Finding Your Individual Development Strengths
In a recent pair of posts on Creating High Performance Teams, I put the onus on the group leader or manager to develop their teams by truly focusing on and amplifying the team's strengths. However, that's only one perspective to it. It's also incumbent on today's software developers and testers to commit to understanding and improving their own skills.
The emphasis here truly is on understanding your performance, your strengths and weaknesses. Even more importantly are two other considerations:
- How do you stack up against others at your project team level?
- Are you in a job that accentuates your strengths? Where you truly make a difference?
Going back to my blog entry on creating high performance teams, I want to again reiterate that success is not about schlogging to improve your weakness, as Buckingham and Coffman eloquently and compellingly point out. And please don't construe this as a license to ignore your weaknesses. It's not. Instead though, true excellence and true difference making is gained from finding your strengths and amplifying them. To quote the Army, to "be all that you can be" should be your goal.
But there is an important first step to consider. How receptive are you to feedback?
First, Be Open Minded to Feedback
I remember when I first started as a development group leader my boss pulled me in for my first performance review. In my particular case, I'd always been a pretty fair developer, which led to the increased responsibility of leading a small team. I took my coding very seriously and really worked hard at my craft. I guess I was also a bit of a perfectionist.
Given that, I didn't like to listen to criticism and usually construed anything outside of positive feedback to be such. So during my review, I received some great comments -- keeping in mind that I'd just been promoted.
However, we also began to explore areas where I could improve. Sort of picking at my contributions on recent projects and using them as examples. From my point-of-view, he was simply nit picking--searching for anything negative to comment on because he had to point out improvement areas somewhere. I became quite animated and agitated by it all. Ok, I became defensive and somewhat argumentative.
We finally closed what should have been a very positive meeting in a very negative manner. We were both frustrated and the tension lasted for quite some time. What's the lesson here beyond the fact that I had some growing to do? At least for me, it's that it takes effort to properly receive feedback. However, it's crucial that you learn to do it well.
In performance discussions, if you aren't open minded and receptive to feedback--literally from anyone--your boss, your peers, your project manager, and your team--eventually they'll stop giving it to you. It's simply not worth the effort to give it. However, this is the worst possible scenario. Your performance gaps will still exist; just nobody will be talking to you about them.
So what's the point here? As you'll discover in later posts in this "series," I'm setting the stage for your learning from your own performance. However, in order to do so, you need to be receptive, inquisitive, thoughtful and willing to take action to change your focus and adapt to feedback. As illustrated in my example, this isn't always as easy as it sounds�
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