Teach & Serve II, No. 30 – Leadering: Identifying Weaknesses before Celebrating Strengths
March 1, 2017
A leadering step is identifying and embracing one’s weaknesses along with relying on one’s strengths. Good leaders comprehend their limitations. They know their difficulties. They recognize their weaknesses.
Over the course of the next few weeks, Teach & Serve will be discussing “leadering” activities. In essence, these are the critical steps, as I see them, that individuals take as they become leaders. These are the universal gates through which they pass. These are their shared signposts they come across. These are the things leaders do as they go about “leadering?”
- Knowing Oneself
- IDENTIFYING WEAKNESSES BEFORE CELEBRATING STRENGTHS
- Honing Communication Skills
- Exercising Authority Appropriately
- Achieving Balance and Blend
- Humbling Oneself
- Letting Go
I have conducted many, many interviews during my years in education. Likely, I have been on the interviewer side of the desk more times than I can remember. As I became more facile with the task, I would enter the interview with a series of questions I knew I wanted to ask. No matter if I was part of an interviewing committee or solo, I would be sure to get certain questions answered.
One of these had to do with the perceived strengths and weaknesses of a candidate.
What I do not clearly remember is in what order I asked about these characteristics. If I had to guess, I suspect I asked first about strengths and then followed up with a query about weaknesses. Why put the candidate on the defensive with a challenging question?
A leadering technique, however, should be knowing one’s weaknesses just as well – better, even – than one’s strengths.
Do not misunderstand. Leaders must know their own strengths and realizing them throughout the leadership journey is a principal part of growing into leadership. But it is also an easy part. We like our strengths. We play to them. We are comfortable operating from our strengths. We have been celebrated for these qualities time and again.
A leadering step is identifying and embracing one’s weaknesses along with relying on one’s strengths. Good leaders comprehend their limitations. They know their difficulties. They recognize their weaknesses.
As we look for leadership positions, as we realize we may be called to them, we should search out opportunities to address our weaknesses. We can look to overcome them. We can look to find ways to lessen them. We can seek help in dealing with them. What we cannot do as leaders is avoid them. They will surface. It is inevitable that they do. Our leadering should involve us naming our weaknesses and working through them. Our leadering should call us to embrace them.
I chose the word “embrace” carefully for surely our weaknesses say as much about us as our strengths.
Often our leadering activities – working in groups, serving on task forces, building teams – provide wonderful opportunities for us to recognize our weaknesses and to strategize ways to compensate for them. These are chances we must take to know ourselves (see last week!) and to know our weaknesses. It is in knowing them that we can minimize them.
We all have weaknesses. What leaders chose to do with them, how they choose to acknowledge and work with them, indicates much about who they are as leaders.