A key skill that managers must learn in connection to their people is to not focus too much on the weaknesses of an employee, in the sense of trying to make them better in those areas. You're wasting a lot of valuable time and energy that will help neither the company or the employee.
A much more profitable exercise for both would be to look at the strengths of your people, and draw out and enhance those areas.
What's a managers job in these cases? To make sure they identify the things that a person is good at, and work and help them to make them even better.
It reminds me of one of my favorite example of the true story of a college wrestler I used to enjoy watching years ago. To understand this example, in college wrestling, when you take down a challenger to the mat, you get two points, if after being taken down to the mat, the challenger escapes your hold, he gets one point.
This guy was so good at what he did in taking down his opponents, that he would take them down to get his two points, and then let the other wrestler up on purpose so he could do it again. Every time he would let his challenger up, the challenger was awarded one point ... but he never lost, and won the national championship.
The thing to learn is that it would have been a waste of time to try to concentrate on not allowing the opponent to get one point, when he could let him go and get two, literally every time.
Many times we as managers focus on the wrong thing with our people. This is an example of seeing what a person was good at, and even making them better in their specific strength. If his coaches would have tried to fix the weaker area, they would probably have damaged his strength as well, and made him a far less effective wrestler. Think of that when you are looking at the performances of your employees.
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