12 Executive Skills
Self-restraint
Working Memory
Emotion Control
Focus
Task Initiation
Plan and Prioritize
Organization
Time Management
Achieving Goals
Flexibility
Observation
Stress Tolerance
Fig.1 12 Executive Skills
2.2.2 Personal strategies-play your strengths, avoid your weaknesses.
Once you know your strongest and weakest skills, you have two choices. You can either leverage your strongest skills to maximum benefit or you can start trying to improve your weakest skills. Experience has shown over and over that the best approach is to capitalize on your strengths and leave your weaknesses to take care of themselves.
2.2.3 Seek opportunities to exploit your strengths
Your executive skill levels probably will not vary much over the course of your career. Instead of trying to improve on your weak areas，you should spend more time leveraging and fully exploiting your strengths. You should seek situations and circumstances where your strengths will come to the fore. If you can do this consistently, you will place yourself in a position to excel.
So how does this work in practice? There are several things you can do to try and stay in the areas where your skills are strong:
■ Try to delegate the tasks you are not good at, so you can spend more of your time working in highly productive activities that harness your strengths.
■ From alliances with people who have complementary skill sets-who are strong in the areas you are weak in. By forming a partnership, you may both be able to generate impressive results.
■ If you do end up having to do something that taps your weakest strengths, keep a positive outlook by focusing on the magnitude of the potential loss or the potential gain from that activity. Remind yourself that there will be consequences, so you need to be doing the best you can, even if this does not come easy.
2.2.4 Minimize the negative effects of your weaknesses
As mentioned, your greatest gains in productively will come by playing to your strengths. Having said that, it also seems sensible to do everything you can to minimize your weakness. In this regard, there are a few things you can try:
■ Admit your weaknesses openly and candidly-rather than trying to sweep them under the rug. Understand how your weaknesses will manifest themselves in practice and do all you reasonably can to address those situations.
■ Keep asking for feedback on an ongoing basis-on both your strong points and your weaknesses. Welcome suggestions for improvement or ideas for development with open arms. Consider whether more training or experience in weak areas would be helpful.
■ Look out for any flow-on consequences from your weakest skills and do what you can to correctly identify them. For example, if you are low in flexibility, you might be able to volunteer to keep the written minutes for your team meetings. That way you can listen to everyone else's ideas before putting your own suggestions forward. By doing positive things like that, you will be able to make things work even in areas you have no natural strengths in.
■ Do all you can to improve in your weak areas-at least to the stage where you can do enough to get by. This may be a matter of breaking a task down, identifying any triggers for poor performance and creating new habits that will be better. Something as simple as training yourself to count to ten before responding if you are weak in self-restraint may be a workable idea.
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