As a leader, you need to know your strengths and weaknesses to improve your performance and effectiveness. However, identifying them can be challenging, especially if you rely only on your own perception or feedback from others. In this article, we will share some tips and tools to help you assess your leadership skills and areas for development.
One way to start identifying your strengths and weaknesses is to self-reflect on your goals and values as a leader. What are you trying to achieve? What are the principles that guide your actions? How do you measure your success? By answering these questions, you can gain more clarity and insight into your leadership style, motivations, and preferences. You can also compare your goals and values with those of your organization, team, and stakeholders, and see if there are any gaps or misalignments that need to be addressed.
As a certified Journal Therapist and Life Coach, I would get my client to do try these simple practices. Journaling: Keep a leadership journal where you document daily or weekly leadership experiences, decisions, and interactions. Reflect on these entries to identify recurring themes, situations where you excelled, and instances where you faced challenges. Goal Setting: Set clear leadership goals for yourself. Regularly review your progress towards these goals. Assess whether you've demonstrated the necessary skills and qualities to achieve them, and if not, consider those areas as weaknesses to address. Feedback Incorporation: Integrate feedback from others into your journal.
Another way to identify your strengths and weaknesses is to seek feedback from multiple sources, such as your peers, subordinates, managers, mentors, coaches, customers, or partners. Feedback can help you understand how others perceive your leadership, what they appreciate, and what they expect from you. However, feedback can also be biased, incomplete, or inaccurate, so you need to be selective and critical about the sources and methods you use. You can also ask for specific examples, suggestions, or ratings to make the feedback more concrete and actionable.
Feedback is a great way to truly understand how you come across in the workplace. There could be a gap between the way you believe you are seen and the way you are truly perceived. By seeking active feedback, you can ensure that there is no gap there and then work on changing the perception people have of you if needed. The best way to gather feedback is to be intentional about the people you seek it from and to offer a framework they can use. This way, you avoid people going on random explanations about what they think of you and you ensure the feedback is factual and comparable. For example, you could offer a list of aspects you'd like them to rate you at, e.g. transparency, ability to influence and ask them to justify any rating.
A third way to identify your strengths and weaknesses is to use assessment tools and frameworks that can measure your leadership competencies, behaviors, personality, or potential. There are many tools and frameworks available, such as the 360-degree feedback, the StrengthsFinder, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Emotional Intelligence Quotient, or the Leadership Practices Inventory. These tools and frameworks can provide you with objective and standardized data, benchmarks, and insights that can complement your self-reflection and feedback. However, you need to be aware of the limitations and assumptions of each tool and framework, and use them as a guide, not as a diagnosis.
For me, I encourage you to do the following; Self-Assessment: Reflect on your experiences in leadership roles. Identify moments of success and challenges faced. What skills and traits enabled success, and what areas need improvement? Feedback: Seek honest feedback from colleagues, mentors, and team members. They can provide valuable insights into your leadership style and areas for growth. Assessment Tools: Utilize leadership assessment tools or quizzes designed to evaluate leadership strengths and weaknesses objectively. These tools can provide a structured analysis of your leadership qualities. Combine self-reflection, feedback, and assessments to understand leadership strengths and weaknesses, improving leadership skills effectively.
Once you have identified your strengths and weaknesses, you need to create a personal development plan that can help you leverage your strengths and address your weaknesses. A personal development plan is a document that outlines your goals, actions, resources, timelines, and indicators for your leadership growth. It can help you prioritize your areas for improvement, set realistic and specific objectives, track your progress, and evaluate your results. You can also use your personal development plan as a basis for your coaching or mentoring sessions, where you can get support, feedback, and guidance from a trusted advisor.
Finally, you need to review and revise your plan regularly to ensure that it is relevant, effective, and aligned with your changing needs and expectations. You can use various methods to review and revise your plan, such as self-evaluation, feedback surveys, performance reviews, or coaching or mentoring meetings. You can also use various criteria to review and revise your plan, such as your achievements, challenges, opportunities, or feedback. By reviewing and revising your plan regularly, you can celebrate your successes, learn from your failures, and adapt to new situations or demands.