Strength and weakness aren’t opposite concepts. They are two aspects of the same quality within us.

At one point of our life, we are asked to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses. This is likely to come up as a question in a job interview. Most people dread talking about weaknesses, some try to downplay them.

This reflects how much of our relationship with strengths and weaknesses is one dimensional. We favor strengths, improve weaknesses. This common approach makes us miss the depth of our qualities. There is much more to a “strength” and to a “weakness”. In fact, strengths and weaknesses can be viewed as being two sides of the same coin.

So, the lines of strengths and weaknesses are blurry. This means, there are two ways of looking at your qualities: First is, your strength can be a weakness; and second is, your weakness can be a strength. How does this happen? Think of a quality of yourself that you view as a weakness. By labelling it as a weakness, you miss the totality, the depth of this quality.

We observe that developers are usually regarded as introverts. The general view towards introversion is that it is less favorable compared to extroversion. This is merely because, as Susan Cain says, “we’ve looked at extroversion only through its advantages, and we’ve looked at introversion only through its disadvantages”(3). But we know that preference for solitude is associated with deep thinking – focusing, dwelling on internal processes. In the case of developers, this produces great work. Susan Cain, who gave a TED Talk on The Power of Introverts, explains the two sides of introversion briefly in this video:

This exact concept is true for the reverse as well. A quality that we mostly benefit from – which
we call strength, could come out as a weakness. A strength is as beneficial as the way it is put to use.

An example of this is a creative colleague that constantly generates new ideas usually misses deadlines (3). The pressure of time tends to kill off creative ideas – and creativity thrives on the settings where free thinking is allowed without limitations. So, in the context of a work setting where deadlines are a part of your productivity, creative tendencies can bring difficulty. Whereas, if you loosen the emphasis on deadlines, you’d see the positive effects of creativity instead.
All in all, you can get rid of one dimensional way of thinking when evaluating yourself, and arrive at a more wholistic perspective about yourself. This is possible by seeing through the other side of a trait. And that is a matter of changing your perspective and thinking critically to get a
whole view of this trait. Afterwards, you’ll realize that the strengths and weaknesses are related.
You can see how this practically plays out if you take a SWOT analysis. The items on the strengths section wouldn’t be there if the complementary part of it wasn’t in the weakness section. And vice versa.

How do you evaluate a trait then? Is this a strength, or a weakness?
The aim should be to go beyond judging a quality, and to understand ourselves; understand our qualities with the totality of them, for what they really are. Then, we may arrive at a good conclusion on what our “strengths” and “weaknesses” really mean.

RESOURCES
(1) Answering the ‘Strengths and Weaknesses’ Question
(2) Interview: When Strength Becomes Weakness
(3) Harvard Business School Podcast: Does Time Pressure Help or Hinder Creativity at Work?

Tags: creativity, interview, strengths, traits, weaknesses