Designing for your strengths
This Olympic medalist with an unconventional career path is proof you should always double down on your strengths
John Coyle is an Olympic medalist, sought after speaker, design thinking expert, and a best-selling author.
However, John’s success has been far from a linear path. After failing to qualify for the 1992 U.S. Olympic Speed Skating Team, he decided to quit, abandon what was considered best practice at the time, and instead train by himself in a completely different way. Instead of working to better manage his weaknesses, he focused on maximizing his strengths. This approach led John to a Silver Medal in the 1994 Olympic Games and an unofficial US and world record.
John recently joined Chuck Swoboda for an episode of Innovators on Tap where he discusses the necessity of designing for your strengths, his time spent working with Lance Armstrong and Jeff Skilling, the disgraced former CEO of Enron, and how to make the leap from manager to leader. Read John’s answers to the rapid fire questions below and then listen to the full interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Has your success come more from avoiding failure or embracing failure?
I think for me, success has been from leaning into failure but then understanding it. I don’t think you can have success without failure. I don’t think that’s possible.
[When] I was at Stanford, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I was taking math 202, which is Linear Algebra. I studied my hiney off and I still failed the midterm. I got a 13%. And I thought I was gonna feel terrible, because I knew I wasn’t gonna pass that class; I couldn’t be a mechanical engineer. And instead, I felt euphoric. Because I was like, ‘I can’t do that. I won’t do that. I don’t have to do that. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do something else, I now have choices.’
I kind of joke about it, but every time I’m facing down a bad thing, I’m like, oh, something good is coming around the corner. Something really good is about to happen.
If you’re going to pursue innovation, what’s more important: the brutal truths or psychological safety?
That’s a tough one. I will tell you a stat that I use all the time, which is 94% of companies say that innovation is essential to their future, but only 14% say they’re good at it. And then when asked what their barrier is, the number one answer by far is people and culture. If you read The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, safety is an essential component to a highly functioning work team. Now, safety doesn’t mean not taking risks, it means almost the opposite actually: it means that it’s okay to take risks and it’s okay to fail.
I’m dancing between your two dichotomies here because I think the big hard truths are essential. But if you don’t have a cultural safety net for people to to face those truths, or to wade into them and fail, then you’re not actually going to get anywhere. You can have all the great ideas in the world and have all the hard truths in the world, and if your team is too terrified to tread into the water, then nothing will change.
When confronted with a problem, are you more likely to think outside the box, build a better box, or set the box on fire?
You know, I have a friend who gave me a new term for my book, and I hadn’t heard it before. So you’ve got convergent thinkers, you’ve got divergent thinkers, and then she hasn’t she has a new term I love which is ‘emergent thinkers.’
And these are the people that just don’t even know the box exists, right? I’m not one of those. I have a couple of people I rely on that are. And so I’m more of an out of the box thinker, but I adore emergent thinkers. So I collect them. I have at least access to emergent thinking to burn the box and find a whole new way of thinking about stuff.
When you’re evaluating talent, what do you believe is most important to someone’s future success?
Resourcefulness. You know — just figure it out. No rules. No boundaries. Figure out a new way to solve an old problem and come back to me with your answers. That’s the kind of talent that works with the kind of teams that I built. For an innovative team, that was what was a key sign of talent for me.
Is your personal decision bias to limit your downside or maximize your upside?
Always maximize upside.The hard part is, you don’t always know what your strengths are. And, you know, without just taking on new experiences and challenges, it’s hard to ascertain what what they can be.
The other thing that is true is every strength has a weakness and vice versa. The price of having a strength is you almost always have the associated weakness. If you’re a big picture strategists, you’re probably bad with details. If you’re a detail oriented person, you’re probably a perfectionist. If you’re calm under pressure, you’re probably emotionless. If you’re creative, you’re probably disorganized. This is the price of admission to having a superpower and you have to cultivate an environment that is tolerant of the downside of your strengths.
Check out the full interview, with additional insight from John, on Innovators on Tap, a podcast powered by Marquette University’s Innovation Alley and hosted by Chuck Swoboda. Available on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
