The last thing a dragon wants to do is show any unarmored spot to the warrior archers below on a hill.
And likewise the last thing a soldier would do is go unarmed to meet his enemy on the battlefield.
But the workplace is no place for dragons and — although competitive — the corner office hardly resembles a battlefield.
It’s time for today’s leaders to lay down their arms when it comes to acknowledging personal weaknesses and realize that colleagues are not enemies. Our workplace weapon of choice is called leadership self-awareness and the more you develop it in yourself, the stronger and more effective you will actually become.
Chris Musselwhite writing for Inc. Magazine says this about self-awareness: “Organizations benefit more from leaders who take responsibility for what they don’t know than from leaders who pretend to know it all.”
Musselwhite is in good company. Business coach Steve Roesler encourages the development of self-awareness in leaders, expressing that “trying to hide a weakness actually magnifies it, leading to a perceived lack of integrity and, ultimately, trust.”
In dragon-speak it goes like this. It’s likely your team members can see that soft spot anyway. So rather than blow some dragon fire in a futile attempt to pretend it’s not there, take some time to become aware of it, examine it, and learn how you can become an even more effective leader without armor rather than with it. When you know yourself better, you perform better.
Developing Self-Awareness: Action Steps
Identify key life areas of which to heighten your awareness. Dr. Scott Williams, faculty member of the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright University offers these to start with: personality, values, habits, needs and emotions. Seek to understand yourself better in these areas and record your strengths and weaknesses in each category.
Take a psychometric test. Don’t let the words psycho, metric, or test unnerve you. A wide variety of professional personality and strength/weakness evaluations are available online and are commonplace in today’s workplace. Although no individual can be put in a neat package, you can benefit from reading the results and keeping those insights in the back of your mind. They will help you understand why you respond the way you do, how you can work better with different personalities, and what motivations inspire you the most.
Write. A daily entry in a journal or even a blog does wonders to help you formulate your thoughts and regularly review your struggles and progress. For example Warren Buffett regularly writes down the reasons behind his investments. He goes back later to see what went right or wrong and applies this information to future decisions.
Ask for feedback. Develop the habit of regularly asking your team and other leaders in your organization how you’re doing. Make it clear that you value honesty more than courtesy and be careful to respond to negative feedback in a non-threatening manner.
Start new habits. Awareness accomplishes little without action. When you discover your “Achilles heel” create an action plan and act on it daily to help develop new habits that counteract your natural weaknesses.