Had a good conversation with a candidate recently about strengths and weaknesses. Not the usual interview dance where weaknesses get reframed as strengths in disguise. An honest exchange about what we’re each not good at and how we compensate.
It reminded me how rarely we talk about this directly—and how enabling it is when we do.
The Real Skill
Knowing your strengths tells you where to deploy yourself. But knowing your weaknesses tells you who you need around you.
That’s the more useful map. Not a catalog of what you’re good at, but a clear picture of the gaps—and a strategy for filling them by leaning on others who are strong where you’re not.
This isn’t about self-deprecation. It’s about self-awareness that actually leads somewhere. If I know where I fall short, I can seek out collaborators, build teams, and structure work in ways that compensate. The gaps become a design constraint, not a liability.
A Career Theme
Looking back, the most enabling pattern in my career has been exactly this: finding people whose strengths complement my weaknesses, and offering the reverse.
It changes how you hire. Instead of looking for people who are good at the same things you are, you look for people who cover what you can’t. It changes how you collaborate. You stop pretending you can do everything and start trusting others to handle what they’re better at. It changes how you grow. You stay humble about your limits and curious about improving them, which is the growth mindset in practice.
The alternative—projecting competence in every direction—is exhausting and brittle. Eventually the gaps show up anyway. Better to know them, name them, and build around them.
Why It’s Hard
We’re trained to emphasize strengths. Performance reviews, job interviews, professional branding—all of it pushes toward articulating what you’re good at. Admitting weakness feels like giving something away.
But teams built on pretense fail in predictable ways. Everyone is covering gaps that nobody acknowledges. When those gaps finally surface, there’s no structure to handle them.
I’d rather work with people who can say clearly what they’re not good at. It makes everything else more trustworthy. If someone knows their limits, I can trust their confidence in other areas.
The Map Worth Making
So here’s the question worth sitting with: what are you bad at? Not as an exercise in humility for its own sake. But as real intelligence about who you need, what you should delegate, and where you still have room to grow.
The map of gaps is a blueprint for the career you actually want—one where you’re not trying to be good at everything, but building something better by leaning on others.
