Emotional Intelligence Leadership

Leaders, use your strengths. Maximize them. But don’t overuse them – they become weaknesses.

Think about this: what got you here isn’t enough. If you only rely on your strengths, top ten strengths or otherwise, you will either remain in the status quo or go backwards as the world churns forward.

Self awareness enables you to target where to grow.

As a leader who wants to continue to keep moving, you need to leverage your strengths AND develop those weaker areas. Makes sense…intellectually. Action is the key. This is not a prescription for overwhelm. Pick one area to develop or improve and concentrate on that for three months. Before starting, decide on how you will measure your success. During that time and after, get feedback on your progress. Based on the input, continue to hone and adjust as appropriate. Don’t worry abut being perfect, you won’t be. And don’t try to develop more than three areas at one time. It’s a process of learning, developing and applying, as with any skill or capability.

Do this and your leadership capability expands beyond your current strengths.

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Intention and Impact. Is there a gap there? Are your leadership intentions and the impact of your words and actions aligned? Most of us think our intentions are clear, transparent, until something goes wrong, not as well as we thought it would or business results suffer. Leaders, especially those who have self-clarity (clarity in our own mind exists), tend to assume that the impact of what we do will follow our clear-as-a-bell intention. Certainly, it’s clear because it’s clear-as-a-bell in my own mind.

• Have you ever been misunderstood?
• Was it because what you said or did was mis-interpreted, it missed the mark?
• Have you found yourself having to explain, maybe apologize to repair a relationship?
• Did you have to do double work to straighten things out?

Stop. Back-up. Establish clarity from the beginning. I recommend actually using the words, “my intention is…” These three simple words can prevent a lot of headaches, problems and hurt feelings. They can prevent a simple change effort from going bad.

This works in personal relationships too. Use the three words, “my intention is…” and they will save you from having to use a whole lot of extra words on the other end. Make alignment of your leadership intention and impact one of your strengths and your team will be that much further ahead in achieving your goals.

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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?

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