You… Meet You. Knowing Yourself – The First Leadership Principle
In my last post, I opened the conversation about the “original” leadership principles. Number one on the list is know yourself and seek self improvement. Just by virtue of the fact that you’re actively reading this blog, you have clearly taken the first step in that direction (at least I hope you’re here for self improvement and not just irreverent and witty banter).
But what’s this principle really about? Knowing yourself. It’s about taking a hard look in the mirror and assessing yourself warts and all. We all have our deficiencies. The difference between the Average Joe/Josephine and a solid leader is the solid leader is honest (sometimes painfully so) in their assessment of self. They first can admit they have weaknesses and they actively move toward fixing them or mitigating their deleterious effects (Yay! It’s been a while since I’ve been able to use “deleterious” in a sentence. Now THAT’S a fun word!).
The real challenge here is summoning up the courage to know yourself. There are a few ways you can get started pretty quickly though.
Recognize It’s Not You – It’s Your Behaviors
One reason it’s so hard to undertake this exercise is no one wants to feel bad about themselves. Examining “defects” is as appealing as realizing you have a zit on picture day. We all do stupid things (myself included) – that doesn’t mean WE are stupid. Only our actions are stupid (okay, I’ll admit – some of us ARE stupid but fixing that issue is beyond the scope of this blog).
My suggestion: separate the behavior from the person. This is about the way you act and show up (or fail to show up) as a leader. Go through old progress reviews and look for behavioral trends. Write the categories down and list incidents where things didn’t go well and where they did go well under each category.
You’ll start to see trends emerge from the events you list. Maybe you don’t listen enough. Or you’re overbearing. Or indecisive (or maybe you’re not. Then again, maybe you are. Or not. Or you are…).
Once you’ve identified behavioral trends (good and bad), think about ways that you can recognize such patterns emerging in your behavior and how you’ll either mitigate an issue before it starts or put yourself in positions where you can leverage those strengths you identify. The thing is, if you make it about the behavior versus being about you as a person it’s much easier to be objective and not take “failures” or shortcomings personally. Going through this exercise will get you well on the way toward knowing yourself.
Seeking Self-Improvement
Great leaders fix problems, especially problems within themselves. The first part of this introspective exercise simply makes you aware of your challenges. The difference maker here is if and how you go about improving yourself.
Make a list of the behaviors you want to change. Seek out others who are good at them and ask them what they do differently. Ask them to coach you (and it might even be folks who work on your team who you ask for this support – after all, they see you every day). Establish progress points and goals along the way so you can measure your improvement.
I know this is hard to do because it requires you to admit to others that you’re not good at everything. Want to be a great leader? Then get over it.
At one point a long time ago I had a particularly bad time during a consulting engagement. I knew I stunk up the place and my progress review was absolutely an accurate assessment of that performance. The partner who had to deliver the review was very apprehensive about doing so because they weren’t sure what my reaction would be to the feedback.
My response: “Okay. I get it. Now what?”
“Huh? You’re not upset?” was her response.
“Sure I’m upset but getting bent over it does me no good. The review is accurate. I have challenges. How are you going to work with me to get better at the things I’m not doing well at?” From that point forward, the conversation was extremely productive. She worked with me for several months and created opportunities for me to work on the rough spots as well as to demonstrate they had been smoothed out.
The critical word in this part of the exercise is “seek.” You have to look for the self-improvement here. It won’t just stroll along to assist you. Wanna be a better leader? Start by leading yourself through understanding, admission of weaknesses, and rigorous focus on improving your skills.
So how do you stay on top of “knowing yourself?” I’d love to hear your techniques and thoughts (yes, I’m fishing for comments here – please share as it makes us all better leaders in the long run).
– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC
Photo: 107-365 (Year 6) Mirror mirror … by George Redgrave
Great post Mike. Your point about leaders being able to face their faults is an important one. How can someone expect to lead others if he or she isn’t willing to acknowledge, and put effort into improving his or her own weaknesses?
In response to your question, I try to stay on top of knowing myself by doing the following three things:
1. Open up. I try to remain open-minded, and gladly accept constructive criticism from those that are strong where I’m weak.
2. Pay attention. I observe how others react/interact with me to determine if my words or actions are affecting others the way in which I intended.
3. Change! Life is change and if I’m not changing and improving a little each day, it means I’m going in the opposite, possibly deleterious (sorry, had to do it) direction.
4. Get uncomfortable. I learn a great deal about myself when I try things that make me uneasy, so I make it a point to consistently step outside of my comfort zone and challenge myself whenever the opportunity arises.
@Jenny – great thoughts. Thanks for offering the perspective. I love the point on getting uncomfortable. Feedback can be a painful thing and unless you’re brave enough to experience that discomfort, you’ll never get anywhere.
Your comment is one of the best I’ve seen on the blog. I’d better watch out or my readers might call for my head and ask that you replace me.
Everyone else – check out Jenny’s blog at blog.jennymccutcheon.com. She’s just getting started but I’m sure you can see the quality of her work.
Well I don’t have any great strategies. However, when I don’t get the results I’m looking for I try to take the attitude that there is something I could do better. Many people look to blame the situation or people when things don’t go their way. I try think that even if my impact was only 5% of the result, I still could have done something more with my 5% to make it happen.
Taking this attitude certainly keeps you humble, but I find most people would rather look elsewhere for blame then focusing on their actions/behaviors.
I have spent a lot of time thinking why that is. Sometimes I think this is because they are not confident enough to admit they can improve. As if merely admitting they have flaws would shatter their ego. . .
Mike, as you know Awareness is one of the four catalysts of Personal Brilliance. Self-awareness is the very start.
A CEO prospect once told me that he wanted to engage me because the last advisor he worked with constantly tried to get the CEO to explore his motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. He thought that was terrible. His feeling was that growth would come from the outside, he had already arrived.
Total lack of desire for self-awareness. Needless to say, we didn’t work together.
Seek!
Jim
@Marty: thanks for the thoughts. You’re ahead of so many folks by even accepting you COULD be part of the problem. Better yet you seek that accountability and do so in the spirit of improvement. Well done. If only more of us took this approach, we’d be a lot better off. Whether you know it or not, you have shared a great strategy. Thanks!
@Jim: I concur (duh). I’m glad you didn’t have the misfortune of working with that CEO – folks like him can make everyone around them miserable. Note to other readers: if you haven’t checked out Jim and Personal Brilliance, please do so. Good stuff. You’ll be seeing more of Jim in the near future.
Thank you for the great post!
One of the strategies for self-improvement could be to take advantage of something we all are good at: observing other people. Then, instead of criticizing, judging or pointing fingers at them, we could think of their qualities (good or bad) for a moment and reflect on ourselves. Am I like that?… What could I have done better? … Do others think of me this way? … How can I be as good?
Then, every interaction in life becomes a way to discover something new about ourselves to improve in a never-ending self-improvement process.
Leading requires difficult choices and decisions to be made every day and I have always found that when I am facing tough times, my values and principles are my guiding light. Things will go wrong – and there will be many occasions when you will not agree with colleagues on the best way forward. That is without doubt. What matters is how you behave when dealing with these issues – and this is when your values and principles come into play. Work through the problems and issues with integrity, respect, honesty and openness and you can hope to come out of it with your dignity and self-respect intact.