I recently had the privilege of talking with a bona fide genius, a rising star, and an increasingly important player in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He’s a sales leader who has pitched investors and who, with the help of a small sales team, has skyrocketed their business to dizzying heights.
As we discussed his meteoric success and the strategies that are continuing to help him succeed, he opened up to me and voiced a very private admission. Despite all his success – the notoriety, the venture funding he has found for his business – he feels like a failure.
It’s always a surprise when those who have “made it” turn out to be just as human as the rest of us, steeped in self-doubt and insecurity. In my disbelief, I pressed him, “why do you feel like a failure?”
He struggled to articulate his answer – spurred and sputtered sentences punctuated by wild gestures and flashes of emotion – but as we wrestled with the subject, a theme emerged. Visionary thinking and technical execution were easy. According to him, leading a team of people is the hard part.
His observations left a profound impression on me and, as I reflected honestly, realized that I too found that to be the case. The hardest part of leading a team is leading the people in it.
There are many reasons for this. Sometimes changing market conditions or disruptions in the industry make it difficult for a team to find its footing and stabilize. Maybe it’s that your team is entirely remote, and so the work gets done – with some measure of excellence – but the team never has the opportunity to gel and build the kind of trust required for bold innovation. As leaders, if we lack the self-awareness to lead ourselves effectively, we undermine all our attempts to lead others well.
Know thyself.
Hopefully, by the time you arrived in a leadership position, you possess some level of self-awareness. You will need that self-awareness to remain effective in your role, and frankly, the more, the better.
Self-awareness is an oddity in that we all have some sense of who we are as people. Ask anybody for a list of five things that tick them off any without pausing; they’ll easily ramble off a list of 10. Unless you are spending intentional time understanding who you are as a leader, you can’t grow in self-awareness.
The most effective leaders are the ones who develop the ability to articulate who they are to the people they lead. This includes characteristics and personality traits, situations that cause elation, and behaviors that you find bothersome. This is far from a comprehensive list, as self-awareness is the relentless discovery of how you show up moment by moment.
The impact of your self-awareness on those that you lead is profound. It is the difference between psychologically safe work environments where employees understand how to succeed in your presence and stressful environments where your team walks on eggshells, never knowing if their work or even their mere presence will be the thing that sets off the time bomb in the corner office.
Developing self-awareness is a life-long pursuit, and while there’s certainly no one prescriptive solution or path to follow, a good starting place is self-assessments.
Here are a few tools to help you continue to grow your influence as a leader by developing your self-awareness. It’s worth mentioning that this list is by no means exhaustive and as others have written in great detail about each of these assessments, I will only include a brief description of each and how I find the tool to be most useful in leading teams.
Clifton Strengths
This assessment is a wonderful assessment to discover raw talent areas that you have unknowingly developed over time. Leaders often take for granted the areas where they are exceptional because they assume that everyone else has the same ability to execute in the same way they can and don’t (either by choice or by circumstance). I have personally relied on this strength tool for profound insights in both my personal and professional life.
Enneagram
The Enneagram is a unique personality assessment in that it provides insight into who you are in your base state, how you might behave in your ideal state, and how you can expect to act when you are stressed out or scared. The simple but powerful tool can help identify positive and negative behaviors in both you and your team. I have personally found Enneagram to be the most helpful personality tool when collaborating with teams in that rather than providing a boxed-in diagnosis of each person. It provides a dynamic framework that allows you to assess your team’s health and mental state (or yourself) at any given moment.
Myers Briggs
Most people have taken Myers-Briggs and put varying degrees of stock in it. The most useful application of Myers-Briggs is an understanding of how personality types interact. With a wide variety of potential personality types present on your team, it is critical to know how you show up and how you are being received by those you lead. It’s no surprise that many leaders embody stereotypical type A intensity and vigor. While these traits may make you effective in attacking challenges and problems head-on, it may create distance and separation for team members with a softer, milder personality type. Understanding how you are perceived by those who lead is a powerful step in building connections and trust.
There is no one way to develop self-awareness. Some of us had parents who themselves were self-aware and built it into us as children. Others of us did not have that luxury, and now, in adulthood, we have the opportunity to embark on the journey of discovering ourselves.
Self-awareness truly is a journey in that you will never wake up one day and fully know yourself. The best you can do is see who you were yesterday, but since human beings are in a constant state of personal evolution, you must begin the task of self-discovery with each new sunrise. This list of tools is by no means exhaustive, and there is no one path to knowing yourself. Hopefully, this will get you started or raise your current level of self-awareness and your ability to lead your team well.
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