It is important to understand what ‘strengths’ you draw from your values and qualities to succeed in your professional life. You have now ‘evolved’ into a more ‘aware’ individual. You now know that your ‘inner self’ holds the key to your ‘being’. Your speed of growth at this juncture is faster because your potential is visible to you. But, how do you chart out your strategy? Without a ‘tool’ how can you possibly propel the engine called ‘you’? The ‘tool’ is your ‘strengths’ which lend you the abilities for ‘continuous improvement’ and therefore progress.

You may have many strengths. Those may be resilience, dependability, ability to multitask, analysis, flexibility, interpersonal skills or any other that you have been able to trace within you. Each ‘strength’ that you have, becomes a tool in your hand that you judiciously employ to get the best results out of yourself and your team. Understanding your strengths and then strengthening those is a good foundation for progress. The strategy is to minimise the weaknesses and strengthening the strengths. With the awareness about yourself firmly in your grip, your attempts to grow externally too assume important dimensions. You become more skilful, knowledgeable, efficient, productive and professionally competent at work. This is discernable. This is measurable too.

Let us assume that you have an ability to effortlessly communicate across different layers. This quality distinguishes you from the crowd. And you know it. Whatever you communicate, you do it with good ‘content’ that is meaningful and exquisite at once. It is your ‘quality’. Now, look at your ‘value’ map. One of your ‘values’ is ‘honesty’. As a professional you would not budge from your ‘value’. You won’t use your communication ability to serve a wrong end. So you communicate with purpose and honesty. And when you do that you have harnessed your ‘strength’. It is your independent ‘conduct’ for which you are known. In an organisation, as a leader, who needs to communicate to serve an end, you have harnessed a recipe for success.

As a leader, apart from the individual growth, you need to drive collective growth too. This collective growth is all about the team members. It becomes imperative that individual ‘strengths’ of the team members are identified. This is challenging these days because of the diversity in a team. Team members from different nationalities, language and backgrounds form a unit. The leader needs to have the insight about each of them and drive to a common goal.  

Despite the growing role of technology in form of robotics, machine learning etc., the realisation that, at the end, it is the ‘people’ who are the ‘bottom-line’ and are needed to be nurtured to guide to their fullest potential, heralds a new wisdom in the modern day management. Efforts are put to create an environment where an individual can optimise own potential so that one can contribute to the collective.

The leader, through the practice of harnessing his and his team’s strength begins to appreciate that knowing ‘oneself’ is a precious ‘wisdom’ but knowing ‘others’ is ‘intelligence.’