Should You Focus on Your Strengths or Your Weaknesses?
- Aug 3
- 6 min read
Daniele Forni is an executive coach for non-standard and neurodivergent leaders and the founder of The Human Spikes Labs. A former Director at HSBC with fifteen years in banking across Europe and Asia, he is a University of Cambridge alumnus and the author of books on leadership, neurodiversity, strategy, and meditation.
It is the question I am asked most often by ambitious leaders, and the honest answer runs against almost everything the annual review has taught us. Every appraisal I have ever watched follows the same script. A manager works down a list of competencies, ticks the boxes where you are strong, circles the two where you are not, and then spends the rest of the hour on the circles. You walk out with a development plan built almost entirely around your weakest points and a gentle instruction to become a little more well-rounded by the end of the year.
However well-meant, I have come to believe this ritual is close to the worst advice a genuinely talented person can be given. It quietly assumes that the fastest way to grow is to hunt down your lowest scores and drag them up to the middle. In my experience coaching senior leaders, the opposite is usually true.
Why do we pour our effort into the weakest boxes?
Because a balanced scorecard feels safe, fair, and easy to defend. A visible gap looks like a risk, so we rush to close it. Being even across the board reads as professionalism, while a jagged profile reads as a liability waiting to be managed. The trouble is that the strategy optimises for the absence of obvious faults rather than the presence of rare strength, and markets do not pay for the absence of faults.
Every leader I assess is really facing one decision about where their next hundred hours of effort should go. They can lift the low points up towards the average, or they can push the high points higher still. Both raise the overall number. Only one of them produces something a competitor cannot easily copy.
What is a spiky profile?
A spiky profile is a simple picture. A few tall peaks, a few deep valleys, and a line through the middle we call the average. Everyone has one, but some run sharper than others. Between 15 and 20 percent of people are autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or otherwise wired differently, and those minds tend to run taller peaks and deeper valleys still. I count myself among them. For years, I tried to file my own edges down to look more even, until I realised the edges were the entire career.
The shape showed up early. I was quick over sixty metres and hopeless over twenty-six miles, which I also loathed. I could read a spreadsheet like a story yet never once made sense of a physics equation. I could hold a room with a sharp question and then fumble the answer entirely. As a teenager, I lost whole weekends to painting tiny Warhammer figures, and years later, that same capacity for narrow, obsessive focus was exactly what let me hold a two-year regulatory programme in my head without dropping a thread. The pattern never really changed, startlingly good at a thin band of things, and stubbornly poor at most of the rest. For a long time, I read that as a defect to correct. It was actually the whole map.
The flat, evenly rounded professional that so many competency frameworks reward is largely a fiction. The high performers I have worked with in banking and technology were never even. They were a little unusual and remarkable at two or three specific things. Specialisation, not symmetry, is what made them valuable.
Is it harder to fix a weakness or build a strength?
This is where the appraisal logic quietly falls apart, because closing a weakness and extending a strength are not the same task and do not pay the same return.
Lifting a skill from poor to passable is slow, effortful, and subject to sharply diminishing returns, and the reward at the end is that you are now unremarkable at it. Lifting a skill from strong to exceptional is frequently cheaper per hour, because you are moving along the grain of how your mind already works, and the reward is a capability that is genuinely scarce. Two decades of strengths research point the same way, motivation, output, and wellbeing all climb faster when people are built up from what they do well rather than repaired at what they do badly.
The applied numbers are striking. When JPMorgan Chase matched neurodivergent hires to roles that fit their cognitive peaks, those employees ran up to 48 percent faster on certain technical work, simply because the task finally suited the wiring. Pull in the other direction and the cost shows up just as clearly. Masking, the constant effort of hiding how your mind works to seem more conventional, is reported by around 81 percent of neurodivergent employees and carries a threefold rise in burnout risk. A valley, remember, is a difference, not a deficit. The 2025 Princeton SPARK study, mapping over 230 traits, found neurodivergence is not a single dial from mild to severe but a set of distinct clusters, each with its own peaks and its own needs. You do not get the pattern recognition without the patchy admin. They are one and the same architecture.
What does the arithmetic actually show?
Here is the part that undoes the well-rounded ideal in a single picture. Take three versions of the same person and let each one land on almost precisely the same average score. The average is a magician's cloth. It conceals the shape, and the shape is where the whole story lives.
The version that fixes its weaknesses fills the valleys but bleeds the peaks, because effort is finite and every hour aimed at your worst skill is stolen from your best. The result is a smooth, dependable, thoroughly forgettable line. The version that doubles down keeps its valleys, but manages them, and drives its peaks upward until they are visible from across the market. Identical averages. Completely different careers.
In practice, feeding the peaks looks like three disciplined moves:
Take the one or two valleys that could genuinely harm others, raise them to a safe, functional level, and then leave them alone.
Delegate, automate, or partner around the remaining valleys, deliberately building a team whose shape is the mirror image of yours.
Aim the effort you have left at the two or three peaks that already make people request you by name.
Does specialising pay off beyond the individual?
It does, and this is not a fringe position. Harvard Business Review has described neurodiversity as a competitive advantage, and the organisational numbers back it:
Teams that deliberately include neurodivergent talent report roughly a 15 percent lift in innovation output (HLB Global, 2025).
Those same programmes retain close to 90 percent of that talent, a rare edge when specialists are scarce.
At the specialist firm Auticon, 82 percent of staff say they can be themselves at work, and that authenticity travels with markedly higher engagement.
Given the right conditions, the very traits a rigid process treats as defects are exactly what let leaders with ADHD thrive in the boardroom. Strength, properly resourced, compounds. The average does not.
So should you ignore your weaknesses?
No. A reframing without limits is just flattery, so here are two honest boundaries.
First, not every weakness is safe to leave alone. Some valleys are thresholds rather than preferences. If a gap is actively harming your team, your clients, or your own health, that is a floor you have to reach, not an inconvenience to route around. Bring it up to safe, and then stop. You are aiming for a functional valley, not a filled one.
Second, doubling down is not the same as hiding in a niche. Building on a strength still means growing, but growing along the line of your own design rather than fighting it, and accepting that careers are made on what you are exceptional at, not on the absence of anything you are poor at.
Ready to find your peaks?
If you have spent years being told to shore up your weak spots, treat this as permission to change tack. It is the same shift driving so many founders and neurodivergent leaders to seek coaching that begins from strength rather than from gaps. You can map your own spiky profile with my free assessment, or book a conversation about where to aim your effort this year. The instruction is the same either way, stop sanding and start sharpening.
Read more from Daniele Forni
Daniele Forni, Executive Coach and Tech Founder
Daniele Forni, known as "The Data Shaman," is not your average executive coach. He helps senior professionals leverage their unconventional traits into tangible ROI using rigorous science, AI tools, and strategic wit. As the founder of the SquirrelCoach platform, he champions the "Spiky Profile" concept, exceptional leaders are defined by their peaks. An alumnus of the University of Cambridge and a 6x author on leadership, neurodiversity, and meditation, Daniele previously spent 15 years driving technology and risk management as an Investment Banking Director across Europe and Asia.
