Author Margaret Andrews shares the unsung importance of knowing yourself, plus a worksheet to kickstart your self-understanding journey.
What do strong managers think about? Business goals and industry trends, sure – but equally important is looking inward. Good managers are deeply in touch with their own values, experiences, and emotions.
Understanding yourself isn’t selfish, sentimental, or a distraction from work. According to author Margaret Andrews, it’s crucial for managing others effectively. And when managers aren’t intentional about building their skills in this area, Margaret often sees it impact their career down the line.
Her new book, Manage Yourself to Lead Others, equips managers to upskill themselves and build self-understanding at any stage of their career. The book draws on Margaret’s experience coaching leaders at Fortune 500 companies and teaching at Harvard and MIT.
Today, we’re sharing six questions Margaret developed to help you assess your own self-understanding. Think of this accessible worksheet as a tool to kickstart your self-understanding journey.
Get the worksheet here and keep reading for a breakdown of the concepts we’ll cover.
What is self-understanding?
According to Manage Yourself to Lead Others, self-understanding has four elements. To build it, you’ll need to start examining:
- Your emotions: In day-to-day life, how aware are you of what you’re feeling? How do these feelings affect your choices and behavior? This is the most basic kind of self-understanding, sometimes referred to as “self-awareness.”
- Your influences: Which people and ideas have helped you grow or hindered you? Do you still connect to these ideas as your present, adult self?
- What matters to you: What are your core values? What do you care most about achieving in life? “People often default to common-sense answers, like friends and family, but everyone values these things,” says Margaret. “Instead, take the time to go deeper.”
- How others perceive you: This is external, as opposed to internal, self-understanding. Without external self-understanding, people often feel misunderstood by others, because they don’t have insight into whether or not their actions reflect their intentions.
We’re often conditioned to see our “professional selves” as separate from the rest of our lives. But incredible things happen when leaders align their true selves with how they lead. That starts with knowing what those values actually are.
How does self-understanding help us lead others?
The idea of studying yourself to manage others might feel counterintuitive. But incredible leaders tend to be empathetic, perceptive, and emotionally attuned, which allows them to read complex situations and weigh competing factors when making decisions.
So why would a good manager be focused on themselves?
Because managing others means maintaining many relationships, and self-understanding is part of relational skills. “If I don’t understand myself and my own emotions, I can’t understand yours,” says Margaret.
Self-understanding is also crucial for growth – you can’t become a better leader unless you know what kind of leader you are today. “It’s only by doing this work that we can ask ourselves: Is this the person I want to be? Is there anything I want to change to become a better leader?” Margaret explains.
Why managers need self-understanding to succeed
Self-understanding is important in every job, but it’s non-negotiable for people who lead others. In Margaret’s experience, a lack of self-understanding is often what causes leadership careers to go off the rails.
The qualities that helped you advance as an individual contributor, like intelligence, technical skill, and strong work ethic, aren’t enough to make it as a manager. A strong leader needs all of the above – plus people skills.
“In my workshops, I ask people to describe the best boss they’ve ever had,” she explains. “Every time, around 85% of the words they use fall into the ‘people skills’ category.”
That’s why capable workers can find themselves out of their depth when they start managing. “People don’t realize that leading others is an entirely new skill,” she says. “I see very smart people get completely overwhelmed by this complexity.”
Not everyone has the chance to build those skills naturally in their personal life or career. But everyone can get better at them, whether you’re stepping into your first management role or you’ve been leading teams for years.
All kinds of managers benefit from self-understanding
But what if you’re not a “feelings person”? What if you aspire to be more of a commanding, decisive leader than a sensitive one?
According to Margaret, great leaders are both. While you may have one leadership style you lean into, you’ll need to be adaptable. Self-understanding will guide you on how to lead, by helping you read people and situations more clearly.
“Even if your baseline is being a caring or commanding leader, there will be times when that’s not appropriate,” Margaret says. “Think back to your best boss ever. Even if they were normally very decisive, there would have been times when they needed to act in a different way.”
Self-understanding doesn’t mean you need to become overly emotional or change the way you lead. It’s a skillset that will elevate anyone’s management style.
Worksheet: 6 questions for self-understanding
Click below to access Margaret’s self-understanding worksheet. How seriously you take these questions, and how much time you spend on them, is just as important as the questions themselves.
A few tips before you get started:
- Spend at least 30 minutes answering the questions. Short, perfunctory responses won’t give you the insights you need to grow.
- Write down your thoughts quickly and freely, without self-editing or judging your answers.
- Save your answers and plan to revisit the exercise a few times, whether it’s a few days or a few months later, to track how your insights might change or remain the same over time.
Finally, remember that self-understanding is a skill – and learning new skills isn’t easy. “If you’re a high achiever, it’s uncomfortable not to excel right away,” says Margaret. “But making mistakes, and even having cringeworthy moments, is how we grow.”
Manage Yourself to Lead Others is available now. Connect with Margaret Andrews on LinkedIn, and learn more about her speaking and leadership development training on her website.