4 Common Personality Challenges and How To Mitigate Them for Business Success
As a leader, how much time do you spend focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of your team members? If you’re anything like me, this is a significant part of your leadership toolkit — identifying strengths and harnessing them, and spotting weaknesses and helping to reduce them.
If you can confidently say you have this down pat, great!
Consider, though, that you may just be forgetting the very team member whose weaknesses could have the biggest impact on your team’s success — you!
You Do You
I’ll admit, I don’t enjoy analyzing my own weaknesses. Who does? It’s definitely not the most fun part of self-mastery, but it is a vital part — and not just for your personal success. As a leader, your strengths and weaknesses greatly influence your team.
Mohaymen Abdelghany compiled the following list of the most common personality challenges and suggested some ways you can start working to overcome them, and now, I’d like to share these incredible insights with you.
1. Overconfidence and Chronic Certainty
I’m sure you know the type — or maybe you are the type. If you find yourself always going with seemingly impossible strategies and insisting your team can accomplish them, you may be putting your employees in some difficult positions.
Recommended HRTech Insights: HR Tech Interview with Jill Popelka, President at SAP SuccessFactors
When human beings are consistently given impossibly high goals and inevitably fail to reach them, it can have a serious impact on their confidence levels.
To lessen this impact or do away with it completely, Ron Carucci and David Lancefield suggest working on surrounding yourself with people who are not afraid to question you and provide you with different opinions. In doing so, you will have a counterpoint to your overconfidence and you can start to make better decisions for your team.
2. Impulsivity
Making on-the-spot decisions is a big part of being a good leader, but not every decision needs to be made on the spur of the moment. If you find yourself making almost all your decisions in this fashion — chasing fads and getting sold on new ideas in minutes — you might be dealing with some impulsivity.
While it may feel right to go with your gut on occasion, if you identify this impulsivity in yourself, you can turn a possible weakness into a sure strength by ensuring you always ground your decisions in solid data. And if you’re the person responsible for making the decisions, have someone else be responsible for the execution.
3. Excessive Control and a Difficulty Allowing Others to be Creative
This may sound suspiciously like micromanagement, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that high on the control scale for it to have an impact. While the feared M-word is one of the worst examples of how a leader can exert excessive authority over their team, even subtle levels of control can create a negative working environment.
If you find yourself stifling your team’s creativity because you don’t really think their ideas have value, or you’re concerned they may veer too far out of their wheelhouse, you could be exerting an excessive (and damaging) level of control as a leader.
To prevent this, identify the team members you trust most and start giving them incrementally increasing levels of freedom to make decisions and develop ideas. This way, you won’t be taking too great of a risk, but you will be desensitizing yourself to the idea that everything will be OK even if you don’t have ultimate control.
New Study Reveals Paradox Between Employees and Employers, Requiring a Rethink About Today’s Workplace
4. Worrying About What Others Think
Human beings are social creatures. We all, at some level, enjoy external validation. However, if you find yourself trapped in a continuous cycle of validation, action, validation, then you may be too reliant on what others think.
When we worry too much about the opinions of others, especially as leaders, we may find ourselves suffering from analysis paralysis. Suddenly, we are incapable of making the really important decisions that will move our team and business forward.
Work on actively experiencing your own success. When you make a decision and find it was a really good one, revel in that a little bit. Start to teach yourself that you really do have the skills to decisively lead your team.
Whenever you feel that niggle of self-doubt creeping up on you, Abdelghany suggests writing down the best- and worst-case scenarios for whatever it is you’re finding yourself in, as well as all your possible choices regarding the situation. Don’t forget to temper that analysis with a healthy dose of recall about your past successes.
Good Leadership Starts With Leading Yourself
While it may be tempting to focus all our leadership skills on those around us, it’s really important to first ensure that we aren’t sinking the ship with our own heavyweight personal challenges.
Not only does identifying and working to mitigate our own personality challenges help our team grow and flourish, but when we do so, we lead by example, allowing others in our team to start their own self-examination and mastery.
Top HRtech Insights: American Association of Community Colleges, Intel, and Dell Technologies Launch Artificial Intelligence Incubator Network Initiative
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]