Master the skill of leveraging strength to achieve success as a team

“I have already tried my best, why is it that I have not successfully achieved my goals?”. Overseeing a company, I often hear employees say this while feeling frustrated. Some of them felt that it failure had nothing to do with them not giving their all, rather it was due to god being unfair, being unlucky, not having a “rich dad” and many more different reasons. They are under the impression that when one has the above-mentioned things in their life, success is inevitable. What say you?

Everyone wishes to succeed yet feeling powerless to do so at the same time. Picture this scenario, I asked you to lift a rock that is twice your weight in the courtyard, all this time standing beside you and giving you encouragement by saying “You will be able to lift the rock up if you give your all!” However, the rock is simply too heavy, in the end, you have exhausted all your strength and still unable to lift it up. You might even start to complain, “This rock is just too heavy, I have already tried my best with my strength to lift it up!” My answer to you would be, “No, you still have not tried your best yet.” I guarantee that you would be scratching your head and wondering why I said that. The key point is, while you have pushed your own physical muscles to the max, you have forgotten to use the muscles in your brain, not to mention, finances and human resources as well. I had been standing beside you all the time, and yet sadly, not once did it cross your mind to ask me for help. Unfortunately, this is all too common in today’s society, most people are only focused only on “what I can do” and not think about leveraging the strength of others to achieve a win-win situation.

Many times we look at our own strength to determine whether we can achieve something or not. Is it true that you can only reach a goal by relying on one’s strength? Many times success is achieved when different parties being their personal strengths to the table. I wonder whose idea was it that you have to use your own strength to succeed? As we can see in many successful individuals, they didn’t succeed by their own, they did so by combining the different resources around them, we call this leveraging strength.

In Three Kingdoms, Zhuge Liang was an expert in leveraging on the strengths of others. One day Zhou Yu told Zhuge Liang : “I want you to make one hundred thousand arrows in three days!” Zhuge Liang confidently agreed to do so. Why did he agree to this impossible task? While it was impossible to make one hundred thousand arrows in three days, he could borrow them! If Zhuge Liang went up to Cao Cao and said to him: “Lend me one hundred thousand arrows to kill you.” You would think that Cao Cao would out of his mind if he agreed to do so. Yet, Cao Cao did lend Zhuge Liang one hundred thousand arrows, and he was not out of his mind. It happened one misty morning, Zhuge Liang sent out thousands of wooden boats full of scarecrows and headed to Cao Cao’s army camp. Cao Cao couldn’t see clearly through the midst and thought that the scarecrows were an army that was about to attack him. He said “Zhuge Liang, you really want to kill me, I will use my arrows to kill you first!” Cao Cao ordered his archers to aim at the boats and tens of thousands of arrows were fired at a time. These arrows got stuck onto the scarecrows on the boats. In no time, Zhuge Liang managed to borrow hundreds of thousands of arrows from Cao Cao.

Who said that you can only borrow strength from “my” friends, relatives, company, colleagues, superiors, suppliers or clients? Sometimes, your rivals can be someone whom you can borrow strength from. Once you breakout from the “me” mentality, you widen your horizon and your world gets bigger. Here’s a modern example about a famous library the British Library in England. There are many books in this library. Once they decided to relocate, however the cost of moving to the new place was estimated to be millions of dollars and they couldn’t afford it. How did they resolve it? Someone came up with a brilliant idea and told the curator. The next day the library posted on the bulletin: “From today onwards, all citizens can borrow 10 books from the library for free”. As a result many citizens rushed to borrow from the library. In a few days, all the books in the library were lent out. How did the citizens return the books? They were then informed of the new library address and returned the books to the new place. This was how the library leveraged on everyone’s strength to relocate.

Many people are limited by depending on their own strengths, yes, you might be able to achieve some goals and do some tasks well. However, if you want to achieve great success, trying your best is not enough, you must apply the wisdom of leveraging strengths. You will be surprise what great lengths of success you can achieve by leveraging strengths, it is usually goes further than you can imagine.