The conventional wisdom on moving up the corporate ladder often stresses the importance of gaining new skills or improving weaknesses. But in many cases, a more effective career strategy might be to focus on developing your main talents.
According to research by Gallup on more than 2 million workers over a 30-year period, those who prioritized their core strengths enjoyed greater success than those who tried to bring up their faults.
Stand Out With Your Strengths
London-based economist and business strategist Vaughan Evans calls this best-foot forward approach the "Madonna method" because the pop diva has maintained her stardom by doing what she does best: constantly reinventing herself to keep up with the zeitgeist.
"The ideal situation is if your strengths are those strengths needed by your organization, and you invest further in them -- then you're in a terrific position, and you're immune from layoffs," says Evans, author of "Backing U! A Business-Oriented Guide to Backing Your Passion and Achieving Career Success."
But given today's far-from-ideal economic climate, Evans recommends having several fallback strategies to ride out the bad times and get ready for a recovery.
The Lower-Cost Approach
Under this scenario, you reduce your "cost" to your employer by agreeing to a salary cut, accepting an unpaid furlough, or switching to a four-day week.
"It's the Southwest Airlines strategy -- you make yourself indispensable based on price," Evans says. "It can be a strategy for success, but it also can be a strategy for survival in hard times like now."
How to 'Sharpen Your Act'
If you find your skills don't match well with your current position or your employer's core business, your long-term goal should be to determine your true passions and find a job that suits them.
But in the near term's difficult market, Evans suggests addressing any weaknesses simply to hold onto your job until conditions improve. This might entail taking classes or getting specialized training.
"In today's world with 10 percent unemployed, you're not going to take a risk of going on the open job market," Evans says. "This could be a valuable strategy for survival."
The Hybrid Approach
Sometimes a new set of circumstances can dictate a temporary change in career strategy.
For example, you may have been cruising along in a marketing position that tapped your abilities as a writer and strategist. Then you get a promotion that adds one of your major weaknesses -- a lack of good public speaking skills -- to your job description. What to do?
"The rules of the game have changed, and you would be well-advised to sharpen your act" by getting some speech training, Evans says.
Passion Rules
Whatever strategy you adopt, each points to the need for every worker to find his or her passion -- and build a career around it.
"It's generally accepted that people whose job is actually their passion perform incomparably better than those who just do a job because it's a job," Evans says.
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