When I was at the job fair, I interviewed applicants using a basic template. I asked the same questions, over and over. On my drive home I was thinking about how I would have answered those same questions and when I got to the generic, “What are your strengths and weakness” question, it took me a minute to rehearse my official answer to that question and I want to share it with you because it’s really something real that maybe many of us face or rather should consider.
Think about that question for yourself. I mean, I’ve heard pretty much every answer that you could think of at interviews, some legit, some bogus. I also know the honest answers verses the Googled answers.
Here’s part of what I came up with:
I would consider one of my strengths to be good communication skills and I would say that one of my weakness, or “areas of improvement,” as I like to consider it, is weak communication skills. Let me try to rationalize to you why my strength is my weakness.
Here’s the thing. I am good at communication. I can listen and I can talk. I can organize my thoughts and put my thoughts into words. I am aware of my body language. I remain engaged. What I find myself having problems with is tailoring my communication to the person in which I’m talking to. I’ve really been working hard on this lately. It goes hand in hand with managing my expectations because if I can’t clearly communicate EXACTLY what I want from a teammate, how do I expect them to understand what my expectation is?
The main thing that I’ve found to be helpful is really getting to know my team. I have to know how they learn best, how they listen, what they need from me and then after all that, through trial and error, I learn how to communicate with them. It’s an ongoing and ever changing effort. I’ve learned to read body language, distinguish moods and attitudes and try to develop the best approach for each individual teammate.
When I think about strengths and weakness, the major thing is to be honest to yourself. You can’t ever improve and grow professionally as a leader if you aren’t willing to take a good hard look in the mirror.