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By PASCAL FINETTE

The Heretic is a free dispatch delivering insights into what it takes to lead into & in the unknown. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated.

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Oct 5th, 2015 Share: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn

Knoweth Thy Strength

At Singularity University’s Startup Accelerator we pay a lot of attention to leadership development (understanding that too many startups implode due to leadership challenges among the founders and/or early employees). Part of this work includes a deep dive into discovering and fully leaning into your strengths.

To facilitate this work we ask our founders to do the R2 Strengths Profiler which gives them a report on their strengths and weaknesses. Each of these two areas is then further divided up into your realized and unrealized strengths as well as “learned behaviors” (the weaknesses you have learned to overcome) and true weaknesses.

The underlying science postulates that if you fully lean into your strengths you can become excellent at something; whereas if you try to iron out your weaknesses your best shot is at getting mediocre at that particular skill. Sadly society and education has this pretty much backward and focusses on us working on our weaknesses instead of fully developing our strengths.

By understanding what your individual strengths are, you can develop a much better understanding who you as a person and leader really are; and identify opportunities to grow your edge. Realizing what your weaknesses are, allows you to make a conscious decision wether the particular weakness is in your way (and you need to work on it) or if you can simply ignore or work around it.

I find this incredibly insightful — especially if you do this with your team and share the results so you all better understand who you are and what your individual superpowers are. We took our founders through a thorough debrief and they loved it.

Curious? Here’s my R2 Strength Profile… :)


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