Design for Your Strengths
Paul Leinwand, coauthor of Strategy That Works,
introduces a counterintuitive lesson in how to achieve breakthrough performance
in your organization from Olympic medalist John K. Coyle.
In their efforts to compete, business strategists often forget a
basic principle: Build from your strengths. The most successful companies have
a clear, well-articulated view of what's important to them and their customers.
They understand that the way to win consistently is through what they do rather
than what they sell.
These companies also understand that “what they do” is unique to
them; they have their own capabilities and practices that no other company
could quite duplicate, even if it tried. In that sense, building from your
strengths is the most reliable way we have found to differentiate your company.
This advice is easy to state and difficult to follow — not just in
business, but in every aspect of human endeavor. Focusing on what you are great
at doing is intuitively compelling, but few companies drive their strategy this
way. It’s too easy to get caught up in chasing what others do — fixing the
inevitably long list of weaknesses in your company, or seeking out what’s new
in a world of change.
But when you understand what you’re great at, and design your
capabilities and strategy accordingly, you can define how you want to compete,
and shape your own future rather than waiting for others to do it for you. John
K. Coyle understands this. He has been through grueling challenges to his
competitive edge, both in his profession (as a design engineer and consultant)
and as an Olympic athlete (in speed skating). As you’ll see, he came out the
other side with new triumphs and a sharper understanding of the best way to
prepare to compete.
After
hearing Coyle tell his story at an Exchange
conference, a session of in-depth discussions of
business issues conducted by PwC, we asked him to adapt it for strategy+business.
—Paul Leinwand
As a senior at Stanford
University in 1989, I was passionately interested in mastering two
capabilities. The first was design thinking: an influential creative
problem-solving method, closely tied to my major in product design (and to the work of management theorist Herbert A.
Simon and the IDEOdesign methods, among others). Design
thinking involves a continuous cycle of innovation: understanding an issue by gathering
data about it, empathizing with the people involved, ideating new approaches,
prototyping one or two of them, and then returning to the understanding stage.
Practitioners continually revisit and reframe challenges to ensure that they
are solving the most relevant problems.
The other capability I wanted to master was speed skating. I was
confident I could qualify for a near-term Olympic bid, for the 1992 Winter
games in Albertville, France. During my senior year at Stanford, while studying
full time and training myself — no coach, no training program, and very little
ice time — I had placed 12th in the world championships for short-track speed
skating. I expected that by joining the Olympic team full time, with all the
support that entailed, I would soon go from 12th to sixth to first.
Little did I know that my two passions would soon intersect in a
way that would teach me the essence of building on my strengths. I would
undergo a profoundly humbling experience, in which I would have to treat
immense challenges unemotionally, as opportunities to learn and reframe, and to
pursue solutions as a design thinker would, with intense passion and
unemotional curiosity at the same time.
Most of all, I would have to do the opposite of what others were
doing and what most experts were telling me to do. Instead of trying to
compensate for or fix my weaknesses, I would have to focus on my natural
strengths. This did not feel like the right thing to do at first, and bucking
the status quo is never easy, but I now believe it is the only way to truly
excel. And, I believe, this counterintuitive lesson is exactly what anyone
seeking to build a distinctive capability for a team or enterprise must learn.
I did not know this at the time. But through experiences such as
my training in Olympic speed skating, and in my coaching of and working with
others, I have come to recognize four key rules inherent in designing for your
strengths: (1) accept your weaknesses; (2) recognize your specific strengths;
(3) solve the right problem (which is not necessarily the problem other people
have diagnosed for you); (4) double down on your strengths by accentuating the
things that make you great. I spent years focused on improving my weaknesses,
and in the end that made me a poorer performer. There is far more leverage in
designing for your strengths.
1. Accept Your Weaknesses
After graduation, I moved to Colorado Springs to join the U.S.
Olympic speed skating team, living and training at the Olympic Training Center.
I was full of hope and confidence, excited to work with the best coaches in the
world. Upon arrival, I was put through a series of tests known as the SATs of
sports. These included a “maximal volume of oxygen” (VO2 max) test, which is
said to be the most predictive measure of an athlete’s capability in speed
skating. It is an aerobic torture test. You ride a stationary bike and, while
you are breathing through a tube, the speed and resistance are ratcheted up
until you feel like you are going to die. During my session, I put everything I
had into the pedals until I collapsed. I was proud of my effort until I received
my results: I had the lowest measured VO2 of the entire team, by a large
margin. I had lasted barely 13 minutes. Later that morning, a 17-year-old Lance
Armstrong lasted twice as long. According to the prevailing knowledge about the
test and the sport, this meant I didn’t really have a shot at being a great
speed skater. The current state of knowledge was wrong, of course, but I didn’t
know that yet.
All of us — individuals, teams, and organizations — have
weaknesses. These are not skill gaps; those can be corrected with learning.
Weaknesses are inherent deficiencies of talent or capability that do not change
even after aggressive efforts to improve them. Pride and our ingrained work
ethic may cause us to deny our weaknesses, but acceptance is the first step
toward designing for strength.
Neither the coaches nor I wanted to accept the results of the
test. But we had to, especially after I took a second test, the Wingate or max
power test, two days later. On a stationary bike, you pedal as fast as you can
for 30 seconds against heavy resistance, while the device tracks your power
output. To my surprise, the Wingate results were even more catastrophic: I
passed out cold after 18 seconds, falling off the bike and failing to finish.
Again, I had the lowest score on the team for average power output, but the
data was interesting in one critical respect. For the first 15 seconds, I had
an advantage. When analyzed second by second, the data showed that I had in
effect a small thermonuclear reactor in each quadriceps. At its peak, five
seconds after the start, my anaerobic output registered 1,740 watts per
kilogram, the highest peak power of the team by far. (Anaerobic activity uses
no oxygen and thus does not affect the cardiovascular system, but it increases
muscular strength.)
Unfortunately, given that the shortest event in speed skating took
at least 40 seconds, this strength didn’t seem particularly useful. The
coaches, after some debate, decided to try to “fix” me as an athlete by
focusing on my weaknesses.
“John, you will train harder and longer than anyone on the team to
strengthen your aerobic capacity,” said one of them. “While everyone else does
jumps and squats, you’ll be doing 100-mile bike rides and 15-mile endurance
runs. In two years, we’ll have you strong enough for the next Olympic Games.”
In making this decision,
the Olympic team was “benchmarking” me — a practice as common in sports as it
is in business. The best-in-class standard in this case was five-time Olympic gold medalist
Eric Heiden. If I wanted to win, they
believed, I would have to train like Eric. They said this with conviction and
compassion; they wanted only the best for me. Sadly, they skipped the step that
design thinkers call empathy. In retrospect, I see that all of us were ignoring
the second rule, below.
2. Recognize Your Specific Strengths
Weaknesses tend to be
universal and broad. I know this personally; I am essentially terrible at all hand–eye
coordination sports or any event lasting more than a couple of minutes. But
strengths are often extraordinarily specific. My own strength was a rare gift:
1,740 watts of anaerobic power in short-term bursts. It was like having a
superpower — but it wasn’t clear, in those training years, exactly what to do
with it.
From my earliest days I had
been considered fast. Eventually it became clear I was good only at short
events, so I became known as a sprinter. But I was not good at all short
events, only certain events with an element of leverage or power. I still
hadn’t learned enough about my singular superpower to describe it as precisely
as I can today. I am fast, as a sprinter, in events requiring repeated bursts
of power against resistance, with a short rest, all while balancing and
traveling at high speeds, through a pack of people moving dangerously fast and
passing them at the last possible second to win. Only a few sports fit that
description. They include short-track speed skating and velodrome cycling, the
only two sports in which I have competed at the world championship level.
As an individual, or as an enterprise, knowing the specific nature
of your strengths is incredibly important. Perhaps, as an individual, you are a
good communicator. But can you be more specific? For example, are you best at
articulating simple concepts underlying complex topics? As a narrator of
emotionally powerful stories? Or at analyzing facts and data? Are you better
with big audiences? Medium-sized audiences? Small groups? Videos? Visuals? Or
words? Are you better as a facilitator or one on one? Are you a coach? A
challenger? A comedian? Or perhaps a listener? All of these are implicit in the
catch-all term “good communicator,” but if you don’t know your specific superpower,
you can’t leverage it to full advantage.
Because I didn’t yet understand this, I worked relentlessly for
the next two years on fixing my weaknesses. I spent hours every day focused on
everything I wasn’t good at. This had a couple of unintended consequences.
First, I went from being the 12th-ranked speed skater in the world to being
ranked 34th the following year. Second, despite all my effort, my VO2 max score
failed to improve at all, remaining steady at 52. Not only did this
weakness-focused approach fail to improve what I was bad at, it also destroyed
the only thing I was good at. During that two-year training period in Colorado
Springs, my peak power waned, from 1,740 watts to 1,250 watts. I didn’t even
come close to making the U.S. Olympic team for Albertville. I skated slower at
the Olympic Team Trials than I had in my very first national team trials nearly
10 years prior, when I was only 13.
Worst of all, I slowly dissolved as a human being. Over those two
years I almost stopped talking. All I did was train, eat, sleep; train, eat,
sleep. When you use all your willpower just to show up every day, it saps the
energy for anything else. I began to feel like the people who, as Henry David
Thoreau put it, “lead lives of quiet desperation.” I was a failure. I was
terrible. I was ready to quit.
The coaches failed to show any empathy for my strengths and
weaknesses, but to their credit, they did not give up on me. They kept up their
refrain, “Keep at it! You’re going to break through! Just keep going, you can’t
quit now!”
But it didn’t make sense. I started to step back, in my own mind,
and wonder: Why was this happening? I used to be good; why was I declining? How
many more years would I have to do this until I broke through? And at what
cost?
Disheartened, I began to withdraw from the established training
regimen. For the next two years I continued to live with the team, but rebelled
against their weakness-centered training approach. By adjusting my workouts to
better suit my strengths, I mitigated the damages enough to compete in the 1994
Winter Games at Lillehammer, Norway. Although I was not strong enough to medal
in the individual races, I was able to bring home a silver medal from the
5,000-meter relay. During that period, I began to accept the fact that I didn’t
fit the mold of a champion like Eric Heiden and that I could never be a strong
aerobic athlete. But I didn’t need to be one to succeed. Only when I realized
that, and began to change my life accordingly, could I move forward.
3. Solve the Right Problem
A moment of magic accompanies the willingness to quit. It involves
gaining a better perspective. Prior to this moment, it is almost impossible to
be objective about your challenges. Too many emotions and pressures intrude.
But now, you can evaluate your options more dispassionately, and — in the
language of design thinking — learn to ask better questions. The problem you
are trying to solve may not be the right one to address.
In my case, fixing my weaknesses was the wrong problem to solve. I
have since come to think that the same is true for many other people and
organizations seeking breakthrough performance. Instead of solving for “how do
I fix my weaknesses?” I asked myself, “how can I design for my unique
strengths?”
Back when I was growing up in Detroit, I had a cycling coach named
Mike Walden. He was a remarkable man; despite being only a club-level coach for
the local Wolverine Sports Club, he would ultimately mentor more than 100
national champions, 10 world champions, eight Olympians, and five Olympic
medalists (I was one of the last group). In 1990, just two years before I went
to Colorado Springs, Walden had been inducted into the U.S. Bicycling Hall of
Fame.
Walden spoke in short,
sharp barks: pithy phrases, each with a specific and deep meaning,
custom-tailored for each person’s strengths. That was how he became one of the
greatest coaches of all time. His repeated advice to me was, “Coyle! You gotta
finish it at the line!” I can remember as an 11-year-old thinking, “Well, duh,
where else am I going to finish it?” But what he really meant was, “Coyle, you
have a weak aerobic motor, but a great anaerobic engine. You need to time your
sprint to win by a tiny margin right at the line. Go too early, and
you’ll blow up because you have a weak aerobic capacity.” Over the years,
following this advice and perfecting my skill, I had won hundreds of races by
the smallest of margins.
Walden was also known for his signature broadcast, shouted dozens
of times each practice: “Race your strengths! Race your strengths!” Even after
two years of focusing on my weaknesses, I could still hear Walden’s voice in my
head, and after the Lillehammer games, I finally decided to follow his advice.
That meant quitting the team, but not the sport — and training on my own, doing
the opposite of what I had been told for the previous two years.
I used design thinking to
reframe the challenge. Instead of “How do I fix my aerobic weakness?” I asked
myself, “How can I leverage my anaerobic strength?” But that wasn’t specific
enough. So I zeroed in on the advantage my strengths might provide. I asked,
“How can I use my strengths to get to the finish line in less time?”
This was still not specific enough. Eventually, by accepting my aerobic
weaknesses, I realized that I couldn’t skate faster and farther. So
I asked myself: “What if I can simply go less far?” I figured that by
traveling 15 percent less far than my opponents, I could skate 14 percent
slower and still win.
In short-track skating, the physics are striking. The track has
tight corners with a 25-meter radius. A world-class speed skater enters a
corner at 31 miles an hour, and, exactly two seconds later, exits at 31 miles
an hour going the opposite direction. The equivalent acceleration is zero to 62
mph in two seconds, which even most automobiles cannot match. This generates a
gravitational force of 2.7 gs — almost as strong as a space shuttle liftoff.
During a race, this happens every 4.5 seconds. For a 170-pound skater like me,
racing each corner is like doing a 500-pound, one-legged squat from deeper than
90 degrees, while leaning over at 68 degrees, while traveling 31 miles an hour
on an 18-inch-long, one-millimeter-wide blade, on ice, headed directly at a
wall.
The conventional best practices of the sport were designed to help
speed skaters cope with these realities. To diminish the g-forces and to reduce
the likelihood of crashing, everyone skated a wider track. This expanded the
radius of the turn from 25 to more than 28 meters, reducing the g-forces from
2.7 to maybe 2.3 or 2.4. But it also increased the track length from 110 to as
much as 125 meters, nearly 15 percent farther than strictly necessary.
I decided to try a new
technique: going a shorter distance. I had always loved “pivoting,” or diving
directly into a corner, which is necessary sometimes to pass another skater.
What if I pivoted into every corner? It would reduce
my distance. It would also be very difficult and super-dangerous. Many people
crash during the dive-in move. But it could be perfected with training, and I
had the one natural strength required: the ability to provide a huge surge of
power for a few seconds with a short rest, over and over again. Which brings me
to my fourth rule.
4. Double Down on Your Strengths
Strengths and weaknesses are often mirrors of each other. My
aerobic weakness had, as its inverse, a superstrength of anaerobic power.
Indeed, these two attributes often go hand in hand. Finally, I had figured out
how to put this to use.
After the Lillehammer Olympics, I dropped out of the training
camp. But I was more dedicated than ever to skating. I moved to Milwaukee, and
without the financial or logistical support of the Olympic Committee, began a
regimen of work, business school, and self-guided athletic training. I woke up
every day at 6 a.m. and went to the rink. There I put on my pads and blocks and
skated from 7 until 9:30. Then I changed into a suit for my part-time job as an
engineer. At 3 p.m., I left work in Milwaukee and drove to the Kellogg Business
School at Northwestern, a two-hour drive. I had class from 6 to 9 p.m., usually
arrived home at 11, and lifted weights until midnight. I did that every day for
two and a half years.
Many people assume that being an Olympic athlete requires a lot of
discipline. But in my experience, the discipline is only physical. Someone is
there to make sure you get up, start warmups, practice, and eat right. It’s
like being in the military. Building capabilities on your own, without someone
else’s playbook, takes much more mental discipline.
One event made it easier for me, psychologically. A few months
after starting this regimen, I visited the Olympic Training Center in Lake
Placid, N.Y. I was still nominally on the team, and I thought this would be a
welcome reunion. But at the first ice session, the coach pulled me aside. “I’m
very sorry, John,” he said, “but the skaters and coaches have voted. You can’t
skate with the team. You have to go home.” I was furious beyond belief, but it
was one of the best things that could have happened. Solitary training was
difficult, but after that event, each morning I got up with vigor, flipped a
single-finger salute to Lake Placid, and got to work. It also showed me how
unpopular you can be if you make a decision to buck conventional wisdom.
The first real test of my new approach came about a year after I
started, when I went to the 1995 U.S. World Team trials for a three-day
national competition. I was nervous because I didn’t want to be humiliated. I
arrived a week ahead of the event and then promptly got a severe case of the
flu, which meant I couldn’t train much for most of that week. On the first day
of the trials, the preliminary event was not my forte. It was a 1,000-meter
time trial, which goes on for about a minute and 40 seconds. The top 16 racers
qualify, and the other 80 competitors go home. I was sure I would be thoroughly
embarrassed: the rebel, the wild child, training without a team. Despite how
nervous and sick I felt, I showed up on the line.
This race is run pursuit-style: Two skaters start on opposite
sides of the rink, chasing each other around the loop. One sign that you’re
falling behind is when your “pair skater” catches up and skates past you. My
pair was a strong skater who had been second in the Olympic trials the year
before. As we lined up, I focused my attention on my approach: skating directly
at the blocks and diving in. If my pair didn’t catch me, I thought I might have
a shot at being in the top 16, which would allow me to skate the remainder of the
competition.
After the starting gun, I entered a dreamlike flow state. I dove
into each turn, just millimeters from each block, ice flicking up off my
pivoting blades. I coasted the straightaways and felt the g-forces as I surged
through tight corners. Time went into slow motion, and I didn’t feel like I was
going fast.
After a couple of laps, I noticed something strange. I was
catching my pair skater fairly quickly. Because of the flu, I knew I wasn’t at
my best, so I thought he must be really out of shape. Then I forgot about him,
resuming the intense focus on skating “my” track. At my fourth lap, the judges
made him swing wide and I passed him. Around the sixth lap, I noticed that the
rink was very quiet. Normally, these competitions are noisy; there are 400
people in a small space, with coaches yelling, parents cheering, athletes
sharpening skates, and kids running around. Not this time. I allowed my
awareness to expand and noticed that there were faces pressed against the
glass. I looked at the lap times, and the lap card said “.2”. I didn’t know if
that was 10.2 or 9.2 seconds per lap. In speed skating, the margins are tiny;
the difference between first and second place is often measured in hundredths
of a second. I knew that nobody could skate as fast as 9.2 — it was faster than
the world record — and 10.2 was way too slow. So I just ignored the numbers and
kept skating.
After nine laps, I finished the race. My coach from the Olympic
team, one of those who had rejected me at Lake Placid, was there. He jumped out
on the ice with his stopwatch held high and stood directly in my path. I was
traveling at 30 mph directly at him, so I tried to dash around him, but he
stayed in my way so I had to skid to a stop. He looked angry. He said, “Coyle,
what the hell have you been doing!?”
I was about to burst into tears. I had been voted off the island;
I had skated alone for a year; I was trying a totally new technique; and I was
sick as a dog. All my fears of humiliation boiled over. But I forced my spine
to stiffen and said, with false bravado, “I…I have been sick!”
His eyes met mine. He smiled. “No,” he said, “you don’t
understand. You just broke the U.S. record by five full seconds.” I had in fact
skated 9.2 seconds per lap. “You skated faster than the world record.”
I was speechless. In fact, I didn’t believe it. I was immediately
convinced I had skated a lap too short and my failure would quickly be rooted
out. So I calmly exited the ice and reviewed the tape on the video camera,
counting laps. Only then did I realize the scale of the breakthrough.
The best part was the cause. I hadn’t skated any faster. I had no
new technology. I didn’t invest in a new wind tunnel–tested skinsuit or new
skates or blades. I wasn’t doping or taking supplements. I was still the same
me. I had simply skated less far, and in so doing, I had built on my strengths
instead of trying to fix my weaknesses. This type of design thinking, combined
with my natural anaerobic power, was my distinctive capability.
During the next two days of that competition, I broke every U.S.
record. Later that year, I went on to set the fastest time in the world in the
500 meters at the world championships.
On Building Capabilities
After that event, I continued my own form of training. I had high
hopes of bringing home a gold medal at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano,
Japan. But in 1997, I was persuaded to return to the Olympic Training Center to
train with the team once again. The coaches, still stuck in their mental model
of an aerobic athlete, immediately put me on their old benchmarked approach,
and I went along with them. It’s not unlike a business that innovates a bold
new way of doing business, but after a period of success finds itself slipping
back into familiar patterns, just because it doesn’t have full confidence in
its new approach. But slipping back had devastating effects for me. Not only
did I not bring home a medal in 1998; I failed again to make the team. I was
beyond humiliated and embarrassed. In my mind I had disappointed everyone who
had believed in or invested in me. After the last race at the Olympic trials in
Lake Placid, I got in my car and drove 45 hours straight to Phoenix, Ariz., to
leave the cold behind and start a whole new life.
Leaving skating was like going through a difficult divorce.
Between 1997 and 2006, I had nothing to do with the sport. I gave my silver
medal to my parents and cut off all communications with my skating friends. I
didn’t follow the results or watch skating on TV. I joined a management
consulting firm called Diamond Technology and focused on design thinking and
related work. I married and started a family. With time, the pain and
disappointment faded.
Then, in 2006, I received a phone call from NBC asking me to be
the speed skating analyst for the Olympics coverage in Torino, Italy. I
couldn’t say no, and shortly thereafter I found myself thrust back in the
sport, interviewing the parents, skaters, and coaches to gather stories to feed
to the commentators.
Something happened during that Olympics that changed my life
forever. I was at dinner with the skaters and their parents when one of the
parents pulled me aside to a quiet corner of the restaurant. “John, I have
something important to tell you.” He seemed serious, even nervous. “I just want
you to know that we wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for something you
did.…” He trailed off.
I was confused. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You won’t remember, but 12 years ago you brought your silver
medal to a little reception in Bay City, Michigan. You put it around my son
Alex’s neck. He was 11 years old at the time, and the next day he joined the
Bay City Speedskating Club.” His eyes welled up. “And tomorrow, Alex is skating
for a gold medal.”
This changed everything. I experienced a sudden release from years
of feeling like a failure. I got involved again, started coaching the local
clubs, got my daughter started in speed skating, and started announcing
competitions and world cup events. I also, for the first time, began talking
about my experiences, sharing my stories.
My biggest failure, just like my biggest weakness, has now become
a source of success. As I share my story, I connect on a human level with
people around the world. People everywhere relate to the narrative of fighting
a system and forging a new path — not for the sake of bucking the status quo,
but because everyone needs to find his or her own distinctive path to success.
It is not easy to know your strengths, and it is even more difficult to put
them to use and build on them. It may require you to look outside standard
approaches to getting things done. But if you can step back, accept your
weaknesses, recognize your specific strengths, solve the right problems, and
design your own way of winning, you too might find your life has changed. This
way of going through life is not for everyone, perhaps. But neither is the
struggle many of us put ourselves through — the struggle against our own innate
capabilities.
by John K.
Coyle
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