Your Leadership Legacy: Success???
In A Leader’s Legacy, James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner state, “what’s crucial is that you become more self-aware–and self-awareness is a predictor of success in leadership.” So being self-aware, knowing your own strengths and developmental areas is directly related to how successful you will be.
Taken a step further, this translates to you, leader, consciously complimenting your own strengths with others’ talents. This support the case for the importance of teams, where each person contributes to the solution by sharing his/her unique strengths.
Take a moment to write down your top ten strengths and your top ten developmental opportunities.
- Are you leveraging your strengths?
- How are you making up for your weaker areas?
- Who fills in the gaps?
- Where can you increase success by bringing others into the mix?
Tags: Barry Z. Posner, contribute to the solution, developmental areas, developmental opportunities, gaps, James M. Kouzes, leadership legacy, leveraging strengths, strengths, success, success in leadership, talents, teams, top ten strengths
March 1st, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Alison – thanks for this reminder. It is so interesting that we so often focus on our weaknesses and not our strengths. One of the tools that I rely on personally, and that I use with my clients, is the DiSC Personal Profile System. This is a 4 Quadrant Model of behavior that is elegant in its simplicity.
In less than 10 minutes anyone can see in black & white their specific strengths and limitations. It is not that the information is revolutionary; at some level we all know ourselves. But there is a confidence offered when we have this information confirmed by a highly researched and validated instrument.
Even as someone who knows this well, reverting back to old behaviors still happens with regularity. Thanks for the gentle reminder, including action steps to take us back to our true selves.
Alicia