If you’re starting your own business or leading a team, you have some level of confidence in your abilities, and it’s only natural for you to gravitate toward your strengths in those areas.
However, it’s also important to recognize your weaknesses as a leader. If you do, you can learn to make up for them; if you don’t, you become even more vulnerable to their damaging effects.
Why weaknesses matter.
Why is it so important to recognize your own weaknesses? For starters, it gives you something to work on. In chess, if you’re good at end game strategies but your middle game is weak, you won’t get any better unless you specifically target mid-game strategies to improve. While it’s true that specialization is often better than generalization for a team of people, when it comes to leadership, you need to be well-rounded.
For example, a good leader should be one who communicates effectively, has high emotional intelligence and is decisive. If you’re missing even one of these traits, you’ll be less effective, so it pays to balance your abilities by calling out and improving your areas of weakness.
There’s only so far that this strategy can take you, however. No matter how much experience you gain or how much you improve, you’re always going to have weaknesses in your abilities. Thankfully, just being aware of them can improve your performance; the idea is to compensate for them in other ways. For example, if you know you have a tendency to lose your temper, you could choose an office away from the team so you can vent your frustrations in private.
That sounds good, but how can you learn to recognize your weaknesses?
Identify your strengths.
It may seem strange at first, but strengths and weaknesses are…