In my almost 30 years as a marketer in the A/E/C industry, I have seen principals, managers, supervisors and coaches develop exercises to work on an individual's weaknesses, forcing those people to spend inordinate amounts of time focusing on the area(s) where they are weakest.
I am convinced that this does little more than remind people of the ways they don't measure up.
If you take someone who is pretty weak in one area and improve their performance by 20%, have you made them strong? Or have you just made them less weak? And does your client care about this kind of improvement? I don't think so.
But suppose you take an area where the individual is already competent and give him/her the additional education and experience to turn that competence into a real strength. Then you have helped them grow into someone who has value to your clients and, therefore, who brings value to your firm (i.e. builds business) above and beyond just their capacity for billable hours.
Your client wants to know that your firm's best people (the "A" Team) will be on the project, that the strongest resumes are in your proposal, that your most expert staff members will be advising him/her and managing his/her projects.
So the focus really needs to be on identifying each individual's strengths, building those strengths further, and giving those strengths wide visibility through a variety of opportunities--in other words, promoting those strengths to your clients and to the technical and professional communities.
Hence all the current discussion about visible experts.
When your technical folks achieve name recognition within the local A/E/C community, you may have more teaming opportunities. Prime firms want you on their teams because your visible expert enhances the client's perception of a proposal team.
When your technical folks achieve name recognition in the broader business community, you may have suddenly be seen as having the technical "chops" to propose as a prime because your person's visibility enhances the owner's perception of your firm's capabilities.
How do you make your experts more visible? By helping them get their ideas to the eyes and ears of the people who promote and/or hire expertise. Your marketing staff can help.
Marketers can help identify the groups whose members need your expertise, the magazines those people read, the associations they belong to and the conferences they attend.
Then, your marketers can look for opportunities to get your experts writing for magazines those people read and speaking at conferences those people attend.
Your marketers might even parlay these successes into interviews with local newspaper business editors and business press--maybe even local TV stations. Ultimately, your experts will be called by reporters for quotes about related subjects, and the broader community will begin to see them as experts, too.
By the way, make sure there's a place in your firm's website to publish your experts' writings. In this day of self-publishing, if a local paper is not interested in a subject, you can still give your expert visibility by publishing his/her writing on your website, announcing it to the world, and making copies available. And if people have to provide their contact information to get the "free" article, that's even better.