111: Strengthening Strengths Beats Improving Weaknesses | Joe Folkman

Meikles & Dimes

Joe Folkman is co-founder and President of Zenger Folkman, a firm specializing in leadership and organizational development. As one of the nation’s renowned psychometricians, his surveys and assessments utilize a database comprised of over one million assessments on over 80,000 leaders.

Joe’s clients include AT&T, General Motors, General Mills, Wells Fargo, and Yale University, he has published nine books, and his research has been published in the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal.

Joe holds a doctorate degree in Social and Organizational Psychology, as well as a master’s degree in Organizational Behavior from Brigham Young University.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• When people receive feedback about their strengths and weaknesses, they often choose to focus on their weaknesses. But Joe’s research, based on one million assessments of 80,000 leaders, shows that people tend to be better off focusing on their strengths rather than their weaknesses.
• To build leadership strengths, such as trying to improve our honesty, it can be helpful to focus on adjacent strength builders such as assertiveness. By improving our assertiveness, we can improve our honesty.
• Joe’s research shows that those who rate us are twice as accurate at predicting our strengths and weaknesses as we are.
• Steve Jobs had weaknesses, some of which were nearly fatal flaws. But his strengths were so strong, that they more than compensated for his weaknesses in the workplace.

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoeFolkman

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-folkman-4766813/

Joe’s HBR Article on Strength Builders

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