Page 198 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Leading Yourself 187

what attributes of your current style and habits will keep helping you suc-
ceed and which might be holding back your future growth.

Holding the external mirror up to yourself
Organize your reflection by again probing with some well-targeted ques-
tions, for example, asking yourself and people you work with about the
style and habits you bring to your leadership. Many leaders work with a
coach or external consultants, using established assessment tools (e.g.,
Meyers-Briggs, DISC, 360-degree feedback, etc.) to help uncover their
workplace behaviors and style. These can be helpful, but you can also struc-
ture a basic inquiry for yourself—for example, by adapting Peter Drucker’s
self-diagnostic from his landmark HBR article “Managing Oneself.”
Drucker suggested that all leaders should seek to understand—and
then manage and improve upon—self-knowledge in several domains. One
of these domains, captured in the question “What are my values?” is part of
character, which we’ve already discussed. But some of his other questions
can help you understand critical dimensions of your leadership style and
habits.
As you pursue such a diagnostic, what you hear from other people may
be different from what you currently believe about yourself. But you have
as much to learn from those differences as from the findings themselves.

WHEN AM I MOST EFFECTIVE? Start your self-analysis by simply asking
others, “When do you think I’m at my best as a leader?” The intent of this
question is to identify specific situations in which you excelled in your re-
cent work.
Listen for patterns in the specific examples your colleagues provide
when they think you have been “hitting on all cylinders” as a leader, and
then step back and reflect on why they said that and what seems to have
made your actions so powerful to them. Also consider if these situations
seemed as productive and lively to you as to them. If not, are you missing
something about a particular style you brought to the task or some repeat-
able approach that others apparently found so helpful? For example, did
you model the kind of work you expected of others in a tough situation?