Growthink’s Dave Lavinsky Urges Business Owners to Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

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Dave Lavinsky, co-founder and President of Growthink

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) June 02, 2012

According to Dave Lavinsky, co-founder of leading entrepreneurial consulting firm Growthink Inc., Strengths-Based Leadership is a way of improving a company's success by developing the organization's strengths. According to Lavinsky, the key to this philosophy is that people have a significantly higher ability to further improve on their strengths versus fixing their weaknesses.

"Makes sense doesn't it," Lavinsky said. "Yet most entrepreneurs and leaders do the opposite; they focus on improving their and their employees' weaknesses. This leads to frustration and lack of high performance. Rather, you should be constantly improving your strengths," said Lavinsky.

Lavinsky uses the philosophy of the Chinese Ping Pong coach at the 1984 Olympics, to highlight this view:

"Here is our philosophy: if you develop your strengths to the maximum, the strength becomes so great it overwhelms the weakness. Our winning player, you see, plays only his forehand. Even though he cannot play backhand and his competition knows he cannot play backhand, his forehand is so invincible that it cannot be beaten."

Dave Lavisnky has revealed five methods to help business owners implement this philosophy in their own organisation:

1. List your organization's strengths

"A strength is defined as the ability to exhibit near-perfect performance consistently in a given activity," said Lavinsky.

"Create a list of the strengths that you and your employees have."

2. Rank the organization's most important strengths

Lavinsky encourages business owners to identity which of their listed strengths is core to the success of the organization, and to then rank them in order of importance.

"For example, strengths that allow you to produce a better product or service for your customers would be key as it can give you sustainable competitive advantage. You should then rank these strengths," Lavinsky says.

3. Invest in further developing employee strengths

Lavinsky recommends that time, energy, and money (training, education, etc.) is invested in to further develop the top-ranked strengths of employees.

"Remember, just having a strength isn't good enough. Consider professional athletes. They all have great strengths. But the world's best professional athletes are the ones that constantly practice and improve on their strengths," he said.

4. Outsource your weaknesses

Lavinsky believes that in order to operate effectively, every company needs to perform many tasks that may fall outside of their strengths.

"A company who is incredible at making the best wines needs to do many other things. Such as answering incoming phone calls, shipping the wines (to distributors, retailers and customers), creating and maintaining a website, etc" he said.

"Importantly, if their wine is that superior, than these other functions are far less important and do not require the company to have competitive advantage."

Lavinsky therefore advises firms to outsource these tasks to another firm who focuses on these functionalities (e.g., a web design firm, a trucking company, etc.). He also encourages businesses to consider hiring people who have strengths in these areas.

"You may also need to hire an operations manager to manage these hires so that the company head can continue to focus on their strength," Lavinsky says.

Lavinsky believes that leaders do not create companies that are great at everything. Rather, they figure out their key organizational strengths and further develop the most important ones.

"This gives them lasting competitive advantage," he said. "I urge you to do the same."

About Growthink:
Growthink, Inc. is a leading provider of business planning services. Growthink has also developed several training products and tools for entrepreneurs, including a simple business plan template, sample marketing plan template, and strategic planning template. To learn more about Growthink's products and services, call 800-506-5728.

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