee makes me believe that that is the time when we are out in the real world and want to prove ourselves. We start to believe that the more we work we prove ourselves better until, 2-3 years down the line, we realize that most of our basics are not yet clear.
I would suggest the trainees to spend considerable amount of time in honing their application development skills and implement these skills in small assignments. For software development these skills include design (application & db), reusablity in design, extensibility of design, analyzing/profiling the complexity and performance of modules (this, I found, is one of the most important thing we miss to do as trainees), writing unit tests and other best practices. As a trainee it is good to believe that until such concerns as above are not addressed and justifed the assignment is not complete yet. Then we have big accomplishments with small assignments.
I commend your thoughtfulness and intention in assigning apparently smaller pieces of work to trainees. Hope they capitalize on this opportunity to learn and apply best practices.