The strength your team has learned to work around

Bill George, author of True North posted a reminder this week of a finding that I enjoyed hearing again. Asked to name the single most important capability a leader can develop, the members of Stanford's advisory council were nearly unanimous. Not strategy. Not vision. Not charisma. Self-awareness. George is blunt about why. It is not a soft skill. It is the discipline everything else runs on.

So the place to start is not the team. It is you, and the strength you are most sure of, because that is usually where the blind spot hides.

Watch four people meet the same problem. Maybe you are the visionary, certain of where this could go, genuinely baffled that the others cannot see what is so obvious to you. Maybe you are the people person, who can work the room, but then be strangely reluctant when it is time to commit to who is doing what by when. Maybe you are the one who gets things done, dependable to a fault, quietly resenting how much of the load keeps landing on you. Or maybe you are persuaded only by facts and data, slow to back a new idea until it has been proven, and tired of being cast as the negative one.

Each of you is right. And each strength, pushed too hard, hardens into a loop. The visionary keeps chasing the next idea. The people person is overly concerned for preserving the relationship. The doer overworks the wrong task. The sceptic says no before the proposal has had a fair hearing.

This is not a personality parlour game. It is why initiatives stall. Four people leave the same meeting with four different versions of what was agreed, and a fortnight later nobody can work out where it slipped. The fix is rarely more process. It is the leader who can name their own pattern clearly enough to finally see everyone else's.

When I understood that my ease with people came with a reluctance to nail things down, the sceptic's flat no stopped feeling like resistance and started looking like care. The better you know your own strength, the more generously, and accurately, you read the people who are wired differently. Knowing yourself is the start of leading anyone else well.

That is what we work on in learning Transactional Intelligence™, developed by Influential U. We name a strength and its cost in the same breath, so you can choose when to lean in and when to step out of the loop.

If you would like to learn more about how to develop your self-awareness, join me for a free introductory session on Transactional Intelligence™ on Tuesday 7 July, 10:30am AEST. You can register here.

In your experience, how much has self-awareness contributed to the success of the leaders you have seen?