Self awareness is an important part of any leadership role. When you are aware of your own strengths and weaknesses, you can work to improve upon them and become a more effective leader.
What is Self Awareness in Leadership?
Strengths and weaknesses are just the beginning. Self awareness in leadership includes knowing what types of problems are you drawn to solving, and what types of solutions you are uniquely suited to provide. At GLLG we refer to this as “what you solve for.”
Knowing what you solve for is a continuous journey of personal exploration and reinvention.
Essential Leadership Strengths for Yourself and for Those You Lead
Self awareness in leadership comes in two forms:
- Knowing how to achieve it for yourself
- Knowing how to help those you lead achieve it for themselves
New leaders, emerging leaders and even senior leaders can benefit from learning how to explore and discover what they solve for. Then each leader can create their own personal brand statement to clarify this insight for themselves and for those they work with.
4 Questions to Achieve Self Awareness in Leadership
Explore these four questions to define your leadership identity and create your own personal brand statement.
- What is your Enduring Idea? What is unique about the way you think? Consider what long-lasting impact you have.
- What is your Primary Differentiator? What gives you distinction as a leader? Consider what you are known for, what you stand for, what about you stimulates engagement.
- What is your Primary Experience? What impact do others expect from your presence? Consider how you influence conversations.
- What/Whom Do You Serve? What type of solutions do you consistently deliver? Consider what problems you are drawn to, what outcomes you most enjoy working toward.
Now consider how this level of knowledge among your team members could give you one of the most powerful employee engagement programs yet. It comes from this combination, when you have a high performance team with:
- People who know what they solve for
- People who know how to see others for what they solve for
- Leaders who know how to bring people together based on what they solve for
- Leaders who build systems for enabling individual capacities to be elevated and activated
This gives you the ability to inspire and energize leaders and people like never before.
Conclusion
Leadership is about the desire to be significant, not just successful. You need to be courageous and vulnerable enough to take action and be your most authentic self in everything you do. As a leader, what do you solve for?
Most leaders struggle to answer the question. Knowing what you solve for allows you to influence more and be more accountable to others about what they can expect from your leadership.
Do you want to build your own self awareness in leadership? Learn more about GLLG’s personalized executive coaching.
