As always, I returned home from this year's Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) conference with, in addition to very sore feet, more information than is possible to process in a short few days in a different time zone. So you can expect to see FiercePracticeManagement stories related to conference presentations and impressions continue to unfold during the next few weeks.

Today, I want to share with you the main crux of Marcus Buckingham's general session entitled, "What the world's best managers do differently." In a nutshell, according to Buckingham, great managers focus on their team members' strengths rather than harping on their weaknesses. As a person with some very distinct talents and shortcomings, this idea quickly got my attention.

The one concept the session aimed to drive home was this: You are your most productive, creative, innovative, authentic, resilient, effective, and even attractive when you are utilizing your strengths. Although the idea makes intuitive sense to most people, a preconference poll showed that 45 percent of attendees who answered the survey were apt to spend more time working to improve upon their weaknesses. This tendency, Buckingham said, occurs because we're "more fearful of our weaknesses than we are of honoring our strengths."

As a result, managers stunt their employees' growth by putting too much emphasis in their weaknesses (commonly referred to in performance reviews as "areas of opportunity"), he said. "They're not ‘areas of opportunity,'" he said. "They're areas of least opportunity. They're areas where you will grow the least, learn the least, be the least creative."

"You're grownups," he continued. "You can deal with the fact that we have weaknesses. You all have strengths, which are areas you should work on. You don't work on weaknesses; you neutralize and work around them."

Therefore, the best way to challenge someone is not to correct their flaws, but to push them to get even better at something they do well.

Think about how this idea could change the way you manage your office and how you promote people. If more managers used this line of thinking, we'd probably see a lot fewer excellent receptionists "promoted" to the back office, where lack of contact with the public left them doomed to fail.

But of course, weaknesses can't be ignored completely. Nonetheless, Buckingham advised that you should still use a person's strengths as a starting point to work through their weaknesses.

Application to physician communication

Though it didn't come up in the presentation, a good place to test this theory might be in the quest to improve physicians' interpersonal communication skills. Although a recent essay in The New York Times casts some doubt on the current buzz surrounding physician empathy, I'm personally a firm believer that bedside manner does make a difference in patient care and satisfaction.

Take my recent visit to my primary care physician for an annual checkup as an example. As is all-too common in practices, I was whisked from the waiting room into the exam area almost immediately, only to be left perched on the edge of the paper-lined table flipping through old issues of People for at least 30 minutes.

I've got to tell you, a warm handshake from my doctor when he finally did breeze into the room and his remembering a few details from our last visit a year ago went a long way toward my forgiving the inconvenience. I don't know if these gestures come naturally to this person or came from a class, but they make the visit a pleasant experience and also have a way of making me want to come through for him by following any instructions he may have for me.

Then take, on the other hand, a particularly cranky neurologist I went to see several years ago for what turned out to be a slipped disc (which resolved itself by the time I was finished riding a merry-go-round of specialist visits and unnecessary tests, but that's beside the point of this post). To say he was unfriendly would be an understatement. During our first meeting, he barely made eye contact. He barked orders at nurses and other staff; forget about "please" and "thank you."

But after a nerve conduction test (which was about as physically comfortable as this person made me feel emotionally) turned up uneventful, he started to probe into other reasons I might have been feeling numbness and tingling in my fingers in toes. "Have you been out to the countryside recently?," he asked. I, thrown off a bit by the English expression for "woods" and hearing this man utter a sentence longer than three words, returned only a puzzled look. Finally, he laughed. At me or with me, I'll never know. But we went on to discuss my risk factors for Lyme disease, and his demeanor kind of grew on me.

In more than one instance thereafter, I witnessed this doctor use his "charm" (read: whatever the complete opposite of charm would be) to efficiently and effectively advocate on my behalf. He did not make friends in the process, but he got me what I needed.

So if he had any strengths when it came to communication, it would be that he is direct. It's a starting point. For other physicians, that building block could be an ability to pick up on the subtlest of clinical clues. After all, the skills required to detect a heart murmur aren't technically that different from those needed to recognize when a patient might be holding back important information or a concern. Right?

To be honest, maybe it is optimistic to believe that the best way to surpass our weaknesses is by focusing on our strengths. Perhaps I was sold partly as a result of the humor Buckingham threw into his presentation or his English accent. But even the Gen X cynic in me thinks it can't hurt to give it a try. What about you? - Deb