What type of person are you?
Do you stare at the microwave countdown, wishing it would hurry up? Or,
Is it only food when it comes out of the slow cooker?
Do you like to make sure you say hello to everyone when you arrive at the office? Or,
Is the first thing you do is flick your computer on?
Do you like to speak in a strong voice to make sure people hear you? Or,
Do you think it’s rude to disturb others in the office?
The wonderful thing about people is that we are all different. We have different skills and abilities. We are all unique and there is great strength in diversity. But every strength has a corresponding weakness. And this can bite us in the bottom when we are unaware of our blind spots or when we mistakenly play a weak hand. Success comes from playing to your strengths.
This is why good bosses have great self awareness of what their strengths are and what blind spots are holding them back.
Do you know your Boss Strengths and Weaknesses? Find out in this Boss SuperPower assessment.
Before you can successfully lead others, you must master yourself. And this is how you can use self-awareness to get better results as a boss.
Leveraging Strengths Starts With Self-Awareness
Self-awareness rarely makes the list of top leadership traits, yet it is one of the most valuable. Self-awareness is knowing what you’re good at and knowing where your weaknesses are.
Gallup research shows that great bosses do three things:
Great bosses fully recognize their talents and develop them into strengths,
Great bosses manage their strengths to overcome their weaknesses,
Great bosses invent ways to apply their strengths in new and creative ways to reach their goals.
How do you know what you don’t know?
Surely no-one should know yourself better than yourself? But a study by Korn/Ferry International (2012) showed that nearly 80% leaders had blind spots about their talents. And in this study of of 2,750 leaders, 40% had at least one hidden strength.
My personal experience is that the problem with blind spots is that you just don’t know about them by their very nature. It’s like you look into your toolbox and only find a hammer. You don’t realize that other people have got screwdrivers and yet others have got hacksaws. What happens is that you just think they are bad at hammering things. And as the expression goes: “To a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.”
Without some sort of external perspective people remain unaware of things they haven’t experienced themselves. In my experience, bosses get stuck with the same repeating problems when they are unaware of a blind spot. What this might look like for you is when you continually have the same disputes and problems with your employees. Has Employee Dave done bad work again? This pattern will repeat until you figure out what YOU need to change to fix this.
Improve Your Self-Awareness With a Behavior Profile
Behavior profiling (also known as psychometric testing or personality testing) is a great way to identify your strengths and blind spots. A good behavior profile will give an insight into yourself that some people find uncomfortably true.
There are many free and paid for behavior profiles available on the internet. Quality varies. I use the DISC system because this is validated, simple, yet powerful and it works very well in the workplace.
Using the DISC model, I’ve developed the Boss SuperPower assessment. The Boss SuperPower is a fun personality profile with a serious side. It's based on a validated psychometric model. The aim is to provide meaningful insight in an entertaining way.
The mission of Manager Foundation is to make work a better place by improving self-awareness, communication and relationships. The Boss SuperPower profile shows bosses what they are good at and potential problem tendencies. Plus how employees and bosses can work better together.
Wrapping up
I really like the new movement towards self-leadership. It’s wonderful to see people taking responsibility for improving themselves. But the first step towards self-leadership is self-awareness. When you're a boss you're going to have difficulties unless you develop your self-awareness. You’re going to get stuck repeating the same mistakes over and over again, until you figure out what blind spots are sabotaging you. When you know your strengths and learn to leverage them, that's when you can go from average to Superhero.
Super Pro Tip:
You can find out your full personality profile by doing a DISC behavior assessment. A DISC profile provides a deeper insight into yourself, what makes you different to other people, what other people think of you and importantly what are your blind spots that you need to be aware of.
BOSS CAMP
I bet your staff would rather be at the beach than working hard. But you’re the poor boss who’s responsible for their work. Managing is hard. Find out how to make managing easy at WWW.BOSS.CAMP. The program includes topics such as:
· How to hire for performance,
· How to motivate employees,
· What are bad employee motivators,
· What you must do as a manager but isn't on your job description,
· How leaders get power.
