This Self-Assessment Test Reveals Your Leadership Traits

Being a good leader requires having a solid understanding of oneself. You can empower yourself and your team by increasing self-awareness and recognising your motivational styles, habits, and drivers.

Harvard Business School professor Joshua Margolis wrote that self-awareness is about developing one's capacity to:

Sense how they're coming across,
Have undistorted visibility into one's own strengths and weaknesses, and
Gauge the emotions they're personally experiencing,"

He also added that one can't let their own emotions get in the way of mobilising others to get things done.

This is true for professionals who have previously held leadership positions. For the benefit of their organisations, leaders need to have clear thinking and the ability to make crucial decisions.

Before using their leadership skills, effective leaders must be aware of them. There is evidence to support the idea that self-aware CEOs are closely linked to contented workers and healthy businesses.

The benefits of self-evaluation for leaders

Companies with greater rates of financial return typically hire employees with high levels of self-awareness, according to a study by Korn/Ferry International. Additionally, analysis from the Association for Talent Development demonstrates that self-aware leaders claim to have:

Increased effectiveness at work
Better interactions with coworkers
Improved ability to recognise and control their emotions
Reduced stress

Making an honest evaluation of oneself can help you reap these benefits. You can find opportunities to grow as a leader by looking for patterns in how you see yourself and how others perceive you.

Here are four methods to evaluate your leadership effectiveness if you want to advance your career and enhance how you lead and manage teams.

How to self-evaluate

1. Perform a self-assessment test.

Finding your motivations and strengths can be done by completing a self-assessment questionnaire. The two self-assessments that leaders can take are:

Leaders can identify behavioural trends and understand how they manage themselves and their team members by taking these evaluations.

Because it fosters emotional intelligence, a skill that 90 per cent of top performers in the workplace possess, this self-awareness is essential to effective leadership. You develop a foundation for your leadership style by reflecting inward and responding to inquiries honestly and candidly. This helps you better control your own emotions and those of others.

2. Monitor Yourself

Watching a recorded video of yourself can be a helpful technique to understand more about your present leadership characteristics in addition to self-assessments.

By engaging in this exercise, you can evaluate how you come across and demonstrate traits common to several leadership philosophies, such as authenticity, humility, and faith.

Maintaining these qualities can promote "caring leadership," which is a concern for both the success of your business and the welfare of your people.

You may overcome the vulnerability of placing yourself in front of other people as a leader by engaging in critical self-observation. This will give you the confidence you need to motivate and influence your team.

3. Request Feedback

Seek feedback on your performance from individuals with whom you interact and collaborate rather than just from yourself. Unlike management, leadership focuses more on enabling and uniting individuals to work toward shared organisational goals.

You can spot inconsistencies in your self-perception and create a strategy for more successful leadership by asking coworkers about their impressions of your leadership style. According to the Center for Creative Leadership, open lines of communication are crucial for fostering trust and enhancing performance. Soliciting and acting upon feedback furthers this goal.

For Juliana Casale, a marketing specialist, performing self-assessments and collecting peer feedback resulted in a higher level of awareness of her work and enhanced communication with her team.

Casale claims she is now more aware of how her coworkers perceive her and less reluctant to have difficult conversations.

4. Create and Keep a Robust Network

One must develop the ability to lead effectively. Having a strong network that you can count on for coaching, support, and direction as your career progresses is crucial.

HBS Professor Anthony Mayo says that our internal and external networks are vital leadership assets. They're how we gain access to resources such as information, know-how, and funding that are crucial in helping us to help those we're leading.

Networks also foster our learning by connecting us to people in organisations with different skills, perspectives, and contexts than our own.

Any level of your career can have a successful leader. Developing your leadership abilities can benefit your career, whether you're a mid-level manager or a recent hire. You may better understand your leadership style and bring out the best in other people by developing self-awareness, asking for feedback, and networking.

Source: Harvard Business School