Your Strengths: Promote or Protect?

When do you Promote your strengths and when do you Protect them? 

Not every strength will get you the job or promotion you want.  As you become more experienced and accomplished, FIT is sometimes as important or more important than your experience and strengths.

As a career management and executive coach, I work with my clients to understand their preferences, satisfiers, and strengths.  We work hard to develop a consistent brand and how to best represent it, particularly through the lens of their strengths.  How strengths are presented is important in shaping, projecting, and promoting your brand.

As I mentioned earlier, FIT is critical and probably the most important aspect of whether a candidate gets a job offer or not. Companies are very much like people. They hire like-minded people that they believe match their values and fulfill the role, goals, responsibility and scope of the position. Often job descriptions are written in a way to give clues on whether the environment is dynamic or predictable; structured or freewheeling: intense or relaxed; and open or hierarchical. By networking and research, you can determine the nature of a company and whether you might be a good fit.

But what if because of desire, circumstance, or for some other reason you believe that you FIT in a target company, but there are aspects of your brand they might not value (yet). This is a particular problem for older, more experienced candidates who have high energy, are experts in their field, have embraced continual improvement, and have a full spectrum of training and talents to offer. The problem is their energy and knowledge can frighten off less-experienced managers, or those managers who haven’t yet realized that their growth is limited not by their talent, but by the excellence of the team they hire.

To this point, younger less experienced candidates are often the engine and provide needed energy for growth and innovation.   Some managers get stuck on hiring the perfect candidate instead of solving the problem that initiated the hiring process.  You need to be able to promote your brand and strengths and help the decision makers see your FIT in their organization.

Gallup CliftonStrengths* is a very refined tool for understanding your strengths in terms of two important perspectives which they refer to as Balconies and Basements. Every strength has a balcony and basement, or in simpler terms, a strength can be an asset in some situations and a liability in others.  Another way to think about it is whether a strength can move your career forward or might it hold you back.  For example, if one of your strengths is assertiveness and being driven, you can deliver difficult projects on time while at the same time you can burn out your inexperienced team who hasn’t yet achieved balanced work habits.

Let’s take another example, one of being great at technical problem solving. It is great to have such a strength in reserve.  If you are interviewing for a position that also requires excellent communication and customer engagement, and all you do is talk about technical problems you’ve solved, the hiring company might perceive you as enjoying dwelling in the technical weeds instead of talking to customers and supporting new strategies for growing the business.

So how does this relate to your brand?  A brand is what you promote and what people perceive. Part of career management is the timing of how you shape your brand with the hiring company and then offer them supporting evidence that you deserve the opportunity. To achieve credibility might mean that you have to carefully read the job description, listening to the recruiter or hiring representative during the initial interactions, and determining what should be initially promoted and what should be protected.

Understand, this is not about being dishonest or misleading. During the hiring process, the hiring team has a limited scope. They are relying on a job description (and assuming the person who wrote the job description wrote it accurately based on the company’s needs), the candidates’ resumes, the decision makers’ assessments, and their peers’ interview notes and perceptions. Consider this when presenting your strengths, capabilities, expertise, and achievements. 

Your strength, preferences and satisfiers are your personal property.  We help our clients to leverage and use them in their best interest. Think carefully of what should be promoted to get you the job, and what should be protected or held in reserve because it might cloud the hiring team’s perception of you.

Keep your brand simple and to the point. Promote your strengths that support FIT, while you carefully Protect those strengths, preferences, and satisfiers that might not help you get the job you want.

* - Copyright © 2024 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.

About the FIT Blog

The FIT Blog adds depth and understanding to the Launch Success FIT Method.  Think of it as a resource to learn more about the methods before signing up with Launch Success.  It’s also intended as a resource during and after you’re engaged in the process.   We provide definitions and examples on some of the foundational ideas, like the FIT Mindset and explaining Your Vision and Balance.  What the FIT Blog reinforces most is that you control more than you think and can have a path forward towards independence and financial security.

About Gary Ainsworth

With over 30 years in working in technology and worldwide operations, and nearly 10 years as a certified executive and career management coach, I’ve gained insights in how companies hire and how career seekers increase their probability of getting hired.  I’m committed to helping younger, less experienced professionals understand and unwind what’s holding them back in their careers.

Arc Completa, Inc. – Copyright 2024

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