Strengths, Weaknesses and Career Derailers

Your strengths got you where you are today.

To continue moving ahead in your career and personal life it is crucial to recognize and harness your strengths. Equally important is your ability to identify and address your weaknesses.

When assessing your weaknesses, it is important to realize not all deficiencies are of equal importance to your career. A more significant category of weakness is a career derailer. A career derailer is a behavior or skill so profoundly deficient that no strength can compensate for a derailer’s negative impact. For example, a leader who has a weakness in public speaking can offset this by excelling in building relationships and motivating others. However, an arrogant leader, regardless of their competence in other leadership areas, will limit their potential for success.

Derailers can vary according to the profession or management level. For example, a lack of creativity is a big derailer in advertising while it may be less critical in manufacturing. Similarly, a lack of strategic focus might be a derailer for an executive but perhaps seen as a weakness in a mid-level manager.

Common derailers for employees at any level are

 An inability to adapt to change

 Unable to engage and participate on a collaborative team

 Poor interpersonal skills. For example, qualities such as insensitive / overly competitive / easily angered / manipulative / doesn’t listen.

Derailers can hide out as blind spot early in one’s career and then explode into one’s consciousness through a career setback such as, a demotion, repeatedly denied a promotion or getting fired. These situations can be the first time the individual has been told they are significantly deficient in some areas. Individuals that grow from a setback accept the feedback and seek ways to improve. By seeking out regular feedback they improve their self-awareness and then find ways to diminish the deficiency.

A strategic and practical approach to self-improvement and skill development is to continue to fortify your strengths but mitigate derailers and then move on to rectifying weaknesses.

Keep your career on track and identify potential derailers.