People are more productive when they work with their strengths, instead of trying to address their weaknesses. Read https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/... for more on that.

In the meantime highly productive people from Thomas Jefferson to Richard Feynman appear to have had ADHD. Do you really think that this app would have made a positive difference in their lives?

For a lot of management, "collaboration" means, "You do what I want and you get paid for it." And not, "We'll work together to figure out how to make this work for both of us."

https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/... is a great book on how effective managers actually take their employee's strengths and weaknesses into account, and lean on their employee's strengths. (Trying to fix them is probably a lost cause.)

Wow. While I do not have experience with management courses, and seminars, one book I read about management (https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/...) talks about exactly this scenario. I am surprised to hear about it in the wild.

For a book-length exposition on this theme, read https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/....

The book didn't intend to be a book-length exposition. But the common insight that they found among good managers is that people come lop-sided. They have strengths and weaknesses that they aren't going to change. When you try to make people work on their weaknesses, you're virtually guaranteed to fail and make them miserable in the process. But instead figure out how to tailor their jobs to their talents and they will outperform. If you can pair up people with complementary talents, the combination will do much better than either person could on their own.

The book then includes example after example from industry after industry. For everything from housekeeping in a hotel to being a bartender to data entry. For each of these jobs, there are people whose talents will make them ridiculously better at it.

(Side note. That is the only management book that I recommend to non-managers.)

There are solutions to this problem.

My favorite was outlined in https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/... - namely treat different kinds of jobs as different skillsets and take away the perverse incentive to switch to one you might not be qualified for. Specifically, moving from being an individual contributor to a manager should come with an immediate pay cut. (With opportunities for a pay raise down the road if you prove competent.) And there should be a promotion track for individual contributors. Furthermore, most managers should manage someone who is higher paid than themselves.

When the perverse incentive is taken away, people are more likely to switch jobs because they think that they will be good at the new job, and not because they want to be important, well paid, or whatever.

But this does require a mindset from managers that they are in charge, but not necessarily more important. Which is a cultural shift that is easier in some organizations than others.

This does not disagree with the point. I've encountered some of the research that they are referring to in http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0.... What Gallup has done is developed their own methodology to identify who will be effective managers, and their claim is that the managers that they identify as effective have a huge impact on performance. But their identification has a fairly low correlation with what most in the organization perceive as who is effective.

If you re-read the blog keeping what I just said in mind, you will see that it fits. And you will further see that your point is in complete agreement - the people who are perceived as having good management potential have a low correlation with actual performance.

The blog points out that this happens at the bottom level because people who are good at non-management tasks get promoted to management and may or may not be a fit. But as you go up the latter you find that a lot of what tends to get rewarded is visible success. Which gives an unfair edge to self-promoting narcissists who manage to make their occasional successes more visible than they should be. The result being that perception and reality tend to diverge.

There was a book in the late 1990's, "First Break All the Rules: What the world's greatest managers do differently" which was the write-up of a Gallup study about manager effectiveness. One of its conclusions is the point made in this article almost verbatim, that people leave their managers not their jobs or companies. One of the most powerful sections for the book for me was the opening chapter where they explain their assessment methodology. They compiled it down to a catalog of 12 questions and they found that if these questions were answered positively it correlated with high employee performance, good financial results, good retention, etc. The rest of the book dives into more detail on the reasons for this, one being that each employee's talent is different and managers should try to align talents with business need, focusing on employee strengths rather than weaknesses.

Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0...

It is good to see this discussed, but the principle is not news. In http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0... the point is made that average managers try to bring up their bottom performers, while the best managers long ago concluded that you get more mileage out of investing energy in the top ones.

Of course the world is full of average people. They have to wind up somewhere. And organizations full of average people are never going to be able to take the advice to work the superstars.

I'll believe that the slogan invest in your best has been internalized by our society when we devote serious resources to making sure that people with IQs in the top 1% stop dropping out of school faster than people with median IQs do. Anyone care to give me odds on this happening in the next 20 years? I'll take the "No" side.