Page 194 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Leading Yourself 183

that you’ll know how to take care of yourself in your job, especially as you
gain more responsibility and step up to ever more complex challenges.
But knowing yourself is legendarily difficult. We never see ourselves
100 percent objectively. Holding up the mirror can be painful because we
too often imagine ourselves as what we want to be, not who we are. And
achieving self-knowledge is even more difficult as you grow as a leader. As
your responsibility and power increases, others will often tell you only what
they think you want to hear. A former foundation executive provided us with
his own small case study: “I never had the slightest hint that I was difficult
to deal with until I resigned from my job and stopped giving out grants.”
Knowing yourself requires persistent listening and reflection. You
must keep probing for input and perspectives from others, using both for-
mal and informal means. We discussed earlier in the book how developing
people and operational performance requires a constant commitment to
offering (often tough) feedback; you too need to commit yourself to receiv-
ing the same. That requires real humility, listening to criticism you may
not want to hear, having the patience to reflect on it, and then summoning
the courage to act on the right suggestions for how to improve.
Self-knowledge, like all forms of knowledge, best begins with ques-
tions. Ask yourself about three areas of self-knowledge:

• Your character

• Your personal style and habits

• Your knowledge and skills

Let’s look at each in more detail.

Your character
What is your sense of purpose? What do you believe, hold true, and care
about? What are you aiming at in your life overall? What are your aspira-
tions? What inner strength do you call upon to win at what you do and to
be resilient in the face of challenges?
Your answers will help you define your character: the more personal, in-
tangible, and ethically oriented aspects that define who you are. Character