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When I first moved into leadership roles I recognized that self-knowledge is really critical. First of all if you, if you don’t know yourself you’ll have no grounding. You’ll stand for nothing in particular. You really will be tossed to and fro. You’ll bend in the wind in any direction. Knowing yourself is really critical because it gives you an opportunity A, to to know what your strengths are, what you can excel at, what you’re really very good at. But it also gives you the opportunity to know what you’re less skilled at and where you may have deficiencies. And it’s really the balance. We talk a lot about what our strengths are, what are we good at, what do we like to do, what are we passionate about. But the same set of questions on the other side are just as good in order for us to understand what we don’t know.
Tune in to your moral compass
The most important aspect of self-knowledge is figuring out what your true north is. We write about true north, we talk about it, we call it a moral compass sometimes. But if you actually always know when you are trying to figure out any complex problem whether there it’s a question of ethics, it’s a question of business judgment, it’s a question of whom you serve and how you get something accomplished if you dig deep and ask yourself a question of what’s the true north for this particular situation. I think you’ll always find it.
You know, we all have our approaches. For me it’s meditation and prayer. It’s careful reflection. It’s always asking myself the most important questions. Why am I doing this? What’s motivating me? Are my intentions the right ones? As importantly, am I remaining relevant? Am I getting stale? Do I continue to do the same things over and over and over and am I really challenging the way I think, the way I challenge others and the way I approach a problem. So I think finding a way to center yourself, ask the tough questions and be willing to hear sometimes the tough answers to those tough questions. Answers we may not like but which are critical in opening ourselves up for change. I think you’ll find a way forward.
Celebrate your failures
We celebrate success but I’d argue that sometimes we want to celebrate our failures as well because it’s really our failures that teach us more. Success tells us how to deal with something that looks exactly the same way every single time. If I know how to be an excellent assembly line worker and manufacture a widget perfectly I’m going to repeat that every single time. But if I wanted to do something different and I make a mistake I actually learn more from making that mistake and recognizing that there’s a better way that I can do it. And sometimes patterns can be the clues or the cues, you know. We’ve all missed opportunities. We’ve all failed at something. But it’s interesting that when you begin to recognize and learn from that particular mistake – you recognize a pattern, you see the the ability to connect the dots. You can get there a lot faster the next time around and conclude that I learned from that last mistake. Let me carry that into this next judgment, into this next decision. And sometimes like a flywheel it can accelerate your success.
Test the limits of your courage
Courage is essential as a leader. The answer won’t always be in the data or in the analytics. If I were to ask you right now are you courageous, we’d all answer yes. Sometimes because we hadn’t really tested the limits of our courage because we don’t really know how far we would go for a conviction or a passion or something we really, really believe in. But I think courage occurs at the interface of preparation with information and a gut feeling where you actually know beyond a shadow of a doubt or maybe with some doubt that this is the absolute right thing to do and you’re willing to in the face of adversity stand up and loudly proclaim what it is that you believe is the right thing to do. And I don’t mean just ethics and integrity. Those are always important. But sometimes you’ve got to follow your gut. You’ve got to find that true north that we love to talk about and draw on that true north. And sometimes just instinctively know that this isn’t about the data. This is really about what you’re made of.