I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

I recently read a book called “Now, discover your strengths” (Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton) and according to the strengths test provided, these are my top 5 strengths (selected from a list of over 30), and a massively paraphrased description of each:

Strategic: Forming strategies, coming up with contingency plans (what if) and seeing the path through the strategic landscape to your objectives

Intellection: Thinking a lot

Analytical: Seeing patterns in the data

Input: A sort of learning/information addiction

Command: Telling people what to do.

I put the diagram above together (using my work laptop’s fully legal copy of MS PowerPoint!) to show how I’ve been using these strengths for years - for every aspect of my life from computer games to work. Some cynics would say “jam that’s both aspects of your life…”

Anyway, why I’m bothering to write this here is that I found the exercise somewhat frightening. The diagram above shows the exact inner workings of my mind better than anyone (myself included) has ever been able to. It precisely describes my approach - learning everything I can about a subject, formulating a strategy, thinking through how to implement it, implementing it (now with my long-dormant Command strength), gathering data and analysing the results, and then learning more, refining the strategy or coming up with a new one.

Now in my new role at work, I use all five of these strengths every week.  At home these days my information addiction is in full swing - I’m constantly reading some business book or other, be it about people, or management, or business strategy. I use this at work too - only weirdly it applies to people knowledge - I have never once closed the door of my office to shut people out, I’m always open to people coming in and feeding me vital data about how they feel (venting) regardless of what part of the company they’re from. I’m continually refining and coming up with strategies for my team, for our projects and for our role within the business. I am doing a huge amount of thinking things through. I am finally using my long suppressed strength for Command to give people instructions left right and centre, and every week and every month I gather and analyse data for regular reports that I write.

And it feels like nothing else ever has before. I loved my previous line of work - it gave me some opportunity to use most of these strengths. But my new job gives me lots of opportunity for all five (and more of course), and to me it gives new meaning to the phrase “moving from strength to strength”. At the moment I feel like I’m moving from strength to strength to strength to strength to strength in a never ending (and incredibly fun and fulfilling) cycle. In fact, I’m so into it at the moment that I think I’m going a little bit loopy… I think about little else but work.

But if I were to level criticism at the book it would be the following three statements:

1. It makes no attempt to help identify your weaknesses (although its sequel does - or at least it attempts to help you identify when they are being engaged)
2. In order to learn about any more than your top 5 strengths they demand you pay them money - lots of it. Fuck off springs to mind…
3. The strengths identification website makes no attempt to measure the strength of your strengths.

All of which tells me that while this is a useful exercise in some ways, it fails to acknowledge that some people’s strengths are much stronger than others and that some people have a lot more than five strengths.

For example, I strongly believe my sixth (or so) strength would be Empathy. Yes I know if you line it up with these other five ultra-introspective intellectual strengths it seems hideously out of place - but sensing others feelings has always been my defining ’surprise!’ strength. At work, this feeds directly into my Input strength - I use it to gather some of the most vital information of all - how people feel.

As to my weaknesses? Another eye-opener for me was realising how my inherent ‘laziness’ has consistently led to my weaknesses remaining hidden throughout my career. Not merely hidden, but totally disengaged. Anything I’m weak at, I feel drained/bored while forcing myself to do it (so do you - the key symptoms of a weakness are that you feel bored or drained by the activity) so I stop doing it and work around it. This habit has disengaged my weaknesses from my work life, and led directly to my success!

I hate doing anything manually if it can be automated (despite all these thinking-pathways, my brain actually doesn’t process data very well itself - I was always mediocre at mental arithmetic or indeed any manual mental process outside of strategy/thinking/analysis/information gathering). So I do nothing manually - as a systems administrator and now a manager, this actually works quite well. A SysAdmin can get computers to do everything, and a Manager can get computers and people to do everything…

I had trouble organising myself in the early days. So I used computers to help me do it. To-do lists, ticketing systems, reminders and cron jobs solve the problem for me every day. The same solution fixes my ‘absent mindedness’ - to the degree that most people who only know me in a work environment mistake me for a highly organised person with a great memory for details. Hilarious to anyone who’s known me all my life.

Can never remember people’s names. Easily fixed with an address book until I get to know them enough for my strange memory to class the data containing their name as important enough to actually store. (oddly, my memory is really good in many other areas)

And I actually lack attention to detail - always been a ‘big picture’ guy. Again though, computers do not, and a combination of internally managing this weakness (checklists, holding myself to procedures I compensate with) and getting computers to do quality control for me (having a script check a hundred items against a set of rules beats the shit out of doing it yourself) totally disengages this weakness.

So there you have it. My brain and how it works. How I’ve used it - unknowingly to great effect, now knowingly to greater effect - and how it’s won me my battles to date.

Man, what a murderous week. I’ve moved into my first office, delivered my first dressing-down and been within a gnat’s wang of having to resign in protest at unethical practise.

Luckily the unethical practise didn’t go ahead, the dressing-down managed to convey past failure, future expectation and support for future endeavours without offending the subject,  and so far has had a positive effect. I think.

But I can’t stop working. I can’t stop thinking about work, and that’s bad because it’s Saturday and I need to chill the fuck out.

The replacement for my old position starts on Monday, so pretty soon I’m going to be freed up more and more to do my new job. That’s good, but it also means more and more value will be expected to be coming out of my new office…

So my brain is whirring along thinking of ways to achieve that. I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing… I guess unless it comes up with some good stuff, it’s bad.