Weaknesses at work: which to fix, and which to simply work around

Every year, the same ritual: two “areas for development” written into your review, aimed squarely at whatever you do least well. You then spend the next twelve months putting your energy where your return is lowest. At best, you’ll reach average — which is to say, the place where nobody will ever notice you.

The opposite advice — “focus on your strengths and forget the rest” — doesn’t hold up either. Some weaknesses cost people their jobs when they’re ignored. So the question isn’t which camp to join; it’s how to sort. Weaknesses don’t all call for the same treatment, and lumping them together is the real mistake.

Three kinds of weakness, three different treatments

Before deciding what to do, you need to know what you’re dealing with. Two questions settle it: does this weakness block a result your job requires, and does it exist on its own, or is it the price of one of your strengths?

The blocking weakness: fix it — but how far?

A weakness is blocking when it prevents a result your job demands and that nobody else can produce for you. A manager who can’t deliver difficult feedback is blocked: that isn’t a matter of style, it’s the job. So is a specialist who can’t present their work to a decision-maker — the analysis exists, and it reaches nobody.

The point almost everyone misses: the goal isn’t excellence, it’s “good enough”. Going from poor to adequate on a blocking weakness changes everything; going from adequate to good costs three times as much for a marginal gain. Once you’re over the bar, your effort should go back to your strengths.

The flip side of a strength: what you must not fix

Plenty of so-called flaws aren’t gaps at all: they’re strengths seen from the wrong side. The person who makes quick calls is also the one who decides before reading everything. The one who sees consequences three moves ahead is also the one who slows the meeting down by raising yet another risk. Remove the flaw and you remove the strength with it.

These pairs are easy to spot: the weakness and the strength show up in the same situations, and the same people criticise one while praising the other. “You rushed that” and “thank goodness you made the call” often come from the same colleague, a fortnight apart.

• What works: guardrails. A simple rule that limits the overspill without touching the engine — “I only decide alone when the mistake is reversible”, “I raise one risk per meeting, the most serious one”.
• What also works: warning people. Naming the way you work to your team takes most of the sting out of the criticism. What’s been announced is no longer something people have to put up with.
• What fails: trying to become the opposite of yourself. You end up a tired version of you — without the flaw, but without the strength either — and it doesn’t last six months.

The peripheral weakness: the least serious, and the most guilt-inducing

This is the biggest category and the one that eats the most mental energy: things you do badly, that block nothing, and that nag at you anyway. Formatting a document, keeping a tracker up to date, writing up minutes, filing things somewhere you’ll find them again.

You don’t fix these weaknesses; you get them out of the way. There are three routes, in increasing order of cost.

1. The swap. A colleague for whom it’s a strength does in twenty minutes what takes you two hours — and the reverse is true for one of your tasks. It’s the most effective solution and the one people least often try, because it means admitting the weakness out loud.
2. Automation. Many peripheral tasks are repetitive and follow a template: exactly the kind of thing a well-chosen tool absorbs without complaint.
3. Letting it go, on purpose. Some tasks don’t need doing well. Deciding that internal minutes will be short and imperfect is a legitimate choice, not slackness.

For the second route, everything depends on choosing the right tool: it has to fit the way you work rather than fight it, or you’ll abandon it within three weeks. That’s what our guide on choosing AI tools that fit your strengths is about.

“What’s your greatest weakness?” — answering without shooting yourself in the foot

The question comes up in almost every interview, and the two classic answers fail for opposite reasons. The fake weakness — “I’m a perfectionist” — signals that you either haven’t thought about it or are dodging. A real weakness served up raw, with nothing done about it, hands the interviewer a reason to rule you out.

A strong answer has three parts: the real weakness, what it cost you once, and the safeguard you’ve put in place since. “I make decisions quickly, and in 2024 that led me to launch a project on incomplete data. Since then, anything irreversible gets a second pair of eyes before I sign it off.” It’s no longer a confession; it’s proof of self-awareness — which is what the question is really trying to measure.

Doing the sorting, in practice

An hour is enough. List five things you do badly — the ones that come to mind first, not the ones you think you ought to mention. For each, ask the grid’s two questions: do I have a recent example of a result it prevented, and would this weakness disappear along with one of my strengths?

The outcome often comes as a surprise. Out of five weaknesses, typically one is blocking, one or two are the flip side of a strength, and the rest are peripheral. In other words, most of the guilt you’ve been carrying was about things that never needed work — just a decision.

This sorting assumes you know your strengths with some precision; otherwise the second question has no answer. That’s the starting point, set out in our guide to the 34 talents. And if your weaknesses are about to come up in a review, our performance review guide shows how to raise them on your own terms.