267: Turn Your Weaknesses Into Strengths with Pete Scahill

Pete Scahill, Senior Manager of the Run Efficient Consulting Agency, is driven by a passion for helping individuals, teams, and organizations transform weaknesses into strengths and achieve their full potential.

We discuss Pete’s Weaknesses to Strengths Framework, a framework designed to build trust, enhance self-confidence, and foster knowledge to unlock growth. He shares how this approach transforms challenges into opportunities, empowers teams to innovate, and drives sustainable success. He introduces the concept of “building boxes to think outside of,” a strategy that sparks creativity and scales organizational impact. He also highlights the importance of empathy, logic, and creativity in leadership, illustrating how these qualities help leaders inspire and guide their teams.

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Turn our Weaknesses Into Strengths with Pete Scahill

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Pete Scahill, Senior Manager of the Run Efficient Consulting Agency, which helps companies, non-profits and teams achieve peak performance. Pete, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Great to be here. Appreciate it.

Good to have you here and good to learn about your experiences and “Why” and framework. So let’s start with the “Why.” What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest in your business?

So my personal “Why” is because I like to see achievement and my personal achievement is the success of others. So I look at a company, I look at a team, I look at an individual and what can they achieve and how do they do it and helping them get to that level in their professional life. So that is my “Why.” I just love seeing success.

Awesome. So what do you do in your business to manifest that? How do you do that?

Multiple ways. Sometimes it just seems to be happenstance. I’ll be working with a project or a company, and I will see an individual that has great potential, and I’ll bring them up to a leadership level through coaching, utilizing multiple tools. Or I’ll be brought in saying, I have a team that’s really just not performing, but I know they’ve got the skills. I have to give them the confidence and the tools and what the end goal is. The biggest and most expensive phrase that anybody has ever said to me is, we’ve always done it this way, why don’t we just continue this way?

That can be frustrating when people say that then there is resistance, but they don’t want to change their ways. So you mentioned tools, confidence, knowledge. So let’s discuss then your framework, which I think you call it the Weaknesses to Strengths Framework. So tell me what that is and how do you take companies or individuals from weaknesses to strengths and how to apply that framework.

We’ve always done it this way. That right there seems to be a weakness that I’ve come across quite a bit. Or on an individual level, I’ve always done it this way. With technology and the world changing as quickly as it does, this is a great opportunity to not skill up in technology, but skill up in your personal life and in your work life. So if I see a weakness or a manager has told an individual that this is their weakness, they really need to boat up on it. I say it’s not your weakness, it’s your opportunity. It’s your opportunity for your strength. And we work with them, I work with them, and say, okay, your manager said that your weakness is that you do not have good time management. Well, you have time management.

So I work with them on how to be effective in time management, or I work with teams that are not delivering projects on time, whether it be Agile or Waterfall or anything like that, and I find out that individuals within the teams are resistant to change, so I work with them on change management. How are things going to change and how are they going to be better for the individuals, for the team, for the organization. And the biggest thing is what’s in it for them. That’s the biggest motivator. What’s in it for them. It’s not money. It’s not paid time off. It's speaking for themselves, saying, I did a great job. I did this and be able to say that with confidence. Share on X

That’s very interesting. Do you feel like the best way to move forward is to fix strengths or is it better to build on weaknesses? So there’s always this debate. What is your perspective?

My build, my perspective has been to enhance the strengths, but really build on the weaknesses to help enhance the strengths. And if you look at a typical SWOT analysis, big marketing terms or whatever you want to call it, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You take each one of those.

So they all work in conjunction with each other. So I look at all parts of an individual, of a team, of an organization holistically so that I can help build all different angles and building that strength out of that weakness or that opportunity identified.

That’s interesting. So I have also found that sometimes when a company or an individual meets a huge weakness or obstacle and if they figure out a way, maybe they are forced to figure out a way because it’s a matter of life or death. If they figure out a way to overcome it, maybe by developing a coping mechanism, then it becomes into a great strength. So a weakness actually turns into a strength. And from then on, that’s a unique quality or ability that few others can replicate because they have not gone through those fires that forced to develop this kind of strength.

Absolutely.

I just want to mention one example, which is kind of quite interesting, is the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad. He was a teenager on a distant farm in the middle of Sweden and there were no shops and he was very entrepreneurial. He wanted to buy and sell stuff and he started sending sales letters and explaining or selling pens to a sales letter and he became so good at that eventually the sales letter morphed into the IKEA catalog, which became the most widely published document in the world. 40 million copies printed in a calendar quarter. So, yeah, so that can be very powerful.

Oh, absolutely. And that’s a phenomenal example of building something from an opportunity or weakness into the ultimate strength. And now we see where IKEA is today. It’s in every city, it’s in every suburban. It’s a phenomenal way of looking at things. You look also at Walmart. Started out with one store and just went out huge. They know their market. They knew what their weaknesses were when they first started, and they built those into strengths. They also knew what their opportunities were. They also knew their threats, and they built up to the Walmart brand. Some people may have a different view on it, but it is true.

So, Pete, you talk about three pillars to this framework, tools, self-confidence and knowledge. So tell me about each of these. So what kind of tools do you have in mind and how do you apply tools?

So the first tool that I use in any situation is called the Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey. It is a well-known book, well-known framework for many years. But the trust in yourself, in your organization, in your team, in others, your family is the key to achieving that success. So not only just read the book, but we also do all the exercises. Then we go beyond the book and we utilize tools. Let’s say we’re an engineer and we see how the trust within your team builds and then you deliver quicker because you’re not second guessing yourself constantly. But we use a lot of psychology, a lot of psychodynamics, but it’s all based on that pillar of trust within yourself, trust with others, and trust in your abilities. That’s really the biggest tool. Also utilizing various management platforms, such as a project manager platform called Trello, to keep people dedicated and on task. So it’s a Kanban board. If that doesn’t work for you, we find different ways. We tailor it to the individual, to the organization, of what they need done and how to build that strength and get them back on track.

Okay, so you use certain tools and then you talk about self-confidence. You mentioned trust in others, trust in self. Isn’t self-confidence just trust in self?

Not really. The self-confidence is brought on by other people talking to you. So if you have a boss or a wife or a husband or a partner that says, oh, you’re horrible at cleaning the dishes. You have trust that you’re cleaning the dishes correctly, but that partner, that person is telling you you can’t clean a dish to save your life. Now you have no self-confidence in that cleaning a dish. So what we can do is we build out, this is how I clean dishes, use that communication with the partner, and I can clean a dish. Now take this to an organizational level. I’m self-confident that I can write code. I can write code in C-sharp that will create a phenomenal front-end to back-end middleware. My chief engineer says, it’s not working. You’re not doing it the way I’m doing it. Well, you create that communication with your manager or with your counterparts.

And I’m building in tests into my code. You could take this across every industry. I just finished a project with a health care organization and one of their biggest strengths was they were phenomenal therapists. One of their biggest weaknesses they had no idea how to manage. So I built that self-confidence. They had self-confidence. They could treat the worst mental conditions out there but they couldn’t run a business. So they were confident but I helped him regain that confidence and ultimately build that trust.

That’s interesting. So really self-confidence in your framework depends on how do you get other people reinforce what you’re doing or give you the support that you need to be really effective.

Yeah, everybody, their self-confidence is within, but also take external factors and bring some in that can bring it down, bring it up, or stabilize it. And we need to figure out ways for that individual, that team, whatever, to stabilize their self-confidence and believe in themselves, and then trust themselves.

Yeah, okay, that’s interesting. So the third leg of the stool is knowledge. So what do you mean by knowledge? I mean, obviously we all need knowledge, but how does knowledge interplay with the tools and the self-confidence?

So having a holistic view, let’s say I go into work, I’m a project manager, I go into work and it’s a project that I’ve done 1500 times, but it’s a new organization. So I build this project, but it doesn’t meet what the organization really needs. They need a project, but having this holistic point of view, not inherent, like not understanding the accounting software, that account, understanding the marketing software, but understanding how this pillar of the project will affect the whole organization or in your personal life, how this way of communicating will affect your whole organization with your family, with their partners, however, but it always comes up into your holistic being. So having that knowledge, not expert knowledge, your expert knowledge sits here, but having that knowledge out here so you can think outside of that box that they put you in.

So is this maybe another way to say it is the awareness of the context or your environment, situational awareness?

Yeah. Situational knowledge, situational awareness, and situational communication.

Now you mentioned something that I’m curious about. You said that creating a box that other people can think outside of. What do you mean by this exactly?

This is something that I coined a while back. And when I was a full-time employee at an organization and I was pigeonholed into a small box and I was told this is what you do, this is how you do it, and this is why you do it. Well, that’s not how I really thought about it. I thought about this opportunity as greater than that. So I actually worked with the executives of this organization to think outside of that box. We all hear and think outside that box. Okay, great. With Google and other organizations giving 20% of work time to innovation. Well, I thought, why don’t we use that 20% to build a box others can think outside of. You may not be a manager, but you may come up with a process or a way of doing something that will affect, let’s say 20 people. And so you built this box that others can now innovate out of. Instead of continuing in this box and innovate a little bit, you innovate, you build this box, now you innovate more, build another box, innovate more, and it’s across your whole existence.

So is it something to do with the idea of constraints stimulating progress or this is a different idea?

It is partly constraints hindering innovation. What this is not breaking out of those constraints because you do have to do your job, you have to do your life the way it is, but having the confidence as we had talked about and the trust in yourself to think outside of that box, build a box that others will see into and then build outside of that box and think outside of that box and hopefully build their own. It's great innovation and it actually stimulates organizations, teams, families, whatever, to move forward and constantly think outside of that box, build their new boxes, work in that box, keep going. Share on X

So Pete, give me an example of how that works. Give me an example of a box that was created and then people thought outside of it and created another box adjacent to the first box.

Absolutely. I worked with an organization back in 2020 and they were a on-site thing. Everybody had to be on site. It had been working this way for 30 years. And it was a payroll company, fantastic payroll company. Then COVID hit and they didn’t know what they were going to do. The CEO actually thought he’d have to close down because nobody was on site because you couldn’t have things going under the wires, which is fine. When he hired me to come in, I helped him think outside of that box. This was prior to everybody working from home. I set up the infrastructure with him and a couple other individuals to build this extensive network of people working from home like we all had to. But then he had 60,000 square feet of space of people not being in. He had conference rooms, he had desks, he had cubicles. Everybody’s working from home. And so we reinvented his physical space to rental space. And we took that rental space, kept 10,000 square feet of our space for him, for conference rooms and desks, we rented out the rest of the space to data center, to other organizations that were downsizing. So he had a doubt another revenue stream. But because we thought outside the box, we’d built this revenue stream box, which was renting out the space. He had expanded. He was able to expand his business during a contraction time. Not only that, once he was able to expand his business and think out of this new box, he built another box, which was expand his region. Now he was open to having sales and account management throughout the Northeast versus just Eastern Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. He has representatives and workers that go from New York City all the way to the Northern Vermont and parts of Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut. So there’s two boxes that we built, we thought outside of, we built the box, expanded on it, built another box, expanded on that.

That’s fascinating. It’s an interesting concept, the boxes, and how do you think outside of, especially you isolate whatever you have now and you force the question, okay, what can we do, which is completely different from what you’re doing using the assets that you got? And then you basically lease the space and then you expand it into different spaces using your skills that you may have developed leasing that space. That’s fascinating.

Yeah. And it’s still working to, we’re four years outside of this and he’s actually expanded his whole footprint and still works out of the 10,000 square feet of space.

Yeah, he’s working inside the box but he’s thinking outside the box.

And he’s built his other boxes. That’s wonderful.

Okay, that’s cool. So there’s another topic that you mentioned in a pre-interview and you said that there are these three ideas, logic, creativity, and empathy. So why are these important to you and how do they inform what you need to do as a coach or as a business leader?

This is another thing that I came up with having worked in mental health for quite a few years, but also healthcare in general, and former EMT myself, is you look at things and everybody says, we have two sides of our brain, logic and creative. It’s not true We have multiple sides of our brain. We think all the time, but if you want to break it down there are two sides, logic is the how do I get this done? And what do I need to get done? How do I get it done? Creative is how can I get this done faster? The empathy which pushes you forward, think about it as the back of your head, back of your brain, pushes you forward is to understand the people that you need to work with and understand their situations that they happen to be in. Understanding that this individual, whoever that happens to be, may be going through a very hard time in their life, so the logic doesn’t work with them, but a little bit of empathy helps, and then they move forward. Or an individual, a team over here is having a real roadblock issue, understanding and having empathy for that team, then coming up with creative and logical ways of moving that team forward, coaching that team, pushes them forward, because you understand all aspects of it. You understand their personality, what their thought process is, and how creative they are. It also unleashes people's creativity and abilities in that trust model. Share on X

Yeah, I love it. It’s kind of the, you mentioned Stephen Covey. I think it’s the Stephen Covey Jr. who wrote the Speed of Trust book and then his father who wrote the original one, The Seven Habits. He talks about listen first to understand, I think is one of the seven habits. And what I’m hearing is that really empathy is, okay, put yourself into their shoes, understand where they’re coming from, and then lean on their creativity and logic. Maybe it’s systems thinking to improve the situation. Is it kind of empowering these people to come up with their own solutions, or is it just you being creative for them?

No, it’s all empowering them. They have their own tool set in their mind, in their possession and working with them, how to utilize those tools they have in front of them to move forward and giving them the competence and help them feel that confidence inside themselves that utilizing this tool in a way that is not constantly used that way will actually move them forward. I jokingly call it MacGyver, MacGyvering management or MacGyvering leadership. Using what you have in front of you.

Okay, I’m missing the reference, but it’s going to be..

An old TV show.

Okay, there you go. That’s fine. Okay, so before we wrap up, I’d like to ask you, so as a coach, what do you think is the most important question that a coach has to ask themselves?

Are they coaching for the money or are they coaching for the results? And I’ve come across multiple coaches who are coaching for a good paycheck or multiple volumes, volume of people coming through, executive coaches, team coaches, things like that. Or are they coaching because they love what they do and seeing the success. Also, besides the money is, what is your motivator for coaching? Is it your success or is the young person’s success or the other team or organization’s success?

So depending on what your focus is, if it’s an internal focus saying, we just want to make as much money as possible, would you then coach people differently?

Absolutely. I’ve seen it with other coaches where I worked with an executive coach for a couple of years and this individual was big into I’m gonna charge X amount of dollars to teach somebody from this organization and 500 from this organization because they can afford it. And this was something that this person had learned for many years. And for this individual, it was all about the volume of individuals they get through, or teams, and didn’t really like doing the work, just happened to fall into it.

Yeah, I think some coaching models also force coaches to follow this kind of behavior, because if the coaching model is not robust enough and it’s not going to give enough tools or techniques for the coach to be able to help an individual or an organization for a long time, then they will be forced churning clients, so they will have to invest much of the time into plowing the pavement for new clients, which deprives them of the energy to serve their own clients more deeply.

Exactly. And I look at each engagement as I’m going to work with this individual, this team, this organization until they could run on their own and they don’t need me. My goal is to get fired from an organization, to work myself out of a job. I love it.

Okay. Well, that’s good. A good way to end. So if somebody would like to learn more, maybe connect with you, have some questions or wants to check out your offerings, where should they go and where can they find you?

So the best way to reach out to me is on LinkedIn. Pete Scahill on LinkedIn. I have a Run Efficient page. My website is currently under construction, but it will be runefficient.net. And feel free to reach out to me at petescahill@runefficient.net if you want to reach out to me and learn more about what I have to offer.

Awesome. Well, so Pete Scahill from the Run Efficient Consulting Agency. Definitely check him out and reach out to him on LinkedIn. Learn what he’s doing. Pete, thanks for coming and sharing your ideas on the show and frameworks. You’ve got some original ones. And if you’re listening to this and you enjoy it, then don’t forget to give us a review on Apple Podcast or follow us on YouTube and stay tuned because every Monday and Friday we come out with a new show. So thanks for coming, Pete, and thanks for listening.

Important Links:

• Pete’s LinkedIn 
• Run Efficient Consulting Agency 
• Test-drive the Summit OS® Toolkit: https://stevepreda.com/free-business-growth-tools-summit-os-toolkit/
• Management Blueprint® Podcast on Youtube https://bit.ly/MBPodcastPlaylistYT 
• Steve Preda’s books on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B08XPTF4ST/allbooks 
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• Relevant tools: Mindshare Terms™, Rock-Step Planner™, and Your Company “Why”