What Are You Good At?

In the late Peter Drucker’s book Management Challenges for the 21st Century, the management guru and former Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University, stated, “Most people think they know what they are good at. They usually are wrong.” Drucker continues, “More often, people know what they are not good at—and even then more people are wrong than right.”

Drucker’s insight in this chapter entitled Managing Oneself, and the truth of the matter is, a person can perform only from their strengths. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

More now than at any time in history, as leaders, we must know where our strengths lie. We no longer inherit the family business, continue the work status of our inherited cast, follow our royal parents to the thrown, or any other bygone career track. And more and more, the positions we thought would always be, are being replaced in ways no one dreamed about 15 years ago. We must perform from a position of our stengths.

Drucker’s answer to how one discovers strengths and weaknesses comes through the concept and act of feedback analysis. This is how Drucker explains the process: "Whenever one makes a key decision, and whenever one does a key action, one writes down what one expects to happen. And nine months or twelve months later one feeds back from results to expectations." He continues, "I have been doing this for some fifteen to twenty years now. And every time I do so I am surprised. And so is everyone else who has done it."

Drucker gives this advice for using feedback analysis:

Between now and next summer, why not use this coming year as a time to discover, or rediscover, strengths and weaknesses through an exercise in feedback analysis?

For more reflection on this concept, see this abstract of Drucker’s book.