By Tim Schneider

The most difficult person that you will manage in your leadership career is you.

That is a very hard statement to get your hands around and grasp but managing yourself is a very challenging task. Without good self-management, the delicate balance between leader and follower is jeopardized. You can loose credibility. You can damage relationships. You can completely become irrelevant.

Background on Self Management
First, a little background on self management. Self management is half of the science of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence tells us that eighty percent of our reactions, responses and projections are driven by emotion and not by logic or processed thought.
Many leaders struggle with this concept because they fancy themselves as creatures of pure, unemotional logic. This is nothing but a fallacy designed as a cover for the true nature of decisions and responses.

Emotional intelligence is split in two distinct and different pieces. The second piece is external and relational management and the first piece is self management. Working with the skills associated with both of these pieces, a complete emotionally intelligent leader is produced.
Another point of emotional intelligence and self management relate to age and experience. There is absolutely no correlation between calendar age and emotional intelligence. Some twelve year olds can have outstanding self management and emotional intelligence while some fifty year olds can have very poor emotional intelligence.

A final bit of background information about emotional intelligence is that organizations of all types and sizes have found that good self management is a great predictor of workplace success. Much more so that experience, formal education or technical skills, team members and leaders with good emotional intelligence and self management are much more likely to be successful than those with poor or lacking skills in this area.

What this has caused is that more and more companies are testing, screening and interviewing for emotional intelligence and self management. Your next career move may become dependent on how well you can manage yourself.

Complete Understanding is the First Step
The first, and perhaps hardest part of self management begins with full understanding of the subject matter. That would be you.

You will never completely understand yourself and about the time you think you have a handle on all of your behaviors and personality traits, new iterations of you and your style will emerge. Understanding yourself is not a singular event but a necessary leadership process that needs to be frequently addressed and consistently administered.

There are three sources of information for self understanding. The first is the most overused and most unreliable source related to effective leadership. Far too many leaders rely solely on their own discovery and feelings to try to understand themselves. Unfortunately, this source is full of pitfalls and lies. Often, self talk and intuitive feedback is more about who we would like to be rather than who we really are. Internally produced feedback is a part of understanding yourself but it is a highly unreliable source.

Another reason that self feedback is not a good sole source of understanding is that many leaders have a tendency to be either very hypercritical of themselves or self aggrandizing. The hypercritical feedbacks leads to many negative thoughts that are very counterproductive in self management. The puffing that comes from believing you are more and better than you really are can lead to alienation and loss of followers. Self feedback needs to be balanced with information from other and more objective sources.

Assessments and Profile Tools
One of the best sources of leadership self-understanding comes from psychometric personality tests. Great examples include the DiSC profile and the Myers-Briggs assessments. A psychometric instrument or test is a fully validated and predictive tool that can be used in a variety of settings including coaching, counseling, team building and leadership development. Test like color coding, what Star Wars Character I Am and handwriting analysis might be fun but they are not valid or predictive of your behavior and attitude traits.

One of the great dynamics witnessed in the past twenty years of coaching leaders relates to the use of personality tests. Almost without exception, people will find a piece of language in one of the DiSC profiles and just fall in love with it. Things like “works well under pressure”, “considers the feelings of others”, “builds relationships and teams effectively” or “takes charge and accepts challenges.” They will just ooze with pride when reading and reviewing results like those.
Without missing as much as a breath, the same people will read language such as “can become manipulative and quarrelsome”, “easily distracted by interruptions”, “overly concerned with details” or “appears artificial or disingenuous” and react with contempt for the validity of the survey, assessment or test.

The difficult bottom line about psychometric instruments for feedback is that you cannot embrace the good comments and trends without owning and being accountable for the other behaviors and traits in which you don’t like or don’t agree. We always encourage leaders to note all the statements in these instruments in which they disagree and then ask someone else to review the statements and provide honest feedback. The results: almost unanimously, other people reviewing the results fully validate the accuracy of what is said. Like it or not, it is you and your behavior.

Many times, the information from psychometric assessments and tests in which the leader does not agree represent behavioral blind spots. Blind spots are those pieces of behavior, or in the case of leadership, stylistic elements that the person does not recognize but all other people see with perfect clarity.

If unmanaged, blind spots can be very damaging to a leader. The blind spots can alienate followers, harm and strain relationships and create poor image elements that can damage a career. Blind spots can also be a very limiting factor in the growth and ongoing development of leaders.

If Three People Call You an Ass, You Should Buy a Bridle
The third and final source of information related to understanding yourself comes from the feedback of others. This can be in two subsets, formal and informal. Formal feedback from other people includes performance reviews and 360 degree evaluations. Performance reviews are usually not a very good source of self understanding and awareness because they are done infrequently and they are generally not done well.

The formal process of gathering leadership, performance and behavioral information from others is commonly referred to as a 360 degree assessment. It obtains feedback from those you lead, your boss and others, including vendors and customers, in which you exercise influence. The best versions of these instruments contain both quantified and numeric ratings about key leadership indicators but also include a section for anonymous comments. The most helpful information is often found in the comment section under headings that include behaviors to stop, behaviors to begin, things the person does well and things the person could do better.

The one intellectual honesty risk with 360 degree feedback comes from selecting the audience to comment and evaluate. Two errors occur frequently in choosing either people that you know will be very supportive and positive or choosing people that will be very critical. Both populations do not provide an accurate picture of you or your style. Evaluators and comment providers must be a cross section of those who love you and those who do not.

Informal methods of gaining feedback include the highly complex transaction of (gasp) asking people how you are doing. One of the best leadership sources of this information come from those being led. Simply asking how you are doing as a leader, what you could do better and what is working well is a great source of feedback to understand yourself and uncover some important blind spots.

Another great source of the same type of information comes from peers or near peers. Since they have no real vested interest in how you lead, their degree of honesty would be pretty high. This works especially well if you can create a peer mentoring type of relationship where the feedback is shared between both of you.

As with all types of self understanding feedback, this also contains a warning tale or two. The first time out of the gate, many people will not provide you with direct and fully honest information. In fact, your subordinates and peers may sugar coat things or deny that there is anything in you that needs to be changed. They may even openly think you are up to no good in this questioning. It is only through a consistent approach in which you have demonstrated no repercussions that team members will provide you with complete honesty and feedback that you need. You must ask several times across multiple months and show that no one is going to get hurt to get the self management information you want.

The final cautionary tale about direct feedback is the desire that many people have to dismiss the source. In informal feedback, if you hear something you don’t like from someone you don’t like, it is easy to discredit the information. You might say things like “you know Bob, nothing ever pleases him” or “Mary has not had a good thing to say about a boss in ten years.” Unfortunately, even when the source is not valued, some of the feedback is important. Even when wrapped in exaggeration or dislike, important information about you might lay below the surface and underneath some emotion. Focus on the message and not the messenger.

The three ingredients of understanding yourself are what you already know and believe, feedback from personality assessments and profiles and the feedback from others. Armed with this information you are now ready to begin the final step of self awareness and understanding.

Owning Your Behaviors
Like it. Love it. Hate it.
It is you.
The final piece of self understanding and awareness is to begin to reconcile all of the feedback you receive and owning who you are. The good and the not so good. The parts you like and the parts you don’t like. The effective leader owns all of those pieces of who they are.
From this point, most effective leaders will construct a plan to deal with the areas in which need improvement or need to be corrected. This is a longer term approach in which your behaviors and style are modified through consistent application of better skills and competencies that take the place of the old behaviors. This type of change and progression takes time, persistence and dedication.

Difficult? Absolutely. An absolutely necessary to your success as a leader.

A Little Note About Personal Change and Growth
The biggest obstacle that most leaders face in their own growth and development is success.

That is a tough concept.

When things are going well. You get good raises. Your performance reviews are solid. Results are good. Everything is peachy. What is your motivation to change, improve and grow?

Success often creates an artificial sense and aura of need to continue to grow, develop and change. Success can be a fog that blurs reality. Success can blind leaders into believing they are doing everything well and nothing needs to be tuned.

The most changeable and development desiring leaders are those who are coming off of a failure event and not a success event. Those feeling and experience failure embrace growth while those experiencing success often rebuff it.

Let the impetus for your leadership growth and development be success and not failure.