Knowing Your Strengths and Weaknesses Prepares Leaders for Hurdles

At each level of growth in every leader’s path of success, you will encounter new challenges and hurdles. At each stage, you need different versions of your skills, talents, and resources.

Rising leaders, for example, require more stamina and resilience, and senior leaders need to be fine-tuned listeners and able to make game-time decisions. The skills being drawn on can change at any point, and you have to be ready to pivot. Most leaders evolve and may not consciously recognize how they have changed – for the better or, the worse.

If you are open to becoming a better leader, and we’re betting you are if you are reading this article, you have room to improve, grow, and learn. Not because you aren’t already successful, but because success is a moving target. There are leaders, believe it or not, who have no interest in understanding their own strengths and weaknesses once they hit a certain point in their career.

Valuable Leadership Tools

Executive coaching can be a window for those who may have plateaued. Executive coaching is a tool that leaders can use to create nuanced and purposeful targets for the next step. Multiple studies, including the International Coaching Federation, have shown that leaders see a significant return on their investment in executive coaching, especially when they are matched well with an expert who holds them accountable.

Creating a Benchmark

Self-awareness is a lifelong pursuit. Although as we get older, the chase isn’t quite as dogged. Holding a mirror to your learned and acquired leadership style allows you to see what is working and what isn’t working. The level of success you have already achieved, and nurtured within your organization, is a good place to start in understanding where you can go next. Creating a benchmark makes identifying new goals more productive.

Identifying the Goals

Targeting specific goals sets you up for more tangible success. That’s not to say that anecdotal results of working with your leadership team, mentor, or peer group aren’t useful. More productive communication and problem-solving, for example, might not show in a gradable manner, but they might make productivity more streamlined and result in higher margins. Your goals should be just that, your goals – not someone else’s. No one has a magic pill.

Staying on Track

If you work with an executive coach or other leadership expert, don’t expect them to come in with a quick, one-size-fits-all fix. An expert can draw out your unique strengths and challenges to work with you on creating specific goals and measurable steps. They will hold you accountable for completing each step to achieve maximum results.

Finding the Right Partner

A partnership between you and an expert, particularly one outside of your organization, gives you a confidential platform for working through leadership methods, personality traits, and learned behaviors that may be getting in your way. You may not even recognize them as roadblocks. However, putting your success in the hands of an outside resource can be unnerving, so be sure to get referrals from people you trust. And go in with a partnership mindset. Working with an executive coach is best when it isn’t hierarchical but rather peer to peer.

Liddell Consulting Group is Here to Help

Being a successful leader is hard, and it isn’t a guaranteed part of career growth. It takes listening and instinct and constantly evolving as the world around us changes. Every leader Liddell Consulting Group works with has an individualized executive coaching experience. We partner with you to help build critical competencies for a real impact on personal and organizational success. If you are interested in learning more about our executive coaching, leadership development, or team performance programs, contact us today!