Five Rules for Weakness

by Joe Baker - May 7, 2010

We talk about making connections. We talk about networking internally. We talk about your A contacts, your B contacts, your C contacts, and how to do all that. One thing we haven't done much of, is the interviewing piece.

What happens when somebody says, "Well, what are your weaknesses?" I landed, and I start on Monday. And one of the questions was, what are my weaknesses, or what's one weakness? And then I made a joke. And the guy says, "No. What's your weakness?"

My off the cuff answer was, "My wife thinks I work too hard." And he said, "That comes with the program."

It's a very important thing to do. So I'm going to try and walk through the Five Rules for Weakness.

You have to have one.

You can't say, I don't have one. Because you flunked. It just is. You can make a joke, but prepared to go on. "Superman died, and I'm his replacement", etc. You have to have one.

It needs to be socially acceptable.

Even if you have some peculiarity that I don't want to know about. If it's not germane to your job, or the job you're interviewing for, leave it in the car. Like, "It's really a weakness, but I have to have a Snickers bar at 9:00 every morning." That's great. It has to be germane to what you are there for.

So, one of the things you have to think about is, in the context of the job, and what they're looking for, how do you characterize that weakness? You have to characterize it so that the person interviewing you understands, and can connect in their mind with what they think they want from the job. If you're too soft... If they're expecting somebody firm to make decisions.

You may not know about this. But they may know that there's somebody in that organization that is a bad actor. And the previous two managers were not firm with him or her. And you may not know this. But if you walk across like, "You know, I'm kind of soft on doing performance reviews as a manager." you might as well say, "Thank you very much."

You know, it doesn't mean that you can't turn that from a weakness into something that you can do better.

You have to minimize the impact.

You can have a weakness, but you'll have to minimize it at the same time. And you have to get all this out, not in rapid fashion. But you have to say, "You know my weakness is that I'm soft. In the past, on a few occasions." I wouldn't use the word soft. I would say something that doesn't say soft. It might imply soft, but don't say soft.

Pick your words carefully, so that they understand that you have an idea about what you're issues are. What this issue is. And you're honest about it. You are dealing with it saying, it's not that big a deal, but you're aware of it. Like, "In the past, a couple of times in the last five years, I found out that I did not communicate effectively that this employee didn't get the message that I wanted to send."

There are different ways to say, that you are soft. What I'm doing about that, is that "I read this book." or "I've written an article and I published it on LinkedIn." or "My personal development plan includes working on these issues."

You have to say what you're doing about it.

You can't say you've read the book, if you haven't read the book. Because, if you're talking to somebody in HR, they might have read the book! It might be on the shelf over there. So you have to be prepared for this question. Everybody does, regardless of what job you're applying for. Individual contributor, manager, it doesn't matter. They might ask you this.

If you give them the body language that you're not prepared for the question, you don't get any grade for that. You don't get a good grade.

It has to be in the context of the job you're applying for.

If you're applying for a salesman and you're expected to entertain, and you swear like a sailor on a golf course, that's in the context. I wouldn't use that one since you're with customers. You got to figure out what you're going to do.

In my last interview I was asked this same question. What I said was, that I'm inherently an optimist about things. And when I first when into an organization, when I thought something would take... like a direct report of mine would say "Can you do X?" And I know I had to get permission from somebody to do it. I usually would say, "Come back in 30 days and we'll get started on it."

Well, what I found out in the organization I was belonging to, was it took a lot longer than 30 days to get something relatively simple done. So they would come back in 30 days, and I would say "I don't have an answer." And then they would look at me like, "Well, what are you doing for me?"

If I had been more open to the concept, "I'll try to get this done, but I don't know how long it's going to take." If I knew how to manage the expectations, I would have communicated better to the manager I was talking to.

But then what I said, "But what I'm doing about it, I try to make sure I try to understand what that manager's expectations are before I commit to what I think I can do. I also have to have an expectation that I know how the operation works."